Sometimes I cook up ideas to make the world better. Rather than go nuts trying to come up with the money, expertise, and time to execute them and thereby become wealthy enough to hire a house cleaner, I usually just keep them to myself. These ideas rot away in my memory and disappear. How selfish! (Even if, as I suspect, the ideas usually suck.) Now that we are firmly ensconced in the era of share everything, I will do my best to spread these half-assed ideas to the rest of the planet via blogging and tweeting and social networking and human interface 2.0ing. Enjoy.
1. Make cops use cars that power down during idling. Cops idle a lot. How many times have you seen two police cars spooning in a parking lot as the drivers waste away a boring shift chit-chatting? Or, of course, a cop idling in a median with a radar gun? There are already electric cars that can provide energy to the municipal power grid while idling. Can we build something into hybrids, a kind of smart shut-off with instant rev-up? At the very least, could a car be designed for cops that is super-efficient at idling, fuel-wise?
2. Option to turn off graphics during sports games. I’ve watching a few old-school classic baseball games online to get geared up for the 2010 season. It’s a joy to watch those pre-’80s broadcasts with no graphics cluttering up the view of the batter or the field. While the amount of graphics on screen has hit a plateau since networks went ticker/info/sidebar/animation crazy in the early 2000s, it’s still annoying how little of the screen is actually devoted to the sport. We already have the SAP button and closed captioning. What about a similar simultaneous stream for graphics? Just push a button, and they drop away. (I know there are raw graphic-free feeds of sports at least, because the later games that MLBAM streams are run without them sometimes.) As a bonus, this could also be used for non-sports programming to eliminate the annoying transparent logo in the lower right or the atrocious fly–across-the-screen promo with a smiling guy wiggling around to announce the latest crappy sit-com.
3. Computers with built-in scanners and printers. Really, the chips are small enough to fit in a phone now. Most of the size of an iMac is given over to just the monitor. All-in-ones have become pretty cheap. For high-end desktops, can’t we have a slot that you can put paper in for scanning? With a bit more technical wizardry, it would be cool to be able to slip that piece of paper in and have it pop back out printed with whatever’s on the screen, like a toaster. Most of what I print these days is recipes or directions or résumés — one page items that I need to use away from any kind of screen. Seems wasteful to have an entire electronic appliance dedicated to that.
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