Sunroofs with rain sensors!

What’s the next step? I’m going to patent the idea, contact Toyota, and as soon as July ’09, every Prius will have a sunroof that you can leave open while you’re at work.

Why didn’t I vote for Investing in Me? After all, that option is more likely to actually generate any profit for me. To be honest, I was pretty excited about this idea until Trevor and Caroline pointed out that since my investors would have a stake in me, they would be able to make decisions about my life. Say I want to move to another city—the investors would have to approve such a move. Same if I wanted to sell my condo, or switch to two-ply toilet paper. They’d have a vested interest in me, so they’d have a stake in every decision I’d make.

Originally, I didn’t think it would be that complicated, but of course it would. People aren’t just going to toss money in my direction and say, “Here, do whatever you want. Hopefully you’ll be worth a lot more than you currently are someday.”

Also, what would I do with that money? Say I got $20,000 in investments through some miracle of nature. I’d probably just invest that money in mutual funds, but that would only increase my net financial worth, not my personal net value. I could spend that money on education, which would potentially increase my value, or I could use the money to pay the bills while I pursue interests/ideas that could yield more money. But really, how do you add value to yourself besides getting a higher-paying job?

Because of all that, the sunroofs get the win. I’ll let you know how that goes. Thanks for voting.

In the spirit of so-called brilliant ideas, I’ll give you a freebie for today. The idea? Power strips (or surge protectors) that have a built-in pedal-powered generator. So when you’re sitting at your computer for eight hours a day, instead of letting your legs hang there like lifeless sacks of flour, you can pedal in place and generate a portion of the power required to run your computer. When you’re not pedaling, or when you’re pedaling slowly, the power strip will just use regular electricity. It’ll save the earth and save America’s obesity problem at the same time (or, at the very least, we’ll have a lot of people with very skinny legs who weigh 200 pounds above the waist).

In the NCAA men’s basketball tournament this year, there were four number one seeds vying for the top ranking in the country. When there were four left, each team had two games separating them from that honor.

But imagine if instead of playing a semifinal game and a final game, you put all four teams on the court at the same time? You’d need to add two extra hoops, of course, but the result would still be chaos.

It would be incredibly entertaining.

So that’s what I’m doing today. The March of Mad Ideas ends here with your vote today. All four teams are going out on the court for four days, with me tallying the final votes next Monday night. You can only vote once to determine which idea I’ll pursue, so vote carefully.

The ideas:

An Online Equivalent to Window Shopping: The idea here is to mimic the mall shopping experience on a website. It’s similar to what Amazon has done, but I envision it quite differently. The website would display a number of “storefronts” that would be miniature versions of commercial websites, perhaps with a featured product displayed. You could customize your window shopping homepage with the stores you frequent the most, and the site would add storefronts based on which other stores you clicked on the most.

Investing in Me: The idea here is that I would create a formula that would establish my monetary value, and people could invest in share of me (up to 49%–I would retain a 51% majority ownership in myself). If my value goes up and a shareholder decides to cash out, I would pay them one share’s worth of my current worth. The risk is that shareholders would have a financial stake in the big decisions I’d make in my life, so they might want more control than I’d be willing to relinquish.

Reversible Baby Clothes for Both Genders: In a recent Gallop poll, 51% of women indicated that they wouldn’t want to know their baby’s gender before giving birth. Roughly 426,415 babies were born in the U.S. alone last year. That means that people coming to over 200,000 baby showers have no idea what color clothing they should buy! Sure, they could go with a neutral green, but why not have control to choose the color of an outfit after the baby is born? Thus, reversible baby clothes—pink on the inside, blue on the outside.

Sunroofs with Rain Sensors: Summer is coming up—wouldn’t it be nice to leave your sunroof at least partly open during the day so your car isn’t swelteringly hot when you climb in after a long day at work? But if it rains, your interior is going to get soaked. Many cars already have rain sensors on the windshield that automatically activate windshield wipers. All you’d need to do is connect those sensors with the sunroof motor and you can circulate fresh air through your car all day long.

Those are the options—vote away! I’m looking forward to see what the people choose.

In this contest, though, I want my ideas to win. The idea of investing in ordinary humans like me is so much cooler than banning smoking in bars. Vote on that idea, and you’re going to see a website go up that literally sells shares of me. It also lends itself to the interesting scenario in which a stockholder—say, a 20% owner—wants me to do something differently than I normally would. Do I have to concede? Do I consult the other stockholders? Or does my 51% majority supersede anyone else? As for the window shopping, it’s one of the easier ideas that I could do…the easier, the more likely I’ll actually do it.

On with the matchups. See sidebar. OR…drumroll please…go here and download my March of Mad Ideas Excel spreadsheet from box.net. Yes! I finally found a way to share any file online for free. Sweet sweetness.

