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new ideas.
author Robert McIntyre <rlm@mit.edu>
date Thu, 26 Feb 2015 17:56:46 -0800
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95 <div class="header">
96 <h1><em>aurellem</em>.org</h1>
97 </div>
98
99
100 <h1 class="title">Ideas</h1>
101 <p>
102 This is a list of all the ideas I've had that I felt like writing down
103 for the past ~ 8 years. Some of them could be practical inventions and
104 are "just" waiting the that 95% perspiration to bring them to
105 fruition, some are ideas for science fiction, and some are simple
106 observations. Some are really only for my own personal notes and are
107 not meant to be comprehensible. They are arranged roughly in reverse
108 chronological order, with the most recent ideas at the top of the
109 list. The ones at the bottom of the list are heavily influenced by my
110 time at MIT.
111 </p>
112 <p>
113 If you find some of these interesting and would like to collaborate on
114 them with me or discuss them in more detail, I'd love to hear from
115 you. You can email me at <a href="mailto:ideas@aurellem.org">ideas@aurellem.org</a>.
116 </p>
117 <p>
118 If you want to use one of these ideas as your own and run with it,
119 please feel free. I'd love
120 to <a href="mailto:ideas@aurellem.org">hear about it</a> if you do.
121 </p>
122 <blockquote>
123
124 <p>There's no end to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care about
125 getting credit.
126 </p>
127 </blockquote>
128
129 <hr/>
130
131 <div class="ideas">
132 <div class="project"><h2>the great computing slow-down</h2><div class="description">In general, our computers are
133 getting faster and faster. However, eventually our brains will be
134 made of the same stuff our computers are made of! This has very
135 interesting consequences &ndash; I can add 2+2 and get four in about a
136 second. Since my neurons actually work at around 10-60 hertz in
137 parallel, this means that it takes me around 10-30 operations to
138 do this addition. That's actually not bad in terms of computing
139 time. If my neurons were as fast as the latest transitors, then
140 most calculators would be SLOWER than me at adding numbers. Only
141 the newest, most optimized calculators would be faster, and then
142 only about 10 times faster! This means that once we begin to
143 think at the speed of our technology, that technology will
144 suddenly seem pitifully slow in comparison to how it seems
145 now. And no amount of technical progress will remedy it, because
146 that same progress will also make us all think faster. We'll
147 either have to settle with living in "slow time" to do some
148 computations, or learn to make smarter hardware with special
149 optimizations. But this is actually really hard, because we'll be
150 working with machines that will appear to us about as fast as
151 MECHANICAL computers. So, in the future, all the cool parties
152 will be in cyperspace at vastly accelerated speeds compared to
153 how we exist now. But at these parties, the computers will SUCK!
154 Of course, this is one of the few things that can save us from AI
155 risk, because those AI's won't seem so scary when the're build
156 out of rickety mechanical parts form our perspective.
157
158 </div></div>
159 <div class="project"><h2>unitary reverse evolution of chaos+minds</h2><div class="description">Chaotic systems diverge
160 exponentially in state space. Do you get anything interesting
161 when part of the physical system associated with the chaotic
162 system is a object that performs some sort of computation? Is it
163 possible for the computational system to play a
164 percision-enabling role in determining the final/initial
165 conditions of the chaotic system, just by tracing out thoughts in
166 its decision paths? This is probably too vague of an idea right
167 now, I just wanted to write it down.
168
169 </div></div>
170 <div class="project"><h2>microwave time</h2><div class="description">the cooking time you enter on most microwaves is
171 insane. It's expressed in what I call a "hybrid base", a
172 combination of base 10 and base 60. You can get absurd things
173 like 100 &lt; 61, and 120 == 80! I wonder if these hybrid base
174 systems could be very useful for some purposes!
175
176 </div></div>
177 <div class="project"><h2>three-eyes</h2><div class="description">if you had three eyes, would you still draw cubes like
178 we currently draw them? Or would all 2D-representations of 3D
179 space always look hopelessly fake?
180
181 </div></div>
182 <div class="project"><h2>visual taste/smell assay</h2><div class="description">get a grid of bacteria, each expressing
183 a human taste/smell receptor linked to some sort of fluorscent
184 activity or ion pump. Use a camera / electrical grid to transduce
185 the smell / taste signal into bits!
186
187 </div></div>
188 <div class="project"><h2>carabiner mushroom lock</h2><div class="description">you can take a trapazodial carabiner and
189 make it so that a chain link is caught between the wide end of
190 the carabiner and another chain attached to the carabiner.
191
192 </div></div>
193 <div class="project"><h2>children's tool shop</h2><div class="description">I think that kids should be provided with
194 tool shops &ndash; these would be nice sheds with a good collection of
195 tools to do various things &ndash; circuit components and soldering
196 irons, wires, a small lathe, drill press, belt sander, a
197 centrifuge, microscope, and telescope, etc. The idea is that the
198 kid can now think, "I could use X to do this thing that I'm
199 thinking about" &ndash; the building becomes an extension of the kid's
200 body &amp; mind.
201
202 </div></div>
203 <div class="project"><h2>fluid display</h2><div class="description">like the previous idea about matching refractances
204 between glass and liquid, except you make a lot of
205 switchable glass tubes in various patterns in the
206 glass, and actively pump colored liquid through the
207 tubes (the tubes have glass-like fluid in them by
208 default.) The result is that you can cause the
209 tubes to appear and dissappear, and vary their
210 colors as well!
211
212 </div></div>
213 <div class="project"><h2>immunoincompatibility</h2><div class="description">take the human genome, and refactor it so
214 that it doesn't use a particular codon at all. Then remove the
215 support from our ribosomes for that codon. What does this do for
216 us? It makes us immune to almost all viruses!
217
218 </div></div>
219 <div class="project"><h2>life cycle</h2><div class="description">it's called a cycle, right? So, the thing that repeats
220 itself over and over, right? Not much of a cycle if
221 you don't come back after you die, if you ask me!
222
223 </div></div>
224 <div class="project"><h2>car with no blind spots</h2><div class="description">use some cameras in the back of the car
225 to augment the rear-view mirror so that you never have to turn
226 around in order to lane change.
227
228 </div></div>
229 <div class="project"><h2>partial cell death</h2><div class="description">you freeze a set of cells using some cryo
230 protocol and 60% survive. How can this be explained? It seems to
231 me that if the cells are the same, and the conditions
232 homogoneous, then all the cells should either die or
233 live. However, suppose that there is a metabolic cycle that needs
234 to be in a certain phase for the cell to survive. If the cells
235 are asynchronous, then you might end up with some cells dying
236 because there were in the wrong part of their cycle. This implies
237 that you might be able to cryoprotect cells by causing them to
238 enter a certain metabolic mode before freezing.
239
240 </div></div>
241 <div class="project"><h2>cryonics color appeal</h2><div class="description">perfusate used by cryonics companies should
242 have red food coloring in it. It's just a nice touch so that the
243 cryonics patient looks more life-like than with clear CPAs, and
244 hopefully might get treated with more respect.
245
246 </div></div>
247 <div class="project"><h2>paramagnetic CPA</h2><div class="description">you take a CPA that can be influenced by
248 magnetic fields so that its degrees of freedom are limited. Then,
249 you release the field, instantaly increasing the size of the
250 state space of the system and dramatically decreasing the
251 temperature enough to plunge the system past homogenous
252 nucleation temperature and directly to the glass transition
253 temperature, creating a doubly unstable glass at much lower CPA
254 concentrations than possible at conventional CPA concentrations.
