I got addicted to http://www.whynot.net/

recent quotes i like

"Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words." - ? | | | | | | |
"If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it's that you can have great answers and still be mean... and that just as important as being right is being nice. " - shane claiborne | | | | | | |
"If Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." --George Orwell ||||||
"On Facebook, no one can hear you scream." - I dont know ||||||
"The reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it." - Machiavelli ||||||

basically an open source site to submit ideas for inventions or other "eureka" moments.

http://www.whynot.net/ is a site where people can contribute all those clever (or sometimes very unclever) ideas that we all come up with while daydreaming or doing some sort of drudgery and we truly say to ourselves "there must be a better way."

i stumbled upon it while looking for information on an idea I had for a roof-coating that would change from black to white based on the temperature outside and thus add or reflect heat from the sun based on weather it was winter or summer. someone on the site had made a similar suggestion and as i started to root around the site i found a lot of really clever ideas (and some big duds too - but that was part of the fun!)

you gotta register your email and pick a password but that's the whole registration process.

the site looks like it was founder around 2003 or so since some of the earliest ideas and comments are dated to then. newer comments are listed under older ones (i think they should reverse that since some of the ideas have already come to be or else are in development since the users first submitted them and i would rather see the up to date stuff first.) anyway....

for instance here is one simple idea that i really liked and thought would save enormous amounts of electricity nationwide and involve absolutely zero inconvenience:

Escalators in public places typically run all day long regardless of whether people are using them. Obviously the empty escalator is wasting energy. Why not equip escalators with sensors to determine whether a person is on (or approaching) the escalator? When the escalator senses a nearby passenger, it can start moving. When the passenger gets off, it can stop.

http://www.whynot.net/ideas/4325