Ideas for Free

Problem: Sometimes frozen food melts and refreezes.

Refrigerated trucks don’t.  Freezer doors stay open.  The freezer case goes out.  Groceries get left in the car for a long trip.  The power company decides to play power line roulette.  Later, the problem is fixed, and the food freezes again.  It’s hard to know if food thawed out and was then refrozen.  For some foods, this can be dangerous.

Solution: Fancy Ice Cubes.

Put a small “safe to eat” ice solid inside each back of frozen vegetables.  If it’s missing or unreadable, the vegetables have been thawed and refrozen.  The ice solid is made from water with two or more food colorings, so pick colors like the food.

When ice melts, the liquid will mix.  If you make ice cubes out of two or more colored waters, the two colors will mix.   For the simplest example:

1. Fill an ice cube tray so that each hole is half full.
2. Put in one drop of yellow food coloring into each hole.
3. Freeze.  You now have half height yellow ice cubes.
4. Fill the rest of each hole of the ice cube tray with plain water.
5. Put in one drop of blue food coloring into each hole.
6. Freeze.  You now have ice cubes that are yellow on the bottom and blue on top.
7. Leave the ice cubes in the freezer.  Have a three day power outage and then restore power for a day.
8. You now have green ice cubes.

That’s the core idea.  You have a way to tell if the item was refrozen.  From here, you can get fancy.

• Adjust the surface area ratio to signify how much thawing is acceptable.  Use thin slices when less thawing is allowed.
• “Print” tamper proof cubes in multiple colors.   You might ship cases of vegetables with a thin slice with the date and company logo in different colors.  If it the slice arrives a melted mess, don’t accept it from the trucker.
• Use multiple fluids or widths to make a ‘gauge’ to show exactly how melted the shipment got.

This could easily commercialize as a money saver by identifying truckers making expensive mistakes or as a premium brand spiff by making the ’safety tag’ inside each bag.
Shoo, go make money.

Problem: People Fail To Understand the Whole “Gays Can Marry” Thing

Solution: A T-Shirt!  It’s Always The Solution

FIRST THE COLOREDS…

THEN THE WOMEN…

NOW THE GAYS?

LIBERALS AND THEIR “RIGHTS”

Problem: Hard to Get People Not To Smoke

Solution: Pressure sensitive ashtrays

Some people smoke in non-smoking areas.  Sad, but true.  How about putting ashtrays for their pleasure?  These ashtrays cough loudly when you rest a cigarette on the edge of ashtray.  If you mash your cigarette in the ashtray it screams “Ahhhhhh!!!! It Burns!  It Burns!”

There are worse things to build on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Problem: People balk at having online access to seldom used financial, insurance, and service accounts.

Financial and insurance institutions want consumers to access accounts online.  It lowers costs and provides consistent service.

People note the potential for high cost losses, the one-sided user agreements, and complete lack of recourse for most fraud.  Some may choose online access for primary banking; the convenience outweighing the risk.  Many more will avoid online access to a 401(k) plan.

Solution: Provide information only accounts by default.

Information about an account is less valuable than the money in it.  Being a little careless with your account, such as accessing it from a computer, becomes similiar to throwing out printed statements without shreading them.

These accounts would let people see their balances and fees, make most routine changes, but not make ones that severly compromise security.  For example, transfering money from savings to checking is OK; changing mutual funds is OK; adding a newborn to your insurance is OK; changing your address is not OK; disbursing money to outside accounts is right out.  The risk of catastrophic loss decreases.

There are some implementations approaching this solution, aimed at preventing catastrophic losses.  Bank of America provides alert notifications by email when selected activities occur, such as adding a new Payee.   E*Trade uses separate passwords for viewing information and trading securities.

This idea provides lower costs to institutions, more convenience to consumers, and less loss to fraud all around.  What’s not to like?

Problem: Homeopathy lives right on the border of science.  The edges suggest It could work:  strange dosage curves,  unexplained placebos and histamine effects (see #1 and #4),  mercaptan sensitivity in the 1:50 billion range.  Working would mean bringing drug production costs to nearly zero. Failing means that millions of people are being comforted by empty promises. We want to know!

Solution: Run a double blind study already!