255
256 </div></div>
257 <div class="project"><h2>room temp noodles</h2><div class="description">how does the physics of cooking noodles work?
258 Could you use a vacuum instead of heat to force water into the
259 noodle?
260
261 </div></div>
262 <div class="project"><h2>personal carbon offset</h2><div class="description">feel bad about contribuiting to global
263 warming by using electricity / driving a car? Forget trying to
264 "conserve" or "minimize your carbon footprint". Follow the
265 Platinum rule &ndash; make the world BETTER off than you found it!
266 This would be a small, self contained system that sucks C02 out
267 of the air. It uses electricity, but it's so efficient at
268 removing CO2 that it more than offsets the CO2 produced by even a
269 coal plant to produce that electricity. This way, you can still
270 drive even a gas guzzler, but have a net negative carbon
271 footprint! Maybe something cool could be done with the carbon as
272 well. Use as much electricity as you want, but negate the damage
273 to the enviroment with more technology.
274
275 </div></div>
276 <div class="project"><h2>undoing spermogenesis</h2><div class="description">with enough sperm, you can derive the
277 donor's entire genome. You gain more confidence in the alleles
278 for a particular gene the more sperm you have. Each additional
279 sperm gives you the same sort of information you'd get flipping a
280 coin and trying to decide whether the coin is H/T of H/H. Is
281 there enough sperm in the the average load for you to be as
282 confident as mitosis?
283
284 </div></div>
285 <div class="project"><h2>mars life</h2><div class="description">we could engineer life that could survive on mars
286 (probably some non-vascular photosynthetic
287 poikilohydric creature like a lichen) by taking an
288 extremophile from Antarctica and evolving it in
289 increasingly Martian conditions. This could be an easy
290 start to a terraforming process.
291
292 </div></div>
293 <div class="project"><h2>problem with Aubrey de Grey's ideas</h2><div class="description">Aubrey de Grey says that we
294 might be able to live forever by continually repairing our bodies
295 at the cellular level &ndash; he details 7 different mechanisms of
296 damage and says that if all of them are dealt with <i>together</i>
297 that it would stop aging. (You can't miss even one because
298 they're all fatal.) However, it doesn't take into account that
299 we are also beings of information and that there is a very real
300 software component to our existence. Even if our biological
301 chassies can be maintained forever, I think it is unlikely that
302 our minds will operate well far outside of the design constraints
303 that we've evolved to handle. Say I programmed a webserver with
304 the express goal of it being able to serve webpages for month on
305 some stock server. I'll do fairly rigorous testing to make sure
306 that it can handle the expected load then then some. Now say that
307 you want to keep a particular instance of this webserver running
308 indefinitely. (The program instance is like your mind and the
309 computer it's running on is like your body). You might very well
310 be able to keep the physical computer infrastructure running for
311 forever by replacing hard drives / ram / CPUs, etc. However,
312 since I designed the webserver to work for a month, it probably
313 has memory leaks, rare stochastic bugs, or other built in limits
314 / constraints (think log files or some date rollover shenanigans)
315 that will ultimately kill the webserver even with eternally
316 perfect hardware. Do you really expect that a webserver
317 engineered to work for 1 month will run for 10 years without
318 catastrophically crashing? Not even Apache can do this! In fact,
319 if I put in the extreme effort to make it that robust, I've
320 wasted time that I could have spent on other projects by pursuing
321 an unnecessary engineering goal. Likewise, human minds have only
322 ever run for at most 122 years before they are destroyed due to
323 hardware degradation. Fixing the hardware doesn't change any
324 software bugs that are almost certainly present in the human
325 mind. Think of all the pathological things that can go wrong with
326 a webserver, multiply it by a million, and that likely how
327 evolution has designed our minds. For example, consider memory :
328 why should you expect that we have evolved the ability to
329 coherently organize memories past say 150 years? There's been
330 absolutely no selective pressure for this ability, so you can bet
331 that if there's any fitness to be gained from not having
332 unlimited memory potential (such as better metabolic efficiency),
333 we have it! You might think that maybe we would just forget
334 things the same way that we sort of forget things that happen
335 earlier in our lives, but complicated information processing
336 systems don't have to fail gracefully when they're pushed far
337 past their design constraints. A 150 year old person is just as
338 likely to suffer a catastrophic psychosis due to software
339 limitations associated with memory as he is to do something with
340 all those memories we might consider reasonable. More likely, in
341 fact, since there are so very many ways for a complicated
342 software system to break and so few ways for it to run
343 successfully. Therefore, I think Aubrey de Grey's "hardware-only"
344 approach is missing a very important component of longevity
345 science, and any successful effort to make people live orders of
346 magnitude longer than they do naturally will need to deal with
347 people's software as well as their hardware.
348
349 </div></div>
350 <div class="project"><h2>validating neurocryopreservation</h2><div class="description">Problem : you want to test
351 whether a brain is functionally preserved through vitrification,
352 but you don't want to figure out how to preserve all the other
353 organs in the animal. It might be possible to keep the rest of
354 the body at almost 0C and vitrify just the head for only a few
355 minutes. Induce hypothermia, then separate out the head's blood
356 supply from the rest of the body, then just cryoptotect and
357 vitrify the head. Might need some sort of thermal guard to keep
358 the outer head / neck from becoming too cold. You leave the
359 spinal cord intact! Then you devitrify to 0C, remove
360 cryoprotectant, and then reattach the blood supply. You can
361 determine brain preservation using behavioral assays!
362
363 </div></div>
364 <div class="project"><h2>freezing water purifier</h2><div class="description">you slowly freeze water, but also run
365 liquid water over the frozen mass. This takes away basically all
366 impurities and creates "washed ice" then you melt the ice. Maybe
367 you could re-use the heat from creating the ice to melt the ice?
368
369 </div></div>
370 <div class="project"><h2>ultra strength</h2><div class="description">allow a person to visualize their muscle
371 recruitment patterns. Give them adrenaline and let
372 them feel what it's like to have the normal limits
373 removed. See if they can replicate the effects.
374
375 </div></div>
376 <div class="project"><h2>phone names</h2><div class="description">make a PX record for domain names that's like the MX
377 record, except that it is a phone number instead of
378 an IP address. That way, you can use the domain name
379 registration system to provide names for phone
380 numbers. Then, as long as you control the domain, you
381 can point people to your current phone number by
382 updating that record.
383
384 </div></div>
385 <div class="project"><h2>edible flowers</h2><div class="description">Edible white flowers that you put in a colored
386 solution with flavor. When the flower turns the
387 right color, it is also flavored and ready to eat!
388
389 </div></div>
390 <div class="project"><h2>suicide cryonics</h2><div class="description">according to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06suicide-t.html">this</a>, people who commit impulsive
391 suicides have a newfound sense of the importance of life. Perhaps
392 they are good cryonics targets.
393
394 </div></div>
395 <div class="project"><h2>lead bone</h2><div class="description">Could you fill in all the empty spaces in a bone with
396 lead? Might be cool.
397
398 </div></div>
399 <div class="project"><h2>the quest for life </h2><div class="description">Every stupid story has the "immortal who
400 wants to become mortal" or some other such idea. I want to story
401 where the protagonist loses their immortality and feels <i>angry</i>
402 and ashamed about losing something that's so absolutely crucial
403 to their identity. A reverse of "death makes life worth living",
404 they feel that living forever is what makes life worth
405 living. Now they've "lost their sunrise" or their "connection to
406 the timeless universe" or something. So they go on a quest to get
407 it back, learning about themselves along the way, and regaining
408 the precious thing they lost in the beginning.
