IDEAS

proposed solutions to human problems

  1. Universal Basic Subsidy

    Pay a willing person to withhold the competitive advantage their labor could give others. An industry-funded pool prices the exit.

  2. Preference Ranked Voting

    Complete a voter's shortened ranking from the nearest expressed preference patterns, then count every ballot to the end.

  3. Bring Back the Swamps

    Floating living reactors investigate ocean carbon buffering through mineral dissolution, managed cultivation, and growing surfaces with a second life as marine habitat.

  4. Panoptes

    Explore a large autonomous outer-system observatory: solar gravitational lens imaging, nuclear departure and braking, paired interferometry and the survey of fast interstellar objects.

  5. Battle Domes

    A carnivorous garden that puts visiting insects on the menu and handles its own water, climate and feeding. Enjoy the plants while the habitat takes care of the growing.

  6. The George Washington Expedition

    A crewed, round-trip expedition to Alpha Centauri built around a rotating habitat, sacrificial shielding, long-lived people, and an obligation to return with direct evidence.

  7. Visible Clean

    Two battery-powered hands-in enclosures make washing feedback simple: the first coats both hands automatically, the second illuminates what remains after washing.

  8. The Tabletop Refreshments Cooler

    A shallow circular refrigerator for keeping a single, visible layer of drinks and snacks cold wherever people gather.

  9. Sky Clipper

    A shallow-draft cargo ship shares its load with hydraulically connected square solar pontoons around its perimeter, serving dedicated intercontinental terminal pairs.

  10. Cloud Volcano

    A fabric mountain fitted to Clipperton’s lagoon lifts marine air toward clouds; downstream calculations bound its local shading and the distance to a Pacific climate effect.

  11. Tidal Glass

    Could 500–1,000-acre passive tidal districts of individual Fresnel shell cells fill a permanent inland sea for less than $100 billion?

  12. Scents for Cents

    A beautiful, collectible postcard carries one protected liquid fragrance dose: enough to experience a scent without buying a bottle.

  13. The Haptic Clipboard

    A four-direction control puts copy, paste, cut, delete, and line selection under one tactile finger—with physical confirmation for every command.

  14. Thermoregulated Fan

    Built-in knowledge of human comfort adjusts the fan automatically as temperature and humidity change. The user shifts the response curve to suit their preference.

  15. The Joseph Reserve

    A negotiated wage component shares uncertain prosperity, a reserve buffers reversals, and reconciliation makes pessimistic employer forecasts consequential.

  16. The Royal Flush

    Good stories, useful nonsense, honest laughs, and one emergency last sheet for the room where everybody eventually needs something to read.

  17. Donuts

    A love letter to donuts, followed by six new varieties built from strawberry milk, farro, tiny rings, waffle cone, sponge cake, and German chocolate cake.

  18. E-shoji

    A folding e-paper divider in black, mahogany, bamboo, or walnut. Upload a design, keep the frame, and change the room.

  19. Laundry Detergent

    A critique of the American supermarket laundry aisle, twelve scent compositions, and a grace period for forgotten wet laundry.

  20. Spider

    A six-wheel suspended carrier for rural troop transport, wilderness rescue and wildland firefighters, explored through a shared 3D model, frozen terrain views and future-system concept drawings.

  21. Engineered Crops

    Engineer crops around useful molecules: purpose-built oils, domestic natural rubber, and harvestable organs that turn fields into material factories.

  22. One Shot Suppresser

    For kitchens without a hood: a ceiling-mounted 16 oz suppressant can, a guided hanging nozzle, and a mechanical pressure indicator. A $200 DIY product proposal.

  23. Elsewhere, All Night

    A greenhouse-like sleeping pod whose entire inner surface is a screen synchronized with audio, smell, and airflow so the user thinks their bed lies within another world.

  24. Routes

    Automatically infer regular motion, ask verified users to register persistent X-to-Y routes, privately connect overlapping availability and need, and sell bundled route information to traffic and planning entities.

  25. Aisle Path

    Scan grocery lists, compare products, optionally hand shopping to staff, and use store logistics LiDAR and cameras to build a walkable VR puzzle store on the phone with a complete route and exact shelf guidance.

  26. Yardwatch Airlift

    An app-booked guard dog arrives by cargo drone while you are away and is collected before you re-enter your garden.

  27. Pressure Canary

    A sensor calibrates to internal air pressure and continually sends an encrypted signal home; a locally validated breach signature trips it and immediately stops the signal.

  28. Headroom

    Can bridges stop being can openers? A dashboard scanner below $100 and a fiberglass clearance bow below $50.

  29. The future outlet

    A quiet bedroom panel opens flush, swings out for service, and lets the electronics evolve behind an enduring wall.

  30. The Invite

    Provisioned QR identity vouchers carry petitions and durable contacts through configurable referral chains whose members spend social reputation to proxy access.

  31. The Bus Bulwark

    A manually triggered whole-bus inflatable adds sacrificial distance before an unavoidable impact, evaluated through approach timing, momentum and energy absorption.

  32. The Moving Line

    A twelve-foot wall face on a wheeled adjustable base, with expanding side elements linking sections into a movable boundary.

  33. Tinnitus-treating earpiece

    An earpiece uses biofeedback to treat some forms of tinnitus and designed sound to mask other forms, explicitly testing whether it slows progression, while letting speech through.

  34. Steady Frame

    Camera-mediated glasses explore temporal and spatial filtering for photosensitive epilepsy, balancing reduced visual modulation with timely, usable vision.

  35. The Toasty Triangle

    A quesadilla is unusually well suited to a vending machine: simple mechanical steps turn a few inexpensive ingredients into hot food people already like.

  36. The Micro-Place Pick

    A disposable half-inch placement pick has a square foot, four reinforcing ribs and a tiny adhesive pad for lifting and releasing chip components.

  37. The mediator between states

    A computationally proposed, probably non-dye blocked tetrahydropterin designed to test whether an NADH/QDPR-recyclable mediator can reduce ferric heme without inheriting methylene blue’s entire pharmacology.

  38. Anchor

    Anchor carries an old update request into the gradient’s new frame, then removes the motion that would become correction debt—so a smaller step can settle in fewer iterations.

  39. The Second-Best Gate

    Scout eight candidates, keep the best two, then stop when a newcomer clears the second-best gate.

  40. What is truth?

    A claim-support gauge and a zoomable map of nested epistemic depth.

  41. Mother's Best

    A grant-funded human-milk atlas to test whether infant formula should have evidence-based growth, illness, night, and heat-day profiles.

  42. Babble Bubble

    Transparent helmets preserve face, voice, rhythm, and feeling while turning every spoken sentence into unrecoverable Baby, Robot, Troll, or Elf pseudo-speech.

  43. Space Elevator

    Inspectable 3D assemblies and numerical studies connect a pressure spine, flying stations, balloon rig, orbital handoff and pressure-cushion return into one transport architecture.

  44. Kurapia for climate change

    Build a disciplined local contractor around replacing thirsty ornamental turf with living, lower-input groundcover.
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