Homeopathy works with minute quantities of medicine, in the realm of countable molecules. The doctrine is that the dilution is to zero molecules with only a ‘memory’ in the water. It is nearly impossible to control labs to zero molecule dilution and the real effect might be in the few molecules contaminating the blank pills.

Testing becomes difficult due to the cycle of a homeopath testing several possible medications on a patient based on background, random symptoms, and responses to previous medications. Also, successful homeopathic treatment solutions cause subtle cures of systemic aliments, making traditional testing difficult. The only data on success is the subjective evaluation of the patient.

This is SCIENCE! Science works! Run a double blind anyway. Stop arguing and do the experiment!

Ingredients:

• 1 dozen homeopathic doctors (”docs”) willing to try.
• 300 or more patients (”sickies”) with various suitable allergies, gastric problems, etc.
• 1 trusted pill dispenser and record keeper that can keep a secret (”peddler”).

Recipe:

Peddler randomly and secretly assigns each sicky to one of three types: righties, wrongies, and blankies. Peddler then assigns an equal number of righties, wrongies, and blankies to each doc. Each doc treats each sicky normally: he or she interviews and pokes the sicky, prescribes a homeopathic pill, follows up with more interviewing, poking, and pills, and eventually either calls the sicky cured or just gives up.  Science!

Ah, but each time the sicky is prescribed pills, he or she needs to get them from the peddler. Then begins the fun!  The peddler looks up if the sicky is really a righty, wrongy, or blanky. A righty always gets the pill as prescribed by the doc. A wrongy always gets a random homeopathic pill from whatever spilled on the floor: those pills are small suckers. A blanky always gets a blank sugar pill. So, for example, each time a blanky goes back to the doctor with weird symptoms and an updated prescription for a carefully chosen remedy, he or she really gets a blank sugar pill.

Run for six months if you loaded up with chronic suffering sickies. For acute sickies, you might finish in a couple weeks. By now, lots of sickies will talk about how much better they are! Fill in the surveys on “Did you get better? Did homeopathy work for you? Do you feel better or worse?”. Hand them to the peddler.

You’ve Got Results!

You only get a few numbers out, like how righties compared to blankies. Time to crunch that spreadsheet to see what you got:

Happy Fun Pills: Righties do well; Wrongies and Blankies do poorly.

• Congratulations! Collect your Noble Prize in Medicine. Use winnings to evade Pfizer hit squads.

You’ve Got To Believe!: Some sickies do lots better. About even across docs and types of sickies.

• Eh. Publish an article in Popular Science. Keep trying for tenure.

That Winning Smile: Sickies of some docs do much better than others. About even across types.

• Recruit docs into multi-level marketing selling time shares for the astral plane. Retire rich and wanted.

They Be Shamans: Righties of some docs do really well. Everything else about even.

• Oh, those docs know good things. Go figure it out. Live on research grants forever!

That Black Pill? Not so good: Blankies do average. Wrongies do really bad. Might mix with above results.

• Homeopathy does something! It makes you sick! Win as above, but also sell sickos’ stories to People.

Total Muddle: Everyone does about the same with the usual statistical minutiae.

• Embezzle remaining research funds. Publish paper no one reads. Teach at Yale or Brigham Young.

So, go do it?

Well, it’s hard. Studies in the United States may require providing test subjects with real medical care during or after. Also, there really isn’t much money in it. Look how excited the makers of Tagamet were about rumors of H. Pylori? Think of how excited those generous big pharma will be to your University when you hint you might do the study if you have no money for ‘real’ research.

Great for some small country wanting to make a name for itself.

Problem: Python assert statements are prone to silently fail in obvious misuse.

Solution: Modify Python assert statement to “assert condition as message”

Python usually does the right thing ™. That is, usually a programmer’s code does what is expected without odd language gotcha’s. Here is one of the gotcha’s:

Seems reasonable? Sorry, that assert is equivalent to:

because your parenthesis made a tuple. You meant to type this:

Python 3.0 should be modified to require this:

or just make assert a built_in function and, therefore, require the parenthesis.

So, it’s the coming up on Burning Man. I realize on holidays. Jews light candles. Candles have fire. Fire makes geeks twitch. We should have a Menorah Lighting Invitational. Here are some basic Menorah lighting techniques:

Roman Menorah: To commemorate the fireworks between Jews and Rome, simply replace the original candles with Roman candles.

