Half-baked Ideas

Wouldn’t it be convenient if you knew exactly what year you will die? It would certainly help you plan for the future (though it might also cause you to procrastinate on life goals in the early years and become anxious in the years leading up to your death). The entire $4.7 billion life insurance industry […]

Most public libraries these days have online catalogs of their resources. Every book, music CD, DVD, and magazine they have is indexed in a fully searchable database. What if you could integrate your library’s catalog of resources with the catalogs of local resources on your devices? In other words, your devices can connect with your […]

The metaverse is widely viewed as what the next version of the internet will be. It will be a virtual reality world publicly shared between everyone on the internet. Property on the metaverse will be represented by digital objects stored on blockchains. Payments in the metaverse will be made using cryptocurrencies. Everything in the real […]

There should be a standard format for NFT game items. That way, if you owned a magical ring NFT or a fancy blue helmet NFT in one game, you can import them into another game and use them. Or if there were a standard format for NFT avatars, maybe you can use the same avatar […]

Ebooks are great, but browsing them is still not that great of an experience. People like to go to physical bookstores and libraries because they can browse the books using all of their senses, not just the visual sense. Even the visual sense in online bookstores is impaired—you only get scaled-down two-dimensional information through your […]

If you can spin a turbine, you can generate electricity. Conversely, anything that spins can be harnessed for electricity. That’s spinning windmills. Spinning water wheels. Spin class. Wait, what? Spin class? Yes, those spinning wheels on your stationary bike can be used to harness electricity. What if you could power an entire gym purely by […]