Ideas 2017

A collection of ideas I’ve had and found amusing enough to write down.

Tech

Replace lightbulbs by using fibre-optic cables to transfer sunlight from earth’s daytime side to the night-time side. (After an hour of research I figured out that this is not currently possible due to light decaying quickly in fibre optic cables)
Put accreditation and certificates on a blockchain (prove you graduated from school [X] by showing you have a token cryptographically signed by school [X])

A fancy restaurant where instead of ordering for yourself, you order for the next person/s who eats at your table. You in turn eat what the last person ordered.
A restaurant where you pay proportionally to how much time the chef has spent on your meal. $12 for a basic bacon and eggs that takes ~10min, $20 for the same thing, but with more well thought through garnishing and sauces (~20min), $30 for exotic, hand-cut organic bacon and finely prepared truffled eggs (~30min) etc

Promote understanding between STEM and the humanities by requiring all engineering students to convincingly explain how their thesis project could be interpreted as contemporary art before they can graduate
Illustrate the vastness of the universe in mundane ways: use units of lightyears in running apps, show driving times in millennia
Capture the scents of trash from all around the world and turn them into perfumes named after the cities they come from (different foods = different trash = different smells)
Most things sound green (original idea behind my blog post)
Can you hear the difference between cold and hot water? (the answer is yes, I found this video a few weeks after I wrote this)
Measure hormone levels while having an experience (e.g. being in love, hanging out with friends on the beach) and manufacture pills of the same chemical composition

Audit bus driver driving style by measuring accelerometer data from passengers’ phones while they use the public transport app (Uber already does this, should be easy)
Force all lecturers to sit through a recording of one of their own lectures every year so they can see how bad they are and improve