thoughts: org/good-ideas.org comparison

comparison org/good-ideas.org @ 145:f5a56e2241fb

finally creating a good-ideas page.

author	Robert McIntyre <rlm@mit.edu>
date	Sun, 12 Apr 2015 17:31:34 -0700
parents
children	e9c46842080b

comparison

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+#+title: Big List O' Ideas
+#+author: Robert McIntyre
+#+email: rlm@mit.edu
+#+description: list of ideas from Robert McIntyre
+#+keywords: aurellem ideas half-baked random
+#+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org
+#+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org
+#+babel: :mkdirp yes :noweb yes :exports both
+#+HTML_HEAD_EXTRA: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../css/ideas.css" />
+#+OPTIONS: num:nil
+* Ideas
+# :PROPERTIES:
+# :HTML_CONTAINER_CLASS: ideas
+# :END:
+This is a list of all the good ideas I've had that I felt like writing
+down for the past ~ 10 years. Some of them could be practical
+inventions and are "just" waiting for that 95% perspiration to bring
+them to fruition, some are ideas for science fiction, and some are
+simple observations.  They are arranged roughly in reverse
+chronological order, with the most recent ideas at the top of the
+list. The ones at the bottom of the list are heavily influenced by my
+time at MIT, the ones at the top, by my time at 21st Century Medicine.
+If you find some of these interesting and would like to collaborate on
+them with me or discuss them in more detail, I'd love to hear from
+you. You can email me at ideas@aurellem.org.
+If you want to use one of these ideas as your own and run with it,
+please feel free. I'd love to hear about it if you do.
+#+begin_quote
+There's no end to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care about
+getting credit.
+#+end_quote
+#+BEGIN_HTML
+<hr/>
+#+END_HTML
+** The Ocean becomes a Drop
+Upload faces challenges to grow into they type of person that can
+join the greater society -- a god. They have to go though quests
+that replicate all the things that humanity had to accomplish, like
+going to the moon, by themselves.
+** Butterfly Drone
+If big butterflies used to exist, then maybe we could make
+butterfly-inspired drones!
+** Methylation Sex-Symmetry Breaking
+Human sex cells have methylation patterns that encode male/female
+origin. If you combine two male patterns, the fetus grows "too
+fast" and dies. Two female patterns causes the fetus to enter a
+"vegatable" state and fail to develop. Evolutionary biologists say
+that this reflects the asymmetry of energy investement for creating
+offspring. If that's true, then species that cast-spawn will lack
+this asymmetry, and give clues about how to remove it in humans. If
+even cast spawners like sea urchins have it, then that means
+there's something deeper going on!
+** Homosexual Reproduction
+You take genetic material from two males and put it into an egg
+cell that has had all genetic material removed. Or, you take the
+genetic material from one egg and put it in another egg. This would
+allow homosexual couples to genetically reproduce. One technical
+challenge blocking this technique is that human gametes have
+methylation patterns that encode male/female origin, and only a
+male+female pattern gives rise to viable offspring. You could
+"recondition" male / female gametes to give them the opposite
+pattern, perhaps by incubating them in the appropriate
+environment. You also could try taking stem cells and making them
+form the appropriate structures in vitro.
+** Poly-Vitrification
+Large molecules such as PVP are able to vitrify at around -20C, and
+at farily small concentrations. IF they could be introduced into
+cells, they would be quite useful as vitrification agents. However,
+it's difficult to get them in because they are so big. So instead,
+use smaller agents which combine together into polymers at low
+temperature. In particular, Fructose, trehalose, and glycerol seem
+to have the desired properties (though you need to make versions of
+fructose and trehalose that can penetrate).
+** Whole Brain Perfusion Embedding
+Do the standard EM embedding protocol, but skip the osmium step,
+and use the "perfusion pausing" method to prevent overextraction
+during the dehydration and embedding steps. I think that you can
+perfuse resins into the brain, simply because you can perfuse
