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Good ideas, all
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What good ideas came to life in 2007? The Times says these are 70 of the best ideas from the last year. The include The Best Way to Deflect an Asteroid, Biodegradable Coffins, The ‘Cat Lady’ Conundrum, Posthumous E-Mail, Smog-Eating Cement, and Weapon-Proof School Gear. The full list is here.
And while we’re on the subject…What good ideas did you have this year? Mine: A cell phone that will allow you to answer a call during an important meeting by telling your caller that the phone has been answered and to please hold…while the person leaves the meeting respectfully, to take the call in the hallway.
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A matter of life
California has a bunch of levees along the Sacramento River. They are in sad shape, so says the Governator. I wonder if they could be lined with Tyvek, a waterproof home wrap. Do you remember those white floppy disk sleeves that you couldn’t tear? Tyvek
I had the idea that we should train school teachers to drive snow plows. That way, when it snows and the schools are closed, the teachers could push the snow and we wouldn’t have pay other state workers OT to do it.
Back off, teachers - it was really just a joke.
Here’s a little product idea I came up with:
The scenario: you’ve got a fridge full of ingredients but it’s been a tough day and you’re too frazzled to come up with a plan for dinner. Or you’ve found a great recipe but can’t recall whether one cup of walnuts and a pinch of fennel seed lurk behind all the half-eaten bags of chips in the pantry.
The idea: supermarket scanner technology comes home. A little countertop device that lets you scan everything when you bring it home, and again when you consume it, giving you a current inventory of everything (with a bar code) in your pantry or fridge. Then its recipe database would suggest menus based on what you have.
Love it, RR! I’ll help test it.
Mommy, that’s hilarious!
RR
Sorta like this?
RR, several years ago when my Dad first retired and got a home computer, he inventoried everything in their freezer and printed a list that he taped to the front of it. Every time Mom took something out or put something in, she had to log it on the sheet. This didn’t last very long, but we all got a good laugh over it.
#1 Bob,
Many years ago I was getting frustrated with broken 50 # Paper bags of flour in the warehouse. Even if you taped up the bag the customer would reject it knowing that it had been ‘opened’. It was just making a mess and the pallet jacks and forklifts were spreading it everywhere with their tires. The USDA inspector for rats and mice didn’t like it one bit either so it was a real chore keeping it cleaned up. I ended up sending 10% of the bags to the food bank - who just loved it.
Anyway, I came up with the idea of using a tear proof plastic, like Tyvek, for the bag instead of paper. I got sample of the roll plastic and took it to my flour bagger to see if their machinery could use it instead of plastic. It worked great. It turned out to be 1 penny a pound more expensive to use plastic but it saved me 10% of the total cost of bagged flour in damage. But I couldn’t get any manufacturer to change to the plastic bag no mater how hard I tried.
The reason was because all the manufacturers would lose 10% in sales (because there would be no more damage) and even more than that in profit if they lost 10% in sales. Plus the food bank would lose out on flour they got from me every week and the poor would starve even worst then they starve today.
After talking to many flour mills it became obvious that at least 5% of the total flour in the world was lost due to bags ripping and the spilled contents or remainder could not be used except to feed the mice, rats and weevoils of course.
Sometime great ideas won’t fly for the strangest of reasons.
Mommy,
If the teachers plowed the school bus routes only, then they could tow a bus behind their plows, pick the kids up the kids while plowing and still have a lovely school day for all. I just love Win - Win solutions
Christianleftist, that’s pretty cool! This sort of technology would require only a fraction of the work involved for Mommy’s dad (and mom!).
The expiration date / recall warning technology is way cool; I just wonder if prohibitively expensive. The gizmo I envision wouldn’t be able to do that, but the user could set up some basic parameters like “Warn me about any milk more than ten days old.” It would also be able to track shelf-stable stuff.
And followup to 6: probably every family has a few of these priceless stories where Dad tries to make Mom more efficient, or vice versa. This sort of discipline must be self-imposed, or it will be undermined.
Now if we could get the smart fridge to put the roast into the dumb oven and turn it on for us, we’d really have something!
I’d like to invent a “hovering remote” for the TV. That way I could lie in bed and it would just kinda hover over me so I could grab it at any time. Nothing worse than trying to find the remote amongst the bed covers!
Anlir’s idea reminds me of a project I did in a Marketing class in grad school. We had to come up with a new product idea, and develop a marketing plan. Our idea was a voice-controlled TV remote. The remote would just sit by the TV (could even Velcro it there), and the commands would be given by voice from anywhere within earshot. It would be keyed to one primary voiceprint, with others available as secondary (that was to avoid having multiple people yelling contrary commands).
I’m pretty sure that sometime since then (that was in 1996) I’ve seen a product along those lines advertised, and I wondered how they handled the multiple voice issue.
As far as good ideas, this “low tech” breakthrough in medicine sounded very, very good to me.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande/