Blog of Josh Hall

Do binoculars let people with great vision see further than people with poor vision?  I guess it’s more a question of how they work.  When you adjust them, are you sacrificing distance for quality?  Do our eyes focus on the image way off in the distance, or an image that is contained within the binoculars?

Why haven’t we found a better / easier / more efficient way to do laundry yet? Why do we need 2 devices to complete 1 process? At the very least, can’t we have a 3rd device that moves the laundry from the washer to the dryer automatically? I mean, there isn’t even the option of [...]

I like how pandora and last.fm recommend music based on the genre and bands you’re listening too, but I’m envisioning a site based on literal connections that bands have.  I think the interface could very pretty and fun.  It could be like TheyRule.net.  Think a colored red circle with "Foo Fighters" written in the middle.  clicking on [...]

Are there more people alive right now then people that have ever died?  What’s your first thought?  I want to say that there are more dead people, but I’m not sure how to figure this out, or the best possible way to make an educated guess. According to census.gov, there are 6,812,935,148 people alive today.  So [...]

So Kallie and I need about 1.2 cars.  I walk to work and most places we go together.  Every once in a while though, we need to go separate ways. I’m envisioning a car that can break in half basically.  I think there are people like us that need more than 1 car sometimes.  There would also [...]

I had an idea for a website with community driven content.  Someone would post a rumor or something unconfirmed and people would either simply "confirm it" or add evidence and such to support or invalidate the rumor.  I’d compare it to a cross with snopes.com and mythbusters.  You could have different user rankings for how much they’ve contributed [...]

Watching J’aime’s kids the other day, gave me an idea.  I call it KidCom.  It’s a device, much like a watch, that your kids wear. In it’s simplest form, it just has the time on it and you can set alarms on it that say things like "1 hours before Daddy gets home", or "it’s [...]

When I see abandoned cars along the road or in vacant lots, or even really rusty old heavy machinery and such, I want to steal them.  I had always thought it’d be fun to have a flatbed truck, drive up to these vehicles, and just take them.  Take them to the recycling center for some extra [...]

Had this idea on our honeymoon to chichen itza.  You used to be able to climb up the pyramids, but since 2005, after someone fell down them and died, they have been closed off.  I wanted nothing more that day to go up those steps.  There’s even a doorway at the foot of the pyramid [...]

With all the hoopla around getting a "good" email address, to the point where you want to make sure you have a good one for resumes, I wonder what we’re going to go in…03?  40? 50?  years when all the owners of current email addresses die.  I know Yahoo will deactivate your account after 90 days or [...]