+viscous rubber when doing vascular casts.
+** Very Slow Physiological Pressure Perfusion
+Less extreme example of the "perfusion pausing" trick -- just keep
+the perfusion running and don't put the perfusion target into the
+liquid as deep.
+** Perfusion Pausing
+One problem with doing perfusion of heads / organs where the veins
+freely leak fluid is that if you STOP the perfusion, you rapidly
+loose pressure in the organ as your perfusate leaks out. You can
+prevent this by submerging the organ/head/rat whatever in fluid at
+an appropriate deepness. You would have to slowly decrease the flow
+rate while simultaneously lowering the perfusing object into the
+fluid. To start again, reverse the process -- reengage the
+peristaltic pump slowly while removing the organ from the fluid.
+** Textbook Mimiricy Evolution
+As surgery becomes more common, there develops a distinct selective
+pressure for individuals' organ layouts to look more like the
+medical textbooks!
+** Transparent Skin
+Temporary / permament transparent skin. Allows for examination of
+organs / muscles and visual prevention of disease and detection or
+abnormalities / good things eg. excercise optimization.
+** Sweet Information
+Candy with a whole book written in it. Eat a book!
+** Targeted Immunosuppressant
+Just kill off the B-cells and friends that would cause problems in
+a organ-transplant / other situation. AIDS is good at killing these
+cells -- maybe make it can be modified to just target the ones that
+will cause problems. Then you can premptively kill off that part of
+someone's immune system before a transplant. ALSO, you can kill off
+everyone's defenses against other blood types and make people
+effectively type AB+ w.r.t blood transfusions. Actually, why not
+give babies this treatment so that they're automatically compatable
+with all blood types?  It would be like a blood transfusion
+vaccine. The immune system does this already when it's first
+growing; maybe it can be "retrained" to accept new things, or the
+mechanism of immune cell death be co-opted for these purposes.
+** Fuck-you Tetris
+Tetris that actively gives you the worst possible piece.
+** Pockets
+More things should have them! Chairs, tables, cups, hats,
+trashcans, basically anything is better with a pocket.
+** Colored Shower Head
+A shower head add-on that measures the temp of the water and
+changes the color of the water streams w/ an LED to show you the
+temperature. That way you can align to the color you want and see
+the temperature without feeling it.
+** Giant Dragonflies
+We could rapidly MAKE giant dragonflies by evolving modern
+dragonflies in an very oxygen rich environment!
+** Whirlpool of Light
+Shine a laser out into space. But the planet is spinning! What you
+get is a spiral of light! And as this signal expands, does it
+eventually reveal it's quantized nature?
+** Perfusion Cooking
+You do cardiac bypass on an animal like a pig, then pump in tasty,
+tasty perfusate (like marinade) into the animal's
+vasculature. Then, you switch out to saline and increase the
+temperature of the saline to rapidly and uniformly cook the
+animal. It could be the tastiest meat ever!
+** Timestamp Verification
+You sign your message, and it has a timestamp at the top, with a +-
+percision number.  Then you send it over to the public timestamp
+server, which only signs the message if it gets the message within
+the timestamp window. Or the computer just signs the message but
+puts a timestamp at the beginning. So if everyone trusts the
+timestamp server, you can get reliable timestamps, and prove
+priority on ideas, etc.
+** The Great Computing Slow-Down
+In general, our computers are getting faster and faster according
+to Moore's law. However, eventually our brains will be made of the
+same stuff our computers are made of! This has very interesting
+consequences -- I can add 2+2 and get four in about a second. Since
+my neurons actually work at around 10-60 hertz in parallel, this
+means that it takes me around 10-30 operations to do this
+addition. That's actually not bad in terms of computing time. If my
+neurons were as fast as the latest transitors, then most
+calculators (made with earlier transistors) would be SLOWER than me
+at adding numbers. Only the newest, most optimized calculators
+would be faster, and then only about 10 times faster!  This means
+that once