My Name

It's my name in lights. FINALLY.

Whimsical Thermometer

I could get behind a fun looking thermometer that had a clothing based gauge. Seems like a lake house thing.

For winter - At 40 degrees it would have a jacket, at 30, degrees a pair of gloves, at 20, mittens and a hat, at 10, a down jacket and a scarf, at 0, fuzzy looking boots. For summer - at 70 degrees, a pair of shorts, at 80, a t-shirt, at 90, sandals and bathing suit, at 100, a towel.

finding twenty bucks: you'd always know what to wear, fun, very vacationy

telling a story in which you find twenty bucks: I don't love the idea of selling crap just cause someone would buy it

NYTimes Visualization: Cost of Illegality

I would love the New York Times to put together a visualization that showed how much it cost to prosecute and punish different crimes in the judicial and penitentiary system. It could be divided a bunch of different ways: per capita by criminal, cost per taxpayer, etc. For example, I'm willing to pay a lot to keep rape and murder illegal. But how much does it cost to execute someone? Is it worth it? Do police actually make money issuing speeding tickets?

I think this might make it easier to think about reform of the criminal justice system, which, in my opinion, would help a great number of people.

pros: information helps people be rational about things that they aren't normally rational about, and could help cause change

cons (get it... cons, yeah... okay): SO much work involved, and probably pretty contentious information

Shower Saver

Every morning I spend a couple minutes before and after getting into the shower trying to get the temperature right. There should be either a fixture you could put onto and existing shower knob that you could "set" to your preferred temperature, or something built into a new fixture that included that feature.

hot: perfect temperature every time

tepid: a lot of work for something so trivial

Dapper App

This idea was originally for color blind people, but would probably be good for anyone. You take a picture with your smartphone of the shirt/pants/whatever you want to wear. The phone identifies the color (or dominant color) and tells you what it is. Then it can either show you (on the screen) or identify (through more pictures) appropriate matching colors. You make this style conscientious, and have various settings (male/female, season, style by celebrity, formal/informal, city... etc.) that would help make you a better dresser.

neat: helps everyone look better, might be popular enough to get into a magazine and sell a billion copies to tweens

OCD: might have trouble with stripes, lighting, etc; might cause more awkward wearing of the same thing in middle schools

Wilderness ID

Whenever I go hiking I always ask or guess which mountains are which. There should be an app for that. I know that smart phones can tell which way they are pointing now, so I think most of the work would be in programming. The app should identify mountains and landscape features, so you know what it is you're looking at.

bald eagle: fun, worth about a dollar, if you use it to memorize where everything is you can impress your less knowledgeable friends with their dorky dependence on their phones

baldness: you can just bring a map, it would be annoying to find people all on the top of a mountain with their phones out - waving them around, ugh.

Money well scent

Smell is the easiest sense to tie to memories (mom's apple pie, grandpa's workbench, your girlfriend or boyfriend's cologne, etc.) and does a remarkable job bringing back emotion as well. I'm surprised that big luxury hotels don't use specific scents in all of their locations, which would allow them to scent affiliated products and instantly transport people back to their honeymoons or vacations.

Mmmm, smells like that time we went to Cancun, and stayed at the (insert hotel here.)

snoozing on the couch: new level of branding could make a ton of money, might make vacations literally more memorable

snoring in the bedroom: everything would smell all the time - it would be like middle-school, surely urban outfitters' smell would be annoying, and you'd smell like where you worked.

Sight visit

It would be interesting to go out with another photographer and take pictures in the following way to provide an compelling view of a city (or picturesque place).

Photographer 1: takes a picture, with Photographer 2 in it (who is also acting as though they are taking a picture.)

Photographer 2: doesn't move from where they are in the picture with them in it, waits until Photographer 1 moves a position that follows more or less a straight line from where the original picture was taken. Then #2 takes a picture with #1 (acting as though they are taking a picture). Repeat around town for an interesting tour.

Visually:

#1 -takes picture-> #2 --takes picture--> #1 -takes picture-> #2 --takes picture--> etc.

When I do this, I'll post it.

Electric racing

Millions (billions?) of dollars every year go into researching better and faster gas engines for race cars. Quick way to incentivize car companies to work on a problem that would really help global warming: ban gasoline in racing. Toyota, Honda, Ford and Mercedes would spend all their money researching better electric engines, which would become a basis for improvement on electric cars.

warm bed: great way to make electric cars fast, cool, and efficient

warm soda: apparently the noise of gas cars is important to racing fans, a plan like this would require an autocratic government capable of doing crazy things

Smarter trash can

I often see really sleek looking brushed steel trash cans. They look cool, and have ridiculous hydraulic systems that close the top softly and hermetically seal in all the badness. But, you can't tell how much trash is in them, so if you're forgetful, you could forget to empty them before you take out the trash for pick up. Solution: a scale at the bottom that weighs your trash. It would alert you when it was "full" with a little red LED on the front or something suitably sleek. This is really less cool than what you could do if it recorded how much trash you put in it over time. You could track exactly how much you're throwing out. Knowing is half the battle and for one, I have very little idea of how much trash I throw away.

nice: may help people throw away less stuff, would help forgetful people like me

meh: probably pretty expensive comparative to benefit

Open source engine

Cars - especially electric cars - have computers in them. Surely the computers have software that are used for managing the way the engine runs. I'm sure they've worked hard on them, but I'm also pretty sure that if you made them open source someone would improve upon them.

cool: more efficient cars are better for everyone, it would be fun to see computer engineers and mechanical engineers battle

kewl: open source software isn't always very stable, and I'm sure I don't want my car computer crashing

Stoplight App

So everyone I know uses their smartphone while driving. When stopped at a stoplight, they text, surf the internet, etc. Generally, they don't know when the light changes. There should be an app for that. The display would show you the color of the light you're sitting at in the corner of your tiny screen, and perhaps buzz when it changes.

barcelona: helpful, common, worth about a dollar

real madrid: i have no idea if traffic light data is public, and if so, who and how you control it

A blog of half baked ideas

I'd like to share some of my half baked ideas, and have some place where I can record them as they come (and go.)