409
410 </div></div>
411 <div class="project"><h2>world-map</h2><div class="description">take a small table and paint the continents in
412 toothpaste on the table. Make a slightly raised barrier
413 around the table. Slowly pour water onto the table, and
414 it will form the oceans!
415
416 </div></div>
417 <div class="project"><h2>stage magic rituals</h2><div class="description">rituals should incorporate elements of stage
418 magic. Foe example in Teller's tempest, they have a scene where
419 they levitate a crown in front of someone, then put it on his
420 head. They also have a wedding ceremony where they levitated the
421 bride as well. Actual weddings and other ceremonies should
422 incorporate stage magic as an enhancement.
423
424 </div></div>
425 <div class="project"><h2>isotope time dilation</h2><div class="description">use a cyclotron to speed up rare isotopes
426 developed in nuclear fusion experiments. The relativistic time
427 dilation will stop the isotopes from decaying, and allow time to
428 study them. This is based on radioactive isotopes that fall
429 through the earth's atmosphere that take hundreds of times
430 longer to decay than normal.
431
432 </div></div>
433 <div class="project"><h2>marsupial stimulation</h2><div class="description">You take a freshly pouched marsupial baby,
434 and show it videos and other interactive things while it matures
435 in the pouch. What mental effects would this have?
436
437 </div></div>
438 <div class="project"><h2>dynamic re-keying</h2><div class="description">Some older ways of tuning instruments sound
439 better, but we use the even-tempered scale today because it makes
440 it easier to switch keys. With electronic music, why not make
441 key-annotations and dynamically re-tune the piece to sound good
442 in the current key? Could be done as a midi+annotation -&gt; midi
443 compiler for experimentation.
444
445 </div></div>
446 <div class="project"><h2>death always implies damage</h2><div class="description">is is possible for a corpse to differ
447 from a living person only in the fact that one is dead and the
448 other is alive? NO! A corpse must always have some sort of
449 molecular damage which causes the loss of function!
450
451 </div></div>
452 <div class="project"><h2>inner eye</h2><div class="description">Surgically install a bunch of tiny cameras inside a
453 person. Then, you can activate them all and get a
454 picture of your internal organs for diagnostic
455 purposes.
456
457 </div></div>
458 <div class="project"><h2>chaos rails</h2><div class="description">should make a visualization of the homoclinic tangle,
459 it's truly beautiful.
460
461 </div></div>
462 <div class="project"><h2>context gobbler</h2><div class="description">this would be in "inside-out macro" that takes
463 the context (like you use for things like error, continuations,
464 and friends) and transforms it to something else. Maybe useful?
465
466 </div></div>
467 <div class="project"><h2>cryonics middle ages</h2><div class="description">some people say that cryonics is an
468 experiment and that it is foolish to wait until we have revived a
469 human. There is a middle ground where the procedure has a dismal
470 success rate on humans, say 1 in 20, so that you'd be a fool to
471 try revival. Nonetheless, this very risky procedure could be the
472 legal proof of concept needed to create a new class of life
473 between "living" and "dead": "stasis".
474
475 </div></div>
476 <div class="project"><h2>philosophy of the mirror</h2><div class="description">neat thought experiment &ndash; if you take a
477 mirror of someone by actually reversing a person's chirality
478 molecule by molecule, then will the only be able to read mirror
479 writing? The answer is yes, by analogy to a purely mechanical
480 scan-tron device. This is one of the only interesting transforms I
481 know that can take a human brain and change it in subtle,
482 non-destructive ways. It's also an argument against dualism.
483
484 </div></div>
485 <div class="project"><h2>biosphere in a bottle</h2><div class="description">There are around 15 million species. 15
486 million stem cells will fill only a tiny size, far less than a cubic
487 inch. Preserve a single cell from every species on earth in this
488 small space, and you will have a record of our current biosphere
489 that can be protected. "Hold the genetic data of all species in
490 your hand!"
491
492 </div></div>
493 <div class="project"><h2>chaos lock</h2><div class="description">The "arrow of time" points in the direction of
494 increasing entropy. The time evolution of chaotic
495 systems depend exquisitely on their initial state. If
496 you take a measurement of a chaotic system at any
497 given point of time, you can evolve that system
498 backwards or forwards based on your measurement. So
499 let's say you start the chaotic system in a VERY low
500 entropy state, then let it run for a while, then take
501 a measurement with some uncertainty. Your
502 measurement is pretty good, but obviously not
503 PERFECT. If you evolve the chaotic system back in
504 time, then you will see that you don't really reach
505 a state with low entropy an hour before (the entropy
506 is easy to measure with surrogates like alignment,
507 etc). So use this technique to SEARCH for a more
508 accurate measurement! This potentially can give you
509 many more orders of magnitude than you could get alone
510 just using an instrument. Sometimes it will give you
511 bad results, the the odds of it doing that are
512 infinitesimal, and you can just measure a couple of
513 times.
514
515 </div></div>
516 <div class="project"><h2>cryo-evolution</h2><div class="description">perhaps there would be a way to rapidly evolve a
517 symbiotic bacterial organism that could protect
518 human tissues from freezing damage.
519
520 </div></div>
521 <div class="project"><h2>suicide parasite</h2><div class="description">sometimes, people kill themselves for no good
522 reason. We often explain this with things like "hidden
523 depression" or we say that they had something like chronic jaw or
524 back pain. I think that smells of rationalization. I don't buy
525 it. I propose that in many suicide cases there is a disease that
526 causes the suicidal behavior. We already know that certain
527 parasites have mind-bending properties in other animals, even
528 mammals like mice. It's not much of a stretch to imagine a
529 parasite that causes suicides in humans. Some problems:
530
531 <dl><dt>What does the suicide parasite get out of it?</dt>
532 <dd>This might be answered by the whole thing being a glitch caused by cross-species contamination. Toxoplasma works this way.
533 </dd>
534 <dt>What predictions does a disease model make</dt><dd>suicide should
535 be more common among people who share a contagion
536 vector. There should be suicides that don't make any
537 sense : people who weren't really depressed, who had no
538 reason to kill themselves. People who have killed themselves
539 should have a higher incidence of some unknown parasite in
540 their brains.
541
542 </dd>
543 </dl>
544 </div>
545
546 </div></div>
547 <div class="project"><h2>domestic insects</h2><div class="description">People should eat more bugs because they're much
548 more efficient, so why not do some major domestication research
549 to make very appealing bugs? Beetles, in particular, seem to be
550 excellent targets for domestication because they have extreme
551 levels of genetic malleability.
552
553 </div></div>
554 <div class="project"><h2>birth-clones</h2><div class="description">What if each person was intentionally split at birth
555 into a normal embryo and a few "backup" cells which
556 is then frozen. The backup cells are created just
557 the same way as natural identical twins. The backups
558 can be used to regenerate organs. etc. Also, it
559 would be a good sci fi concept, because you could
560 have a culture where people reward people who were
561 especially awesome are "reborn" from their
562 backups. Imagine having a young Bach every
563 generation, etc.
564
565 </div></div>
566 <div class="project"><h2>pronunciation guide</h2><div class="description">a simple webpage where you type in a word and
567 it returns a simple, English sentence describing exactly how to
568 pronounce the word. For people who don't want to learn IPA.
569
570 </div></div>
571 <div class="project"><h2>cortex-search</h2><div class="description">use the repertoire of actions learned to limit the
572 search space of possible actions.
