Hey Science Persons!
Wanna make some cash? C’mere…
This morning — for no apparent reason* — I had the following thought;
“If eating large meals slows my metabolism, making me fat - and eating smaller, more frequent meals with similar caloric value speeds-up my metabolism making me LESS fat… I wonder if it’s the same with lizards, birds, or ants? Is it possible there’s a cross-species gene that regulates body-fat percentage based on consumption frequency and mass? We should isolate that baby and see if there are any inhibition triggers I can put in my cappuccino or you know, future offspring.”
Yesterday during a similar neurological spasm I found myself thinking;
“I wonder if there’s a higher level of neuro-diversity in the Bay Area, due to a century of tech, resulting in migratory patterns selective for specific neurological phenotypes, who collectively made offensive amounts of money and subsequently, like, had a bunch of babies and stuff?”
Quora (whilst excellent) didn’t really help. Cinch currently only does ‘home-related questions.’ So what do you do? Not much, right?
Here’s the thing though… I’d probably pay… a good $10 to know the answers to each of those questions… not really worth the time for a team of scientists to be interested… but with services like Science Exchange, things start to get interesting if I can find a few hundred friends all wanting to answer that same question… what happens when Kickstarter meets Quora?
My guess is to lock folks like Dan Knox, Jai Ranganathan and maybe an Eliot Durbin type in the same room for few hours with a whiteboard and some crack orapotcoffeewhatever… until they walk out with a collective-curiosity-driven, science-question-answering, threshold-triggered-payments’ing, Put-Food-On-The-Table-for-PHD-Families’ing product, where I can scroll through and donate $X toward the questions I want answered and get back to more important things, safe in the knowledge that if there’s enough like-minded folk, someone will get onto it, taking a small, pre-approved fee from my credit card in return.
A final note — If, like me, you’d like this service to exist but are too lazy* to build it yourselves — why not recommend this post / share it with likely entrepreneurial types? At the very least, it might start some dialogue — and at best we get to, you know, figure out the universe and stuff whilst making sure our smart people can pay for their fancy gadgets they seem to be so fond of. Hmm?
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