Where
Things Work RightWhere
Things Work Right
** New ideas added 9/01/04 starting at number 1.
1. Vanity scenes -
This idea combines the fact that people are willing to pay to get their
name in print (vanity publishing) with the fact
that movie studios are already willing to let companies pay for product
placement. To make it work a production
company or studio would offer a new product - people placement (names)
in movies. Some of the details involved
are listed below.
1. People would be charged an amount based on how big they wanted their
name to appear on the screen. For
instance, a name on the list of names an actor looks at on the call box
outside of an apartment building would
cost just a little, a poster advertising a new perfume in a subway station
would cost more, an advertisement for
Wally's Wonderful World of Widgets on the side of a bus would cost even
more, and at the top of the line you
could buy a billboard for Last Chance Larry's Pet Shop and Wholesale Meat
Company.
2. The price of these people placements would be high enough to take care
of whatever it cost to produce the
actual display plus a reasonable margin.
3. Buyers would be able to pick the genre they want the name to appear
in so if a guy was buying it as a gift for
his girlfriend he could make sure her name showed up in a romantic movie
and not a horror movie.
4. Allowances would made for deleted scenes. This could be handled by moving
a name that's been used to the
bottom of the waiting list and only dropping it off when it actually appears
in a movie. If the scene the name was
in gets deleted during editing then that name would move back up to the
top of the list to make sure it made it to
the big screen.
2. Hurricane timeshares -
Living in hurricane country we've always got to know what we're going to
do when a hurricane comes. For a lot
of people that means run like hell. Seems like sticking around would be
a lot easier if you could do it safely. That's
where this idea comes in. There are several companies in this area
who have had the foresight to build their
headquarters so they were strong enough to easily withstand a category
4 hurricane. They could make some extra
money out of that fact by offering hurricane timeshares. The way it would
work is simple - you agree to pay a 10-20
monthly membership fee to get a timeshare. In return, if a storm hits the
company lets you stay in their building for the
duration of the storm. That would save you the trouble of taking
your chances on the road or spending a couple of
miserable nights in a school shelter. Membership rates could be increased
for those who wanted the company to
store a personal supply of water and whatever onsite for them. I'd sign
up for a timeshare like this. There are
probably a lot of companies that would even pay for the memberships on
behalf of their key people so those people
would stick around and help get the company get back up on its feet faster.
Hospitals should definitely do it for the
staff and their family members to keep them around.
There would have to be some sore of protection against people buying in
at the beginning of hurricane season and
then canceling out at the end. Maybe a management company could oversee
all of the details and refuse to allow
anyone who previously canceled out to buy back in within a set number of
years.
Note #1: The timeshare membership fee would work more along the lines of
a monthly storage site rental fee instead
of the way normal timeshare properties work. Companies wouldn't be
willing to participate if they thought people
were purchasing a vested interest in their properties.
Note #2: Other regions where temporary disasters strike could also offer
this kind of timeshare.
3. Harpoon the drowners -
Lifeguard stations should be equipped with a harpoon-type gun that can
be used to shoot a wide, circular raft
(about 20 feet in diameter) beyond someone who's drowning. The raft
would inflate on impact and could be pulled
back in towards the victim using an electric reel attached to the harpoon
gun.
Laura's comment: A life preserver exists now with straps that enclose around
any limb a person may stick through
it's hole.
My response: Hadn't heard about the life preservers that have holes capable
of closing around any limb stuck in
them but that would be an excellent addition to the raft. Instead
of flipping over onto a drowning person it could
have holes all along the rim to secure any limbs stuck in them. This
would also let a second swimmer be rescued at
the same time - perhaps someone who'd tried to rescue the first victim
and wound up in trouble themselves.
4. Good looking dead dudes -
That's the club I want to join when I die. Some smart funeral chain
should offer the following alternative to
embalming and cremation since a lot of people don't like the idea of becoming
either gray goop or a pile of dirt as
time passes.
There are already companies that irradiate meat to lengthen its shelf life
- why not irradiate corpses? The body
could be put on display as usual after the irradiation (with a little makeup
to offset the process), and then re-irradiated
and vacuum sealed after the wake. That would destroy the microbes that
normally turn bodies into gray goop and
extend your shelf life in the coffin for a long long time. It could
be called the 'Jeremy Bentham Special'.
5. Building a better shallow end -
A lot of swimming pools really don't have a shallow end that parents can
let their youngest children use. These
kids have to wear floaties or a life vest and never get to stand up in
the water. A small, collapsible mini-pool that fits
inside the regular pool would take care of that. This mini-pool would
have a solid plastic floor, mesh netting sides,
and four corner poles (connected by crossbars under the floor to help it
keep its shape). The floor could be raised or
lowered using notches on the corner poles (one side would be moved higher
up on a poles than the other to create a
flat surface where the floor of the pool slopes down). I'd still
put floaties or a vest on the kids but at least this way
they could play in their own shallow end without always having to float
around without their feet touching the ground.
