Things They Should Invent: Set it and forget it emergency kits

Years ago, I bought one of those solar crank emergency radios. The instructions said that the battery will charge in sunlight, and if it isn't charged you can charge it by cranking it. So I sat it in an area that gets sunlight and forgot about it.

Years passed before I had a power outage, and when I did, the radio didn't work. Sunlight didn't power it. Cranking it didn't power it. It seems that, in the years that elapsed, the battery lost its ability to hold a charge.

 

 

When I first heard of 72-hour kits, I bought a bunch of bottled water and canned food. I put it all in the cupboard and forgot about it.

 

When I next moved, I dug out my supply of bottled water, and discovered that the water bottles were all kind of soft and collapsed. It turns out the plastic in the bottles wears out even if it's just sitting around doing nothing!

 

Googling around the idea, I also learned that canned food can go bad. People on the internet speaking positively of the longevity of canned food are like "Oh, it lasts forever! Like, maybe even as long as 5 years!" 

Okay, but my life expectancy is far longer than that! Am I supposed to keep throwing out and replacing my emergency kit???

 

 

Googling around the idea, I discovered that the idea is that you use up the canned food and bottled water for your naturally-occurring everyday use before it goes bad, and replenish it. But the thing is, I don't really use canned food and bottled water in my regular life - I'd have to go out of my way to eat and drink it when I don't even want to!

 

Similarly, you're supposed to test your emergency radio regularly and replace it (or replace the battery if, unlike me, you've stumbled upon the convergence of a radio where you can get at the battery and a battery where you can find an actual replacement, not just something that claims on Amazon to be a replacement but is the wrong size)

 

 

Someone really should come up with an emergency kit with actual longevity, where you can set it and forget it without adding "constantly monitor your emergency kit" to your ever-growing to-do list!

 

 

One thing I have tried is storing water in glass bottles. I used screw-top wine bottles that I washed in the dishwasher in a sanitation cycle, and specifically chose bottles that had contained red wine in the hopes that it they didn't get perfectly clean, it would be visible. 

 

I drank some of the water after a few months and it seemed fine, no ill effects or weird tastes, but obviously I have to wait multiple years to see if it lasts multiple years.

 

Another thing I realized during my last power outage is, canned food aside, I normally have 72 hours of food in my home anyway. 

 

I usually have one or two perishable meals of leftovers in the fridge, which could be eaten cold right away before they go bad. I keep a couple of loaves of bread in the freezer that could be taken out and thaw, I usually have a variety of fruits and vegetables that are kept at room temperature in the supermarket (even though I keep them in my fridge for space and health reasons), I have a few bottles of meal replacement shake for if I get a reflux flare-up - basically, with no particular effort, I have 72 hours worth of food that's within the scope of what I'd eat anyway.

 

Last power outage when I realized my emergency radio had died, I looked around for if I had another radio around, and realized I still have my high-school walkman in a drawer. It takes AA batteries (which I keep on hand anyway, and could easily take out of a remote control during a power outage), and gets a better signal than my emergency radio or my bedside clock radio. So I'm not replacing my emergency radio, and instead just using my walkman for as long as it survives.

 

 

Thinking about what I already have around the house that would serve me well in an emergency gets far better results than making an artificial emergency kit, not keeping up on the additional chore of maintaining it, and then finding myself without an emergency kit in an emergency. Maybe advice surrounding 72-hour kits should focus on this?

 

But it would also be useful if there was a way to make universally set it and forget it 72-hour kits, so anyone, regardless of their needs, can just buy or assemble the kit and never have to think of it again.

Things They Should Invent: library book sale queue

Sometimes, people are willing to pay a small amount of money for a book, but not retail price.

 

A place you can buy a book for a small amount of money (usually smaller than second-hand book stores) is the library book sale. 

 

What if you could sign up to be automatically notified when a book you're interested in is added to the library book sale, so you can get the books you're interested in owning at an extremely affordable price? 

 

Depending on how their computer system works, you could either get a notification when a book is added to book sale inventory, or when it is removed from the catalogue because it's being weeded from the collection. 

 

Also depending on how the system works, maybe they could put books aside for people who signed up for notifications rather than putting them directly into the general book sale. (I feel like putting a book aside for the person who requested it is already within the library's skill set).

 

The book sale could charge more for this priority - maybe $2 or $3 or a book that would normally be $1 - thereby raising more money for the library while still being a fantastic deal on a used book. Win-win!

Steal This Idea: stealth crossover mystery

Two or more TV shows (or other works of fiction) are set in the same location at the same time, with different, unaffiliated characters solving mysteries.

 

Except, unbeknownst to any of them, they're solving the same mystery!