573
574 </div></div>
575 <div class="project"><h2>learning to teleport</h2><div class="description">scifi idea, this is a story about a person
576 who is struggling with his/her society's ideas about
577 teleportation. It's considered a fundamental part of being a
578 member of that society (after all, the difference between animals
579 and humans is that humans are creatures of pure information while
580 animals are burdened with base matter, "that's how you travel the
581 stars, etc") Humans are born normally, grow up, and then
582 eventually transcend via destructive upload. Analogies to jumping
583 off a diving board into a pool (which I simply <i>could not do</i> for
584 a long time), etc.
585
586 </div></div>
587 <div class="project"><h2>no-float-ice</h2><div class="description">cup that has cross beams at the bottom where ice
588 forms. Then when you drink liquid from the glass,
589 the ice stays at the bottom and doesn't hit your
590 lips. For bars and fancy things.
591
592 </div></div>
593 <div class="project"><h2>bitcoins for immigrants</h2><div class="description">A common case with Mexican immigrants
594 (illegal or not) is that they want to send money they've earned
595 in the US back to their families in Mexico. They currently do this
596 through things like Money Gram or Western Union, and they get
597 fleeced in the process with fees. Bitcoin could greatly reduce
598 the cost of sending money from America to Mexico, but I don't
599 believe that it's currently used for that among Mexican
600 immigrants currently due to lack of knowledge. I bet you could
601 set up physical locations like those obnoxious Western Union huts
602 in places like Texas, Arizona, etc, and greatly undercut
603 them. Or, perhaps some educational seminars about bitcoin might
604 be in order. There's some money to be made there because there is
605 great demand, and it's a good thing to boot!
606
607 </div></div>
608 <div class="project"><h2>reverse eye-tracking</h2><div class="description">A painting that is actually a digital screen
609 with a camera. It records people's eye tracks permanently. It's
610 "artistic" because paintings are normally these things that you
611 look at without changing, but this one is changed the second you
612 look at it, recording where <i>you</i> looked forever for others to
613 see. Make it be a painting of a woman and see the trolling as the
614 breasts and groin area light up with interest from all the males
615 passing by.
616
617 </div></div>
618 <div class="project"><h2>smart toilets</h2><div class="description">Instead of using indirect measures like infrared
619 detectors of the presence of a person, use computer
620 vision to directly measure whether the toilet needs
621 to be flushed. I think a lot of things will end up
622 going this way as we get better computer vision.
623
624 </div></div>
625 <div class="project"><h2>validate chemopreservation</h2><div class="description">chemopreservation is difficult to
626 validate because it destroys the functionality of a brain, and
627 brain simulation will take a long time to mature as a
628 technology. However, one very powerful way to validate
629 chemopreservation would be to have a person/animal learn
630 something with high complexity such as a number or the solution
631 to a maze, or a flashbulb memory. Then you preserve their brain
632 chemically, slice it up, and read <i>that specific memory</i> from the
633 detailed brain scan. Much more difficult, but much more doable.
634
635 </div></div>
636 <div class="project"><h2>candy screw</h2><div class="description">edible candy screw with candy nuts that you can screw
637 as well.
638
639 </div></div>
640 <div class="project"><h2>better bibliography</h2><div class="description">when writing a thesis or paper, have the
641 bibliography not just be an opaque list of resources, but have it
642 be a list of <i>summaries</i> and <i>qualities</i> that each paper has in
643 the context of the paper being written. When examining a
644 bibliography, I want to know if reading the papers in the
645 bibliography are worth my time, and I also am probably also
646 interested in exactly the things that are being discussed in the
647 paper I'm reading. The bibliography is the perfect place to
648 provide information about the referenced papers from the
649 author's perspective. I will use this biographic form in my own
650 thesis.
651
652 </div></div>
653 <div class="project"><h2>digital inter-library loan</h2><div class="description">libraries at universities already do
654 inter-library loans for books, so why not do the same for access
655 to stupid paywalled digital papers? All the universities could
656 allow access to articles for registered students to all the files
657 available through any participating university. This could be
658 achieved by sending requests through proxies at participating
659 universities. Each university would decide who at the university
660 can access the proxy network. Access to the proxy network could
661 be made easy using something like <a href="http://libx.org/">http://libx.org/</a>.
662
663 </div></div>
664 <div class="project"><h2>chess visual</h2><div class="description">to show the vast size of the game trees considered
665 by computers, show two people playing chess in a
666 void. They are floating in space, and there is a
667 simple chess board between them. Then, as they play,
668 the game tree's they are considering are drawn
669 behind him. The root of the tree starts centered in
670 their heads or whatever they use to think, and the
671 tree grows out from behind, never crossing the
672 dividing plane between the two players. Each
673 player's tree is a different color. As they grow,
674 there are animations for pruning, etc. Eventually,
675 they look like the hemispheres of a brain, wings,
676 etc. A human's tree might occasionally have a long
677 chain, while the computer tree would be more
678 uniform. You could compare deep blue and a modern
679 laptop. Use actual data when fighting two computers!
680
681 </div></div>
682 <div class="project"><h2>time verification</h2><div class="description">some standard way to verify that some piece of
683 data was recorded at a specific time. Might involve a time
684 server, a key for each time period, something like that.
685
686 </div></div>
687 <div class="project"><h2>tamper proof gold bars</h2><div class="description"><a href="http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/gold-plated-tungsten-alloy-bar.html">this site</a> offers gold plated tungsten bars
688 as "novelty" items. One reason to prefer coins is because they
689 are much harder to counterfeit because there is less surface area
690 to mass ratio. However, gold bars are still a great design
691 because they can hold a lot of value in a small space. A gold bar
692 could be given the same protections (and more) that gold coins
693 have to offer by changing it into a "gold book", which would have
694 hundreds of "pages" of gold bound together. This could be
695 implemented with multiple steel rods going through the book which
696 can be removed, or some more classier mechanism for holding the
697 pages. The point is that the bar can be EASILY subdivided (and
698 people would perform this test before buying), thus guaranteeing
699 it's authenticity.
700
701 </div></div>
702 <div class="project"><h2>aurellem shirt</h2><div class="description">I should make an aurellem star symbol tee-shirt.
703
704 </div></div>
705 <div class="project"><h2>touch vision</h2><div class="description">inspired by GelSight, I want to reexamine cortex and
706 see if I could implement touch as a very low range
707 form of vision.
708
709 </div></div>
710 <div class="project"><h2>high school science</h2><div class="description">this is a lesson in scientific ethics. The
711 goal is to calculate <i>g</i>, the local gravitational
712 acceleration. The students are told that the textbook says it's
713 <i>exactly</i> 9.81 before they start the experiment. See how they
714 doctor their results to get closer to the textbook value. It's
715 neat because for any given school, <i>g</i> is probably <b>not</b> exactly
716 equal to 9.81, because that is just an average!
717
718 </div></div>
719 <div class="project"><h2>opencourseware subtitles</h2><div class="description">there are ladies who type up lectures
720 while they are being given. These recordings should be kept and
721 given to OCW for subtitles. If the timestamps of keys are
722 recorded, then it is easy to make subtitles.
723
724 </div></div>
725 <div class="project"><h2>screen locking timing</h2><div class="description">you use your computer camera to see if you
726 are sitting in front of the computer. If you are, then the screen
727 will never lock. If you are, then the screen will lock with a
728 30-40 second timeout. It's an extension of using inactivity to
729 initiate the countdown, just with more information.
730
731 </div></div>
732 <div class="project"><h2>mirror toilet</h2><div class="description">a toilet with a square basin made or mirror instead
733 or porcelain. That way, you can see how good of a
734 wipe job you have done / watch how your excretion
735 system works.
