Archive for the 'idea' Category

Sleight of Hand

February 22nd, 2011

Last night, again, on TV, they had a segment where a plainclothes shoplifting prevention guard with a hidden camera tails someone in a supermarket whom they suspect is a shoplifter, sees them put stuff in their bag / jacket / pants, and then busts them when they leave the store. It’s a pretty common feature […]

Stuff Lying Around Is The Mother of Invention

December 2nd, 2007

One of my wife’s childhood friends made this for his kid, and I think it’s totally cool. (That’s my kid behind it)

A modest proposal

August 13th, 2007

And, no, it’s not about eating children, it is actually a modest proposal. Or, rather, a proposal about modesty. Housing advertisements everywhere use idealized images. That’s understandable. However, I think it would be nice if, instead, all housing advertisements were required to photoshop busy, ugly surroundings around the houses, instead of the non-existent green fields […]

Where Is Evil?

March 2nd, 2007

There are a few places where evil is set in science fiction/fantasy: An evil land A tower of evil An underworld of evil deep in the catacombs/sewers The top of a giant city, which seems to be good, but is actually evil Which leaves one crucially underrepresented geographical distribution: The middle So if you’re looking […]

Free Idea

January 5th, 2007

Dearest reader-who-happens-to-work-in-a-plastics-research-lab, I would greatly appreciate it if you would develop a very hard, cheap plastic that could be used in credit cards, mileage cards, and other “standard size plastic card” cards, that would be just as strong as current credit cards, with only half the thickness. I, and the wallet-shaped indention in my butt, […]

Take My Idea

November 1st, 2006

There should exist in-ear headphones which use a skin capacitance sensor (you know, the kind they have in those lamps that you can turn on just by touching them) that treats them as unplugged when they are not placed in the ear, so that, with an iPod or any other music playback device that turns […]