 

Each show has the characters find a different set of clues that lead them to the same person having committed the same set of crimes, although perhaps each show emphasizes a different crime. (For example, one show is solving "Who stole the MacGuffin?" and the other is solving "Who was the hit and run driver?", when it turns out the driver committed the hit and run during their getaway from the MacGuffin theft.) If it's the kind of mystery that has to end with the police arresting the bad guy, it's shown in screen in a way that's vague and non-specific enough to avoid any awkward questions (e.g. montage with uniformed officers and dramatic music while the main characters have an emotional discussion that resolves their respective B plot.

 

Just once or twice in the season, we see actors from one series as background characters in a scene in the other series. For bonus points, we see them both in the same scene in the different series - e.g. one cast walks by the window as the second cast eats in the restaurant. 

 

For added authenticity, both series could share background actors, so they both have the same older lady in a statement hat and enormous man walking a tiny dog walk by in the background.

 

 

The most important part: they must not promote this crossover in advance! Wait for the internet to notice, and be careful with your IMDB curation until the internet does notice! This should be posted by some small Tumblr (yes, I said what I said in this the year 2025), then reblogged by some big-name fanfic writer, which leads to it being screenshotted on Reddit and then someone makes a TikTok post about it that doesn't get traction until some influencer duets it. By the time the information becomes general knowledge, the season is already over, and the ensuing buzz saves at least one of the serieses from cancellation.

 

I theorize that there's a 63% chance someone's already done this and no one has noticed. 

Journalism Wanted: if you evacuate a plane and leave your belongings behind, what happens next?

If you're on a plane that crashes and you have to evacuate, you're supposed to leave your belongings behind. And every time there is a plane crash that makes the news, you hear about people trying to bring their belongings with them.

 

An easy way to prevent this would be to widely publicize what actually, in real life, happens to people who evacuate a plane and find themselves on the tarmac of a strange airport in a strange country with only the clothes on their back. (Which might not even include coat and shoes, because sometimes people make themselves comfortable on airplanes.)

 

What measures are in place to keep people safe? How do they avoid the pitfalls we can all anticipate, and those we can't?

 

Suppose your passport is on the plane. You're in a foreign country with no passport and no ID. Maybe it isn't your destination country and you aren't actually legally permitted to enter that country. What measures are in place to regularize your presence so you don't get arrested and imprisoned? What if the country you're in isn't safe for people of your demographic?

 

Suppose your wallet is on the plane. You have no money and no cards. How do you get all the things you need, including random incidentals like menstrual pads and eczema cream?

 

Suppose you lose your driver's licence in the plane crash and need to drive home from the airport. What provisions are in place to keep the cops from arresting you for driving without a licence?

 

What if your baby's car seat is in the plane? How do you safely and legally get, like, anywhere? 

 

To what extent are they assuming goodwill ("Don't be silly, the authorities won't arrest you for being in a foreign country without a passport if you've just been in a plane crash!") vs. having actual procedures in place ("This is your official internationally recognized Plane Crash Survivor card")?

If they actually want people to leave their belongings behind, they need to let people know what measures are in place to protect them. But I've never seen anyone report on this - it's always just "These plane crash survivors are Bad and Wrong for trying to collect their belongings!"

Firefox's translation feature needs to be suppressed on pages that already have an official target language version

Recent versions of Firefox have a "translate this page" function that pops up if it detects that the webpage is in a language other than the preferred language indicated in your settings.

They need to figure out a way to stop this from automatically popping up when an official version of the page exists in your preferred language.

 

For example, if I, with my default English settings, end up on the French version of the federal government's COVID wastewater monitoring dashboard, a conspicuous "Translate this page" bubble pops up front and centre. 

This is a problem, because an official English version of the page exists. You can access it by clicking the English link on the top right. And the automatically translated version is never going to be as good or as authoritative as the official English version.

Screenshot of linked page, with the English link at the top right highlighted

 

People outside of translation/language intersection spaces don't always know that pages with multiple language versions exist, but they are common, especially in institutional (government, education, etc.) spaces that provide official information.

 

Firefox's translation feature needs to avoid distracting these uninformed users from the existence of the official multilingual versions that they may not even know to look for.

So how do you do that from a programming perspective?

Preliminary idea to build on: what if the translation feature could detect the name of the target language in the target language? If the user has English set as their default language, it detects the word "English" on the page. Perhaps it could highlight it? Perhaps the translation feature could say "An official version may exist"?

This wouldn't catch every instance. Some websites use abbreviations (en, fr, de, es, pl) and some websites use flags. However, there may be a finite number of ways that these are coded, or commonalities to the scripts used to switch the language, or indicators in the metadata.

Another possibility would be to have the pop-up appear elsewhere on the page (maybe towards the bottom left of the visible portion?) so it's less likely to cover the link to the official version. 

In any case, however well-intentioned this automatic translation feature is, it needs to avoid making it difficult to find the official version of the page in the target language.