736
737 </div></div>
738 <div class="project"><h2>test dummies</h2><div class="description">why don't we clone anencephalic humans and use then to
739 test <i>in vivo</i> human organ systems and drugs? It
740 would be ethical as long as there are women who are
741 willing to host the clones, and it would be a
742 tremendous resource for studying the human body. I
743 see nothing wrong with it morally, since no one is
744 suffering, and it stands to save many lives throughout
745 more advanced technology.
746
747 </div></div>
748 <div class="project"><h2>X-ray telepresence</h2><div class="description">given that a doctor is operating on a patient
749 via telepresence, one cool things you can do is shine X-rays into
750 the patient to view the insides during real time. If the system
751 was coupled with a Bayesian model of the layout of the structure,
752 and the x-rays were only fired whenever the uncertainty of the
753 model reached a certain threshold, then the radiation damage
754 and surgery risk could be minimized.
755
756 </div></div>
757 <div class="project"><h2>superfluid vascular system</h2><div class="description">I wonder what would happen if you
758 replaced the blood in a human with a superfluid. What would the
759 physical dynamics be? Would the superfluid flow through the
760 vasculature, or would it ignore it and travel through the cells,
761 or something else entirely. Since superfluids need to be cold to
762 retain their superfluidity, how would the dynamics change during
763 perfusion of a superfluid, where the fluid gains and looses
764 superfluidity as it goes deeper into the body and is cooled by
765 superfluid from upstream. In summary there are two things to
766 simulate 1.) replace all blood in human with superfluid
767 instantly. 2.) perfuse superfluid into human.
768
769 </div></div>
770 <div class="project"><h2>projective guessing</h2><div class="description">I think that we read and see things by
771 making a really good guess about what we're expecting to see,
772 and then searching for our guess in what we see. If it really
773 doesn't match, then we start to make more guesses / analyze the
774 image from first principles, but most stuff is projective
775 guessing.
776
777 </div></div>
778 <div class="project"><h2>Intestinal flora maintenance</h2><div class="description">why not inoculate babies at birth
779 with "ideal" gut flora instead of whatever bullshit they
780 naturally get, thus giving them optimal digestive/nutrient
781 extraction capabilities. Might also be able to make their farts
782 not stink for life, too. MORE IMPORTANTLY, might help to
783 preventatively stop some forms of <i>colic</i>, which affects 1 in 5
784 babies and causes constant screaming and pain for about 5 weeks.
785
786 </div></div>
787 <div class="project"><h2>server culture : mirrors</h2><div class="description">make a distributed system where people
788 can mirror the websites of people they like &ndash; essentially cover
789 the server costs of favored websites. This could make popular
790 websites run at no cost. The system would require that the
791 mirrored content be the same as the official source. Sort of like
792 bit-torrent for websites.
793
794 </div></div>
795 <div class="project"><h2>map programming</h2><div class="description">one problem with functional programming is that
796 in order to remain functional, you have to pass up arguments up
797 into each calling function to get the full range of behavior
798 from the lower level functions. Normally people come to a
799 compromise involving abstraction and sparing use of dynamic
800 variables to configure runtime behavior. What would be the
801 advantages of making a programming language where every function
802 receives one argument, a map, which contains all the symbol
803 bindings it would ever need? This map is passed on to all
804 subordinate functions. This way, you could replace functions on
805 the fly, and arrange for there to be sensible defaults,
806 etc. Might cause more harm than good but is an interesting idea.
807
808 </div></div>
809 <div class="project"><h2>rest nest</h2><div class="description">a small EEG device you would attach to your head when
810 you go to sleep at night. ML algorithms would determine
811 your particular sleep cycles. This would mostly be an
812 alarm clock that you could give a time range, say
813 7:00AM - 7:15AM, and it would wake you up during an
814 ideal time corresponding to then end of one of your 90
815 min sleep cycles. You would feel much more rested upon
816 waking up, and would wake up faster. There might be
817 some other uses for the EEG data as well.
818
819 </div></div>
820 <div class="project"><h2>image compression</h2><div class="description">use a library like gimp or opencv to process an
821 image to make it have less entropy, then store the reverse of
822 those operations along with the compressed simpler image as a
823 super-compressed image file (possibly accepting some
824 losses). Trades file size for decompression time, and allows one
825 to cheat by using information in gimp/opencv to compress the
826 image.
827
828 </div></div>
829 <div class="project"><h2>fixed cryopreservation</h2><div class="description">why not use a fixative to buy enough time
830 to ramp up cryoprotectants to an acceptable level at room
831 temperature? Then, the whole system can be rapidly cooled and
832 vitrified. This method "severs the biological link" in that the
833 fixatives are highly toxic, but current vitrification procedures
834 do this anyway since there can be a lot of freezing damage.
835
836 </div></div>
837 <div class="project"><h2>dilated security camera</h2><div class="description">a security camera that would capture
838 full video footage of everything at 60fps but then decide to keep
839 only every 1 frame every 5 seconds unless there's something
840 "interesting" happening.
841
842 </div></div>
843 <div class="project"><h2>bitcoin wallet</h2><div class="description">Part of "server culture", this would be something
844 like "coin.your-domain.com" which would serve as
845 your personal trusted access to your own bitcoins
846 from anywhere.
847
848 </div></div>
849 <div class="project"><h2>libpay</h2><div class="description">this would be a free library which would enable
850 micro-donations to software projects and other projects,
851 so that you could donate a penny to "emacs" and it would
852 be automatically split up to every person who has ever
853 contributed to emacs in proportion to the amount of
854 community esteem, code quantity, bugs fixed, whatever the
855 community decides. This might make it possible for
856 programmers to live entirely off of free programming.
857
858 </div></div>
859 <div class="project"><h2>distributed graphics</h2><div class="description">Browser based graphics-card accelerated
860 distributed computing API.
861
862 </div></div>
863 <div class="project"><h2>pronouns</h2><div class="description">use capital letters A-Z instead of pronouns. They solve
864 pronoun referents and gender neutrality, are short to
865 say, and you can encode useful information into the
866 choice of letter. For example, instead of "Meetings
867 shall be presided over by the president, unless she is
868 absent." USE "Meetings shall be presided over by the
869 president, unless P is absent." We already use this a
870 little, since I and U are reserved for the subject and
871 object respectively.
872
873 </div></div>
874 <div class="project"><h2>phone DSP</h2><div class="description">software app that inserts an audio DSP between the
875 input to a phone and the output. The DSP is delicious
876 and configurable, and can allow men to make their
877 voices deeper, etc. The app would allow you to hear
878 your own voice as others hear it. Most people hate how
879 their own voice sounds. The app would also allow one to
880 immediately change the parameters of the DSP using good
881 presets.
882
883 </div></div>
884 <div class="project"><h2>predestined body learning</h2><div class="description">a good example of predestined learning
885 might be the mirror neurons.
886
887 </div></div>
888 <div class="project"><h2>restaurant receipt</h2><div class="description">use a carbon copy receipt instead of two stupid
889 copies.
890
891 </div></div>
892 <div class="project"><h2>anti google glass</h2><div class="description">glasses with mounted lasers and computer vision
893 that targets the cameras in google glass and destroy them.
894
895 </div></div>
896 <div class="project"><h2>wearable towel</h2><div class="description">towel with clasp, velcro, whatever, that allows
897 one to wear the towel more securely than just
898 wrapping it tightly and hoping for the best.
899
900 </div></div>
901 <div class="project"><h2>crossdressing</h2><div class="description">Easiest way to disguise oneself as a woman is to
902 wear a burka.