6. Raise the Babel (or how to really get rid of spam) -
One way to get rid of spam would be to destroy the business model of the
people who pay spammers to send
their messages. If we raised the response rate from a typical .01%
to 20% and made sure that the new bogus
responses looked real it would quickly become uneconomical for anyone to
pay a spammer to send out spam.
They'd waste too much time going through all of the responses to find the
legitimate ones. A law creating a quasi-
governmental company to take care of this would also be needed to offset
any charges of fraud.
7. Bad boy student exchange program -
In many 1st world countries (and isn't that an egotistical label), it's
more than just the bright kids who could benefit
from a more worldly education. There are a lot of delinquents who'd
benefit from learning the value of the things
they're rebelling against too. An alternative student exchange program
would do that.
Instead of sending delinquents to a juvenile justice program for a year
or two we'd just trade them to a family in one
of the world's poorer countries who have some children of their own that
they'd like to send here (places like Haiti,
Madagascar, Bangladesh, etc..) The program would provide doctors
on a region by region basis to make sure the
delinquents didn't die (paying for their care out of the now unused residential
funds we've saved by not sending the
kids to a juvenile facility). The doctors would also provide health
care to the rest of the family as an added benefit.
Other than that the delinquents would have to live with the family as one
of their own, eating the same food, doing the
same work. These places would be so out of the way that running away wouldn't
be an option (they wouldn't even
speak the language in most cases, dampening their enthusiasm for such a
course).
At the end of their sentence the delinquents would be brought back home,
hopefully with a better appreciation for
what they have here. The families that took them in would be granted
citizenship in the country the delinquents came
from as their reward for participating in the program. (Sort of like the
current S Visa in the US, only aimed at a
different type of cooperation.)
8. Six degrees of computation -
This idea would require a simple computer program that displayed a screen asking 3 questions -
1. What equation/formula are you interested in?
2. What constant do you want replaced?
3. How many degrees of separation do you want?
After you answer the questions the program would search a database that
had been pre-loaded with as many
standard equations / formulae as possible (engineering books are full of
them) looking for ones that said the
chosen constant equaled something else. The first equation it found
would then be used as a replacement value in
the formula you chose. For example, if E=MC2 was the formula you
picked and C was the constant you wanted
replaced then the C might be replaced by f*w (frequency times wavelength).
This would be the first degree of
separation. Next, each constant in the replacement value (f and w
in our example) would be replaced with
equivalent values found for them. That would be the second degree
of separation. This process would continue
until you got the number of degrees of separation you asked for.
Then the result would be displayed for review.
Some new and surprising connections would surely come up because the program
would in effect be a divergent
thinker (someone who can take two ideas from seemingly unrelated disciplines
and connect them to form a new
idea).
The following two rules would have to be enforced in order to make this program work -
1. Each constant must always mean the same thing: m=mass, c=speed of light, etc..
2. No replacement formula could have a constant that had already been used
in a previous formula (preventing
recursive logic).
Additional Notes:
The computer program's choice would be based on on its sequential reading
of the formulae in the database. A
default setting of one would make it pick the first valid replacement it
found. That could be changed though just by
adding another question to the prompt screen that asked the user if they
wanted to replace the default selection
criteria with a different number. If the user keyed a 5 into that
field then the program would always pick the 5th
replacement formula it found.
Or a Y/N "random" flag could be added to the prompt screen that would make
the program pick a random valid
replacement in the sequence of possibilities when it was changed to a "Y".
Or a Y/N "common" flag could be added to the prompt screen that would make
the program pick a replacement
whose constants were found most often in the database when it was changed
to a "Y" (increasing the odds that
whoever was reading the results would be familiar with the values found
in them).
9. Downy hangers -
The piece of paper that comes on hangers from the Cleaners is called a
'cape'. Since people seem to like the smell
of fabric softener it might be profitable for Cleaners to start offering
a choice of scented capes on the hangers. That
way the fragrance would last a lot longer. You wouldn't want to combine
too many different scents in one closet
though - they might combine to form a single, strong, undesirable odor.
10. Saving babies (carseat safety) -
In Florida there's a serious problem that often comes up - someone leaves
their child in a carseat while they go run
an errand. With the windows closed the inside of the car rapidly
heats up and the child dies. It would be nice if
carseats came with a weight sensor, temperature gauge and alarm, all connected
so that if the temperature rose
above a certain point and the carseat detected a child in it then the alarm
would sound. (It would be nice if this came
with an optional attachment that would hook onto the inside of a window
- the idea being that if the alarm sounded
for more than a few minutes it would blow a hole in the window.)
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