Rocket Menorah: Simple but effective. Replace the boring candles with model rocket engines.Mounted upside down, they should make an impressive but short flame. In a rig to mount them right side up, meaning with thrust causing lift, you could see the mythical Flying Menorah.

Menorah and Lox: Lox is a favorite food of many Jews. Use cups filled with Lox and light. I might be a good idea to stand a bit back for this one.

Acetylene Menorah: A series of tubes makes a simple nine headed acetylene torch. This indoor favorite can heat your entire house.

Dry Ice Menorah: Instead of flame, just add water. Another indoor favorite, you can place blocks into the cups for a long lasting Menorah or you can shave the dry ice for a rapid transition to mist.

Salt Water Menorah: Really, just add lots of RF before lighting the water on fire.

Mixed-Marriage Menorah: For all those marriages that are Christian and Jewish, try a Christmas Tree Menorah. Larry actually does these occasionally, for Clan McDude.

Remember, your mileage and maiming may vary. Please do not attempt if you have no clue.

Problem: I’m a guy. When I try to cook, it uses these things called “in-gradients”. I am supposed to have little boxes, cylinders, and packets full of baking power, baking soda, and yeast.

Solution: I’ve already got a spice rack. Put ‘em in there.

Seriously, is it so hard to package baking powder into a spice jar? Or little packets of yeast in a spice jar? Every recipe wants a teaspoon or two. I don’t need a new shape in my three dimensional Tetris of cabinet space. And don’t get me started on bullion cubes!

Problem: I want a web browser plug-in that can edit the FavIcon for my bookmarks.

Solution: Build one.

There exist dozens of online FavIcon editors on the web. The FavIcon is the small graphic in the corner of the address book; the one for this site looks like this .  Some tools, like FavIcon Picker 2 let bookmarks be reduced to just the icon, making a compact tool bar of bookmarks. Unfortunately, not every site has a favorite icon, and different services help on the same favorite icon. For example, Google, Google (Linux) search, and Google Analytics have the same favicon.  I want to make my own icon as a minor variation of the single standard icon.  Alternately, I want to make dirt simple favicons for sites that have none.

My feature list for such a program would include:

• Take an existing favicon and alter the colors.  The red “G” might be search, the “blue” might be analytics.
• Add a letter overlay onto existing favicons, so my “Google Linux” button has an “L” on it.
• Create a one or two character favicon so that the cool Widgets site with no icon could get a “red Wi” favicon in my bookmarks.

None of this is particularly odd or difficult.  It’s a matter of a GUI front end, some data files, and some shelling out to ImageMagick to do the actual work.  Hmm….

Problem: Testing GUIs tends to be hard.

Writing a reasonable test for GUIs usually involves contortions to find the correct widget and values. For example, a test might want to confirm that “the font is now bold for the third text field, named system_danger_level, in the hbox in the floating frame in the second panel in the third tab bar in the dialog box”. Figuring out how to tell if the test passed is usually difficult.

Solution: Add a function in the GUI framework that returns a single large data structure for the state of the GUI. Use standard Python programming to navigate it.

The test becomes:

assert(gobject.dump(”system_danger_level”)["font"]["style"] == “bold”)

This is one of my poorly researched ideas: it came up while talking with Shandy before Mark Shuttleworth’s talk last night. All GUI frameworks are inherently a bit crufty and hard to navigate. On the other hand, the data types in Python are rich: dictionaries, arrays, nested structures, etc. While handing such a data structure to PyGTK to modify the GUI might require a lot of writing, asking PyGTK to disgorge such a data structure is far easier.

Consider adding it the the GObject functions. Call a new gobject.dump_main_context() and get a huge Python data structure back. It might have lots of redundant methods of finding the same data. For example, a tree of all the contexts or dialog boxes and the usual tree objects inside that are grabbed by tools like Guitar’s GUI Ripper. It might also have a handy hash of object id’s and their associated sub-records, like an index into the big tree.

While some may decry the memory and time cost of creating this tree might have the legitimate wish for a second function known simply as gobject.dump(). It would take a single identifier tag and return a single object from that tag ‘downwards’ in detail. A well published heuristic would have it “do the right thing” when given a tag that exists in multiple places.
This feels like a “implement it first and then see if its useful” type of hack.