903
904 </div></div>
905 <div class="project"><h2>book-mode</h2><div class="description">intelligent color highlighting for books and
906 articles. It would disambiguate pronouns and involved
907 references. For example, if "Rachael" was assigned the
908 color red, and "the blonde haired girl" refers to
909 "Rachael", then "the blonde haired girl" would be
910 colored red. Also, you could disambiguate multi part
911 run-on sentences by highlighting each
912 subcomponent. Maybe would also have applications to
913 scientific reading.
914
915 </div></div>
916 <div class="project"><h2>Handheld light Rain measurement</h2><div class="description">this would be a clear, teflon
917 coated plastic disk with a camera underneath the disk. You would
918 be able to hold the device out and it would measure the rate of
919 accumulation of water droplets from fine mists and light rain by
920 using computer vision to measure the diameters of the drops.
921
922 </div></div>
923 <div class="project"><h2>Big Brother Farming</h2><div class="description">This would be a vision system that would
924 individually monitor each plant and turn on water, etc to ensure
925 maximum/uniform growth for each plant.
926
927 </div></div>
928 <div class="project"><h2>Discrete Faucet</h2><div class="description">A faucet with discrete ticks instead of
929 continuous.
930
931 </div></div>
932 <div class="project"><h2>Laser Circle</h2><div class="description">take a glass microfiliment and shine a laser at one
933 end at an oblique angle. It will make a perfect,
934 large circle on the wall, converting a laser beam
935 into a laser cone, preserving most of the energy of
936 the laser.
937
938 </div></div>
939 <div class="project"><h2>Invisible Glass</h2><div class="description">Take a container of liquid and embed a
940 glass sculpture made out of glass that has exactly the same index
941 of refraction and color of the liquid. Then the sculpture will be
942 totally invisible in the container, and will only be revealed
943 when the liquid is drained. The container might be a fancy
944 wine/spirit bottle or an hourglass.
945
946 </div></div>
947 <div class="project"><h2>Caterpillar people</h2><div class="description">A race of caterpillar like creatures gains
948 intelligence after eons of predation by birds, etc. These
949 caterpillar creatures still undergo metamorphosis into a large
950 butterfly-like creature. The metamorphosis process turns the
951 caterpillar's brain into mush and reforms it into a minimal,
952 dumb, truly insect-like mind, completely destroying the person
953 the caterpillar was. The society develops all sorts of customs and
954 religious interpretations of the metamorphosis. It is viewed as
955 good and natural by some since it is part of their life cycle and
956 necessary to propagate the species, as only the butterflies can
957 mate. Some think that the butterflies are still the same person
958 because they have the same soul, even they no longer posses the
959 memories or personality of the original caterpillar. Some see the
960 butterfly form as the "true form" of the species, since the
961 butterflies can fly, mate, and are beautiful. Many make a big
962 deal out of the fact that 1-2% of the caterpillar's mind is
963 actually preserved in the butterfly. Some see it as a terrible
964 tragedy and argue that the caterpillars should try to stop the
965 metamorphosis by technology. Practically, some very important
966 members of society undergo hormone therapy and/or surgery to
967 prevent metamorphosis so that they can live longer as themselves.
968
969 <p>
970 This is a continuation of Marvin Minsky's ideas about pain being
971 something that preserves our bodies while destroying our minds,
972 something that is a remnant from our too harsh animal days that
973 hasn't caught up to the fact that we have very complex brains
974 now. It's a worst-case scenario about a maladaptive genetic
975 legacy. Also, it's inspired by "There She Is!!!", which makes a
976 compelling point about homosexuality by introducing a second
977 gender characteristic (bunny/cat, male/female), which makes
978 homophobia look very silly. Here, our own biological legacy of
979 pain and death is made to look like the tragedy it is through the
980 lens of the the caterpillar people.
981 </p>
982 </div></div>
983 <div class="project"><h2>relationships as a business</h2><div class="description"><a href="http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx">Turnover-Crisis</a> is an excellent talk
984 about the "culture of quitting," which is about better business
985 by letting people go instead of keeping them around past their
986 "apex". Focuses on information transfer. Cool idea of an alumni
987 network, which for relationships would be a group of satisfied
988 ex-lovers, who would recommend new people your way, and who might
989 consider coming to you again, refreshed from their time away with
990 new stories/experiences. I should look for examples of this and
991 how they worked out.
992
993 </div></div>
994 <div class="project"><h2>coffee with tea</h2><div class="description"><i>rlm-tea</i> contains 2% sugar, 10% cream, and 20%
995 dylan coffee. <i>dylan coffee</i> contains 5% sugar,
996 20% cream, and 10% rlm-tea. Start your mornings
997 with recursion!
998
999 </div></div>
1000 <div class="project"><h2>psychic crystal</h2><div class="description">in a science fiction story, this would be an
1001 object that is very easy to move physically but is extremely
1002 difficult to move with telekinesis.
1003
1004 </div></div>
1005 <div class="project"><h2><a href="http://betsofbitco.in/">http://betsofbitco.in/</a></h2><div class="description">what a great place for an AI/person to
1006 prove themselves as a good predictor. I wish this could be
1007 automated.
1008
1009 </div></div>
1010 <div class="project"><h2>true reflection</h2><div class="description">don't forget about that mirror in the student
1011 center!, it's two mirrors at right angles, like staring at a
1012 corner of a room. The light reflects so that it shows you what
1013 you actually look like, instead of your mirror image.
1014
1015 </div></div>
1016 <div class="project"><h2>remote control wasp</h2><div class="description">use computer to drive wings with remote
1017 power/logic.
1018
1019 </div></div>
1020 <div class="project"><h2>encrypted email phone book</h2><div class="description">public (distributed?) database of
1021 email-&gt;private-key pairs, to enable automatic encryption.
1022
1023 </div></div>
1024 <div class="project"><h2>universal eye color</h2><div class="description">every equivalent creature will see each
1025 others' eyes as black &ndash; it's universal. Even if the creatures
1026 see in radio waves, and their eyes are 2m long pieces of jagged
1027 metal, when those creatures look at each other, they will see
1028 black, the absence of light and color (since it's being absorbed
1029 by the sensor array).
1030
1031 </div></div>
1032 <div class="project"><h2>intelligent microwave</h2><div class="description">it learns where the hot nodes of its fields
1033 are, and uses them to evenly heat any food item. It has an infrared
1034 camera or something to keep track of how hot the food is. That way,
1035 you don't get bowls where the edges are boiling, while the center is
1036 still frozen. Requires a little bit of intelligence/vision, since
1037 the exact pattern of heating totally depends on the exact shape of
1038 the food. Wouldn't need a carousel, and wouldn't need a timer,
1039 just a desired temperature. Could also detect ice, and automatically
1040 defrost the parts which are frozen. Might be able to work much
1041 faster since it can avoid overheating; might have problems with
1042 heating the insides of thick things, might need a weight sensor too.
1043
1044 <ul>
1045 <li>Would be much cleaner than other microwaves, since food would
1046 "sputter" and splash liquid much less.
1047
1048 </li>
1049 <li>Throw in some SIFT+R processing to match previously cooked foods
1050 and learn the exact heating profiles for things that have been
1051 cooked before &ndash; it can get faster the more it's used.
1052
1053 </li>
1054 </ul>
1055
1056 </div></div>
1057 <div class="project"><h2>compression</h2><div class="description">brain-aware image compression algorithm
1058
1059 </div></div>
1060 <div class="project"><h2>Credit card proxy</h2><div class="description">would be a company which works like paypal
1061 except for real world transactions
1062
1063 </div></div>
1064 <div class="project"><h2>Flesh pillow</h2><div class="description">a pillow like the arm or torso of a human, complete
1065 with simulated temperature, bones, and heartbeat.