I’ve put the sweet sixteen up on this blog. This is where the men (West Virginia) get separated from the boys (Duke). Vote to determine my future and the future of the known world.

I haven’t been voting unless there’s been a tie, and a few of the results have disappointed me. One that comes to mind lately is the call waiting button. The idea behind this is that if you’re on the phone, or if you just can’t answer your phone, you click one button, and the person on the other line hears a pre-recorded message that says something like, “Hey, I’ll call you back in a few minutes.” In doing that, you let the caller know that you’re almost ready to talk, but not quite. I don’t know about you, but there are so many times when I can’t take the call at that exact second, but I can take it a minute or two later. But if they’re calling from a land line and they’re leaving a message for me, when you call them back, you get a busy signal. So they you have to check your messages to see what’s up, which takes up precious minutes, and maybe you completely forget to call the person back. I especially could use this at work when I’m on my work phone and my cell phone rings.

Anyway, I may pursue that idea despite the votes. But it won’t be my primary goal. You’ll determine that. Vote by Thursday.

(Sidenote: I’m disappointed that somehow I didn’t finish the March of Mad Ideas before March Madness ended. I’m such a hypocrite.)

So the results are in for part 2 of the round of 32. Most of the matches were blowouts, with the one tie going to Microsoft Format Painter vs. Grid-System Back Scratching. I’m going to go with the latter, as Caroline scratched my back about 15 minutes ago, and it was awesome. Dead skin, begone!

The others are as follows:

A court reporter for your life over choosing where your taxes go
Operation Flaming Streets over Biblio-Thru
Reversible Baby Clothes over Pirates Class
Banning Smoking in Bars over Vending Machine Camo
TiVo Clips over Hiring Ken Jennings

Good picks overall…I’m interested to see where this takes us next. The final matchups for this round are on the right.

Today I’d like to discuss a misconception that adversely affects the lives of many people, especially young people. It’s a widely held belief that simply holds no truth to it. The belief?

That he who smelt it, dealt it.

The “smelt it, dealt it” (SIDI) principle has been around for centuries. It originated, as many things did, in 6th-century China. In that time and place, fireworks were used for the most prestigious of ceremonies, and if something went array, the firework operators were often beheaded. The first person to smell the exhaust of a launched firework was the operator himself, that is, the “dealer” of the firework. When blame needed to be placed, fingers were pointed at he who first smelt, and thus dealt, the off-kilter firework.

The phrase came to be associated with a self-induced odor only as recently as the Industrial Revolution in 19th-century England; specifically, London. To break up the monotony of 14-hour days at the factory, workers would congregate in the back lot to play cribbage, a popular card game of the time. To decide who would have the advantage of dealing first, the men would point their bottoms onto the same object and flatulate concurrently. They would then turn to smell the confluence of odor, and the last man standing would be the dealer. Thus, he who was able to smell it gained the privilege of dealing.

The phrase has evolved into a blame game on school buses and at Bible studies everywhere. The first child, he who is blessed and cursed with the best sense of smell, to detect a foul odor, is accused of being the originator (“dealer”) of said odor. He is ridiculed and shamed for alerting his peers to the dangerous gas when he should be rewarded and thanked. The smellers of this world are persecuted for their gift and are entangled in a web of deception geared toward preventing the true culprit from being revealed.

The lies stop here.

He who smelt it most likely did not, in fact, deal it. A 2007 study (Hermann et al.) showed that 14% of all smellers are innocent. Rather, he who dealt it, smelt it, and either remained silent (47%) or pointed the finger at he who smelt it (36%). 3% remained inconclusive.

Smellers of the world, unite! If we are guilty of one thing, it’s of not announcing our abilities before we are accused. Some suggestions for getting the word out:

• Whenever you walk into a room or enter a group discussion, loudly proclaim, “I have an excellent sense of smell, and will be informing all of you if I smell a fart.”
• Whenever you tell someone who is not aware of your nasal capacity that you have detected a flatuate, present a notarized statement that legally clears your name of any accusations.
• Wear a shirt that reads, “I smelt it, but he dealt it,” with an arrow pointing to the person next to you.

No person is innocent of claiming the smelt it, dealt it clause out of desperation or desire for closure. We must admit to ourselves that simply knowing who dealt it doesn’t make the situation any better. We suffer together. But every time we point the finger at the smeller, we discourage that person from alerting us to similar situations in the future. I fear the day that the smellers remain silent as everyone chokes in a haze of shame and flatuate.

Give the smellers a chance to thrive. A chance to save us all.

I really wish I could post the bracket for you, but I can’t figure out how to do that. Ah ha! I may have found a way, copying and pasting the bracket into Paint. Glorious Paint. Hopefully you can read the words if you click on the picture.

