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more ideas
author Robert McIntyre <rlm@mit.edu>
date Tue, 26 Jan 2016 23:32:36 -0800
parents 0f8cb1752964
children 42290f1f7f12
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43 ** Cure for Color Blindness
44
45 Could it be possible to administer some retroviruses via direct
46 injection to the retina, to cause some of the cells in the retina
47 to begin expressing different color pigments? The brain ought to
48 easily sort out the rest and enable color vision. Furthremore,
49 could we add some more colors to baesline human eyes? Theory --
50 people who are color blind have better color spatial accuity for
51 the colors they can see, because this it the tradeoff here involved
52 with the retrovirus therapy. Re-purposing color detectors to see
53 new colors at the expense of spatial acuity for the old set of
54 colors.
55
56 ** Passion of the Christ Missed Opportunity
57
58 In the Passion of the Christ, they do the entire show using Latin,
59 Aramaic, etc, with subtitles. They should have had a part where
60 Jesus does the sermon on the mount, he turns to the camera, and
61 starts speaking in English, with no subtitles. It would have been
62 1.) biblically accurate and 2.) awesome. It would have been such a
63 powerful example of Jesus' divinity, and it felt like they were
64 setting up for it the entire movie, and they missed it!
65
66 ** Xenobiotic Chimeric Methalation Rewriting
67
68 You make chimeric sea urchins with human reproductive stem cells,
69 so that the sea urchins produce sea urchin like HUMAN sperm and
70 eggs. Then you can have two males / females reproduce without the
71 methylation problem, by using the sea urchins as intermediades. And
72 the normal problems of human chimeras are avoided because the sea
73 urchins are too simple.
74
75 ** Physical PGP Signatures
76
77 You punch into your phone "I want to sign a contract" It gives you
78 a gensym (or you enter a name) like:
79 https://contracts.example.com/car-insurance-2015-09-26
80
81 Then you sign your name, date, and include the link on the contract
82 under "PGP sig". Then you take a picture with your phone and enter
83 your signing password. It gets uploaded to your website and the
84 image gets PGP signed with your key. Now you have a timestamped
85 archive of the contract, and anyone can verify it by looking at the
86 physical contract itself!
87
88 ** The Digital Third Eye
89
90 You wire in a third optical input to the human brain, but it
91 doesn't tranduce light form the real world, bus instead is
92 connected to the "internet of things" and shows you metadata about
93 things you are looking at // serves as an interface to your own
94 mind and body. Then eventually simply real things without metadata
95 seem flat and fake compared to the objects in cities and other
96 annotated areas. This third eye doesn't occupy any of your normal
97 visual field but actually EXPANDS your visual field.
98
99 ** Ultimate Limits of Monogamy
100
101 Let's say that you're immortal and monogamous. The longer you live
102 with your partner, the more you build an internal model of them,
103 and they you. Eventually these models may become complete, and then
104 you two are actually one single recursive entity which references
105 itself. As you offload more processing to the other (such as old
106 couples actually do -- "remember when we were at that place,
107 what-was-his-name honey?"), then computationally you are a single
108 mind distributed across two bodies. (There's a reason why old
109 couples often die as a pair). You might decide to actually merge
110 bodies eventually. But then, you were both monogamous, so the
111 combined person will be monogamous (and lonely because it lacks a
112 partner). So you get married again, rinse, wash, repeat. All the
113 monogamous people within a certain "compatability group" eventually
114 become one. Our "social center of mass" doesn't lie within our own
115 bodies!
116
117 ** Dream Rewinding
118
119 How to record a complete dream without disturbing it or modifying
120 your brain? you need to be an upload: split yourself, and one of
121 you stays awake whike the other sleeps. then you detect a dream in
122 progress by monotoring rapid eye movememt in your sleeping self,
123 and you wake yourself up every few minutes and tell yoursef about
124 the dream. Then sleeping-your restarts the dream, continuation
125 passing style, forgetting everything that was just said, and you
126 repeat this process until the dream is over. Then awake-you and
127 sleeping-you merge each other by taking sleeping-you and replaying
128 the memories of awake-you, and you write a final report on the
129 dream using the "saccade" reports to jog your memory.
130
131 It would really let you directly test theories of memory because
132 you can test a person every second if you want to. I see a couple
133 ways this could play out: you could report a dream that follows a
134 linear narrative, with the story advancing a little bit each time
135 (the "storytelling" hypothesis), you might say something totally
136 different each time (the "garbage memory access" hypothesis), or
137 something even weider like where you report exactly the same thing
138 between seconds 0-20, then something totally different during
139 seconds 20-40, etc.
140
141 ** Denser than Osmium
142
143 Do the "misicibility" thing with an osmium alloy to get something
144 even more dense. Basically osmium + something else might be denser
145 then pure osmium.
146
147 ** AI Hypnosis
148
149 Hypnosis might be good for studying AI, becuse it might probide a
150 "debugger" for ananlyzing the human mind. I briefly tried this
151 while at MIT, but it needs MUCH more work to be properly
152 evaulated. Also, things you can do under hypnosis provide
153 constraints on what the mind's capabilities are. Also, hypnosis
154 iteslf is a worthwhile thing to study in its own right.
42 155
43 ** The Ocean Becomes a Drop 156 ** The Ocean Becomes a Drop
44 Upload faces challenges to grow into the type of person that can 157 Upload faces challenges to grow into the type of person that can
45 join the greater society -- a god. They have to go though quests 158 join the greater society -- a god. They have to go though quests
46 that replicate all the things that humanity had to accomplish, like 159 that replicate all the things that humanity had to accomplish, like