1066
1067 </div></div>
1068 <div class="project"><h2>super screw</h2><div class="description">a screw which has only one or two threads and instead
1069 uses compression to fit into a hole (the whole shank
1070 of the screw is split into multiple pieces to
1071 accomplish this; the tip is a point, then the middle
1072 bulges out and gets compressed when screwed in.
1073
1074 </div></div>
1075 <div class="project"><h2>light filter</h2><div class="description">(like light tweezers) to mechanically separate
1076 fluids with different index of refraction
1077
1078 </div></div>
1079 <div class="project"><h2>chalk eraser project</h2><div class="description">maybe make a directional eraser, for easy
1080 release of chalk dust, like fur, and how it likes to rest in a
1081 certain direction.
1082
1083 </div></div>
1084 <div class="project"><h2>silver socks</h2><div class="description">socks laced with silver for the antimicrobial
1085 properties.
1086
1087 </div></div>
1088 <div class="project"><h2>UROP</h2><div class="description">magnet gear/metal teeth tape
1089
1090 </div></div>
1091 <div class="project"><h2>Rod of Moses</h2><div class="description">device to distill urine through evaporation and
1092 easily dispose of urea crystals for use in desert --
1093 produce drinkable water.
1094
1095 </div></div>
1096 <div class="project"><h2>UROP</h2><div class="description">Make the LED in line with the flow for the micro injector, so
1097 that it may transmit maximum flow. Motor that changes
1098 distance of internal magnet from windings depending on
1099 desired speed so as to obtain maximum power efficiency.
1100
1101 </div></div>
1102 <div class="project"><h2>lottery scraper</h2><div class="description">web scraper which monitors various lotteries,
1103 looking for "special" gimmick changes in the rules (like 4x
1104 winnings on Wednesdays) and computes expected value&hellip;
1105
1106 </div></div>
1107 <div class="project"><h2>Memristiors novel design</h2><div class="description">make an evolutionary algorithm to make
1108 old stuff using all four basic circuit elements.
1109
1110 </div></div>
1111 <div class="project"><h2>Conductive concrete</h2><div class="description">concrete that has embedded metal fibers so
1112 that it can conduct electricity.
1113
1114 </div></div>
1115 <div class="project"><h2>little bitty melting pot</h2><div class="description">might be useful for some types of
1116 manufacturing/3D printing &ndash; how small can an induction melter be
1117 made, for example.
1118
1119 </div></div>
1120 <div class="project"><h2>power strip/timer programmable combination</h2><div class="description">meh
1121 </div></div>
1122
1123 <div class="project"><h2>algorithms...</h2><div class="description">which learn what their inputs are and in what order,
1124 and can adapt to changing circumstances &ndash; they
1125 remember previous arguments and adapt so as to respond
1126 to different connections.
1127
1128 </div></div>
1129 <div class="project"><h2>true pure tones</h2><div class="description">hear a true pure tone by direct stimulation of the
1130 nerves of the ear
1131
1132 </div></div>
1133 <div class="project"><h2>mechanical analogue to the electrical op-amp</h2><div class="description">would be an object
1134 with two levers &ndash; you pull on one lever and the other moves the
1135 same way, no matter what's in the way or what it is driving. This
1136 analogy could be useful to teach op amps to people.
1137
1138 </div></div>
1139 <div class="project"><h2>paper folding device</h2><div class="description">make it convenient to fold lots of papers in
1140 various ways.
1141
1142 </div></div>
1143 <div class="project"><h2>concrete epoxy</h2><div class="description">epoxy with sand/ some other solid material.
1144
1145 </div></div>
1146 <div class="project"><h2>light capacitor</h2><div class="description">suspend some ball of material with a high index
1147 of refraction and shine light into it so it gets stuck &ndash; would
1148 the light stay trapped forever? Could you build up unlimited
1149 quantities of light inside the sphere (which could then be
1150 released slowly by frustrated internal reflection?
1151
1152 </div></div>
1153 <div class="project"><h2>movie screening</h2><div class="description">Movies always are too long at first. One way to
1154 shorten them ``scientifically" is to record blink rate during the
1155 move and then remove / shorten the frames of the parts in which
1156 there are a lot of blinking (average this over multiple people)
1157 better yet, put it online and do it across thousands of people. I
1158 got this from youtube in which there is an episode of kill bill
1159 which is composed entirely of the parts in which people had their
1160 eyes closed. slogan: want to make a movie people can't take their
1161 eyes off of? Just take those parts out!
1162
1163 </div></div>
1164 <div class="project"><h2>optimize an article</h2><div class="description">capture reading of a scientific article via
1165 screen capture while people read it, then use it to make the
1166 article better. like the movie-pruning idea.
1167
1168 </div></div>
1169 <div class="project"><h2>super reading program</h2><div class="description">teaches people the ideal mental mask to
1170 apply during reading so as to read very fast.
1171
1172 </div></div>
1173 <div class="project"><h2>explosive thermite epoxy putty</h2><div class="description">one part would contain the rust,
1174 one part the aluminum.
1175
1176 </div></div>
1177 <div class="project"><h2>reading comprehension</h2><div class="description">use the above screen capture routine to
1178 make a quiz program that constructs questions about the content
1179 you seemed to gloss over while reading. could be easy if the pdf
1180 came with embedded questions. Dylan: automatically generate
1181 word-cloud about the parts you found most interesting; help
1182 others who read the same stuff by drawing attention to the
1183 interesting parts.
1184
1185 </div></div>
1186 <div class="project"><h2>hard sword</h2><div class="description">make a samurai sword, but use osmiridum instead of
1187 martensite for the cutting part; it should be a better
1188 sword.
1189
1190 </div></div>
1191 <div class="project"><h2>close range wireless</h2><div class="description">use the induction technology used to
1192 recharge electric toothbrushes with no metal links to send data
1193 without any metal at all!
1194
1195 </div></div>
1196 <div class="project"><h2>reading</h2><div class="description">is a form of synsethesia
1197
1198 </div></div>
1199 <div class="project"><h2>DNA printer</h2><div class="description">A machine which translates the text eg, "ACTGAC" into
1200 actual DNA
1201
1202 </div></div>
1203 <div class="project"><h2>black generator</h2><div class="description">ferro-fluid magnetic field suspended micro
1204 generator to make electricity
1205
1206 </div></div>
1207 <div class="project"><h2>alcohol battery</h2><div class="description">alcohol/fluid flow powered battery
1208
1209 </div></div>
1210 <div class="project"><h2>folding razor blade sword</h2><div class="description">
1211
1212 </div></div>
1213 <div class="project"><h2>perfect pitch</h2><div class="description">learn perfect pitch using another sense in
1214 combination (sight or touch)
1215
1216 </div></div>
1217 <div class="project"><h2>kaleidoscope projector</h2><div class="description">
1218
1219 </div></div>
1220 <div class="project"><h2>razor blade de-sharpener</h2><div class="description">for guilt free disposal
1221
1222 </div></div>
1223 <div class="project"><h2>bricks</h2><div class="description">filled with luminescent plant material
1224
1225 </div></div>
1226 <div class="project"><h2>bio metallic structure</h2><div class="description">metal grids with seeds inside, which grow
1227 together and form a durable biological matrix. The metal
1228 substrate delivers water. (maybe use plastic instead of metal?)
1229 Dylan: enrich plants with inorganic compounds; electrical
1230 interfaces in cellular plant matter =&gt; remote-controlled
1231 photosynthetic/bioluminescent structures.