I’m going to post the first four matchups of this round. They’ll be up for a few days. I’m not going to include the descriptions in the body of the blog; if you missed them the first time around or can’t remember, just search within this blog for those words and you’ll see the proper info within seconds.

Keep in mind that your votes mean something! I’m going to actually do/make/produce/market the winning idea, especially if it’s one of mine. Your votes decide what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. Will I spend my time making sunroofs with rain sensors (or censors!), or will I waste away my hours trying to construct drive-thru confessionals in East St. Louis? You decide!

The answer, of course, was Facebook. After loading the application, it was revealed to me that a ton of people I knew had used that bracket as well, so I’m among “friends.”

Regardless, what’s the obsession with having your own bracket? And I’m a guilty party—in past years, if I’ve sensed that no one I knew was getting a bracket started, I’d start a bracket. That’s probably the same motivation behind most other brackets that get started.

I hearken back to freshman year in college, when a bunch of people on my floor filled out brackets (by hand, something unheard of nowadays) for our pool. There was something gritty, something real about that. But not necessarily better than online brackets—after all, it’s easy to cheat a little when you write in pencil on your bracket, and it leaves room for human error when compiling the results. But it felt like ours was the only pool in the world—ours was the one that mattered. Now I’m in six different pools, and the only unified theme is that I picked the same teams. I feel no sense of competition against any person or any group.

I think I prefer it the freshman floor way.

I wonder if you can simulate that online?

Today’s matchup results:

A Fridge in Your Pocket crushed Paperclip Dispensers. Not that the latter isn’t a good idea, but I have to say, the PocketFridge is very clever. And it doesn’t even need to be its own device—it could be an application developed for an existing PDA.

Google Analytics beat Video Game Controllers: Good call. Analytics is sweet.

New matchups (these are the final first-round games!):

“Clickable” ads and labels in real life: A PDA that you could point at a billboard, a commercial, or a stranger’s shirt, and would give you a list of online (and local) shopping results on the screen

Vs.

Shakeable phones/music players: The Sony Ericsson W910 lets you change the song playing by shaking the phone

Linking to comments on blogs: If you read an interesting comment by someone on a blog, you could click on their name and see all shareable comments and content that person has ever posted

Vs.

Passion phones: A phone that provides users with information about how a caller feels based on their voice patterns

TiVo Clothes over Smearable Ink: That’s a no brainer. TiVo clothes is brilliant.
Investing in Me over Amazon Kindle: A tough one. I’ve been drooling over the Kindle for the last four months, but I would rather people invest in me. So far, no takers.
Jott over Lumbar Belts: Good call. I still use Jott, and love it.
Drive-Thru Confessionals over Outsourced Keyword Input: Another tough one. I was the tie breaker, so I represented the Church (kind of?) by going with the confessionals.

New Matchups:

Pre-recorded call waiting response: If you see an incoming call, you press a button that plays a message to them saying that you’ll call them back in a few minutes so you don’t have to interrupt your current conversation (unless you want to)

Vs.

RSS Forward: A service that e-mails blogs to you as they’re posted

Spray bottles that work vertically and horizontally: A simple change in design would allow you to spray countertops as well as mirrors

Vs.

Taxes on plastic grocery bags: China and Ireland are doing it, and canvas bags are now completely socially acceptable there. This should be done in America too.

Kindle 2.0: Updates: touchscreen, the device will read the book outloud to you, backlight, and www forum connectivity

Vs.

AI in new Star Wars video game: Using new AI and physics engines, storm troopers will actually act intelligently and have individualistic traits

An online equivalent to window shopping: A browser that presents shopping options to you in the same visual format as window shopping in a real-life mall

Vs.

zzzPhone: A phone that lets you choose exactly which features you want on it

Lumbar belts: Using large women’s belts for lower back support

Vs.

Jott: Service that transcribes voicemails you leave for yourself and e-mails them to you

Drive-thru confessionals: So you can be sinless on the road and on the run

Vs.

Outsourcing the decoding of internet keywords: To buy huge numbers of popular concert tickets, a guy set up a program that outsources the decoding of garbled keywords to India

A fridge in your pocket: A refrigerator that knows its contents from radio transmitters in the labels and sends the current list to your PDA when you’re at the grocery store

Vs.

Paperclip dispensers: Such a simple tool, but it functions without fail every time
Video game controllers that attach to your hands and arms: So you can actually throw a punch instead of clicking the A button twice

Vs.

Google Analytics: Free tool that gives you detailed information about who is visiting your web site or blog

(Winners from last week were vending machine camo, banning smoking in bars, hiring Ken Jennings for trivia nights, and TiVo Clips.)