1232
1233 </div></div>
1234 <div class="project"><h2>conducting extracellular matrix</h2><div class="description">to allow better control of
1235 organic systems and an enhanced nervous system.
1236
1237 </div></div>
1238 <div class="project"><h2>cross-modal memory hashing</h2><div class="description">a way to retrieve memories more
1239 robustly.
1240
1241 </div></div>
1242 <div class="project"><h2>flossing thimble-guards</h2><div class="description">(these actually exist)
1243
1244 </div></div>
1245 <div class="project"><h2>rules + lattice learning</h2><div class="description">integrate lattice learning with rules by
1246 generating hypothetical examples
1247
1248 </div></div>
1249 <div class="project"><h2>wooden refrigerator</h2><div class="description">to give food a better taste Dylan: like
1250 barrels for wine, or planks for salmon. Maybe just have "flavor
1251 planks" for your pre-existing fridge. Need to mitigate effect of
1252 temperature on volatility?
1253
1254 </div></div>
1255 <div class="project"><h2>radioactive transmutation molecule by molecule</h2><div class="description">create precious
1256 metals or something else economically advantageous.
1257
1258 </div></div>
1259 <div class="project"><h2>crowd preservation</h2><div class="description">inoculate food with tons of harmless
1260 bacteria so that there's no room for bad bacteria as a method of
1261 preservation
1262
1263 </div></div>
1264 <div class="project"><h2>old school preservation</h2><div class="description">Pasteur - style holding jar with siphon
1265 as a way to store liquids at room temperature indefinitely w/o
1266 refrigeration.
1267
1268 </div></div>
1269 <div class="project"><h2>restaurant policy</h2><div class="description">Throw rude people out of restaurant as a matter
1270 of course &ndash; make ambiance much better.
1271
1272 </div></div>
1273 <div class="project"><h2>clean windows</h2><div class="description">make something that mixes soap with fire hydrant
1274 water (and reduces the pressure a bit) and use it
1275 to clean windows of buildings.
1276
1277 </div></div>
1278 <div class="project"><h2>ocarina</h2><div class="description">make an ocarina out of pure silver
1279
1280 </div></div>
1281 <div class="project"><h2>fire pen</h2><div class="description">pen which burns words on to the page, thus never needing
1282 any ink. Is there a way to make it runnable from the
1283 human's energy?
1284
1285 </div></div>
1286 <div class="project"><h2>website to design your own soda</h2><div class="description">and label, and have it mailed to
1287 you / sell it from your own online store.
1288
1289 </div></div>
1290 <div class="project"><h2>solar panels</h2><div class="description">that float on the ocean
1291
1292 </div></div>
1293 <div class="project"><h2>handcuffs with more than two cuffs (3?)</h2><div class="description">great for daisy chaining
1294 people, binding them to environment, etc.
1295
1296 </div></div>
1297 <div class="project"><h2>vector based SOUND files</h2><div class="description">like the pictures but with SOUND. codify
1298 sound in a language with enough symbols so that it can describe
1299 everything and encode it in that. would be like going from speech
1300 to text or smtg. Could also store sound as an image of the
1301 wavefront encoded as a vector image.
1302
1303 </div></div>
1304 <div class="project"><h2>Mouse</h2><div class="description">with a horizontal scroll wheel in addition to the vertical
1305 scroll wheel
1306
1307 </div></div>
1308 <div class="project"><h2>logic maintenance system for big institutions</h2><div class="description">to make sure the
1309 things they are thinking about doing are not retarded
1310
1311 </div></div>
1312 <div class="project"><h2><a href="http://www.regulations.gov/">http://www.regulations.gov/</a></h2><div class="description">cool site
1313
1314 </div></div>
1315 <div class="project"><h2>genetically engineered glowing fruit</h2><div class="description">sell seeds?
1316
1317 </div></div>
1318 <div class="project"><h2>memory slide</h2><div class="description">IF memories are encoded using particular sensory
1319 impressions, what happens if the sensory organ
1320 itself changes? those memories would become
1321 inaccessible. maybe this is why we can't remember
1322 much from our childhoods. also, could this happen
1323 throughout life as well? Could S remember stuff from
1324 his childhood?
1325
1326 </div></div>
1327 <div class="project"><h2>make a completely indestructible phone</h2><div class="description">no moving parts or display
1328 you should be able to slam it around all you want, and it will
1329 just work. brutally simple. aerogel around the battery, minimal
1330 interface - never gets too hot, and can be dropped into water. no
1331 holes &ndash; uses field effects for everything from the buttons to
1332 inductive charging and data transfer.
1333
1334 </div></div>
1335 <div class="project"><h2>midi to ocarina "tabs" program</h2><div class="description">(online website? buy ocarinas from
1336 it too)
1337
1338 </div></div>
1339 <div class="project"><h2>3d printing with sound pulses (or just patterns)</h2><div class="description">like the 8.03
1340 lecture
1341
1342 </div></div>
1343 <div class="project"><h2>lighter flint on spring</h2><div class="description">make hot, throw it at something, and it
1344 makes sparkles!
1345
1346 </div></div>
1347 <div class="project"><h2>nuclear energy</h2><div class="description">Rebranding New+Clear Energy with informational
1348 campaign and public debate forum to enforce its
1349 transparent and open nature. France needn't be the
1350 world leader in nuclear energy. (Dylan)
1351
1352 </div></div>
1353 <div class="project"><h2>bubbles</h2><div class="description">Engineer a material which has both ductility and high
1354 surface tension to make the "third"
1355 minimal-surface-energy solution to a bubble suspended
1356 between two equal-diameter rings. (Solutions are
1357 cylindrical catenary curve, two separated half-bubbles,
1358 and a double-cone)
1359
1360 </div></div>
1361 <div class="project"><h2>Textbook whose content can be varied continuously</h2><div class="description">alter level of
1362 difficulty, rigor, diction, emphasize crossover with certain
1363 other discipline, etc. Content generated dynamically from
1364 knowledge base, along with questions that are moreover altered to
1365 guide knowledge acquisition. Motivation: One book of
1366 knowledge. <i>One.</i>
1367 </div></div>
1368 </div>
1369
1370
1371
1372 </div>
1373
1374 <div id="outline-container-1-1" class="outline-3">
1375 <h3 id="sec-1-1"><span class="section-number-3">1.1</span> From Jacob's idea list</h3>
1376 <div class="outline-text-3" id="text-1-1">
1377
1378
1379 <ul>
1380 <li>Roommate-canceling headphones: uses roommate's laptop mic to seed
1381 noise cancellation alg in your headphones (would this
1382 work?). -Update on sound canceling headphones that take feed from
1383 tv: how about ones that cancel people talking on the phone by
1384 receiving the phone signals and playing inverse sound
1385 waves. #signalprocessing ~jcole@mit.edu
1386
1387 </li>
1388 <li>ClackerAlert &ndash; tells if you slam the keys too hard using sound data
1389 (and speed/jerkiness data)!.Prevents RSI ~jcole@mit.e
1390
1391 </li>
1392 <li>separate pin that you can tell someone if forced to
1393 identify your PIN (idea from idea about credit cards)
1394 </li>
1395 </ul>
1396
1397 </div>
1398 </div>
1399 </div>
1400 </div>
1401
1402 <div id="postamble">
1403 <p class="date">Date: 2015-02-04 23:52:02 EST</p>
1404 <p class="author">Author: Robert McIntyre</p>
1405 <p class="creator">Org version 7.7 with Emacs version 23</p>
1406 <a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer">Validate XHTML 1.0</a>
1407
1408 </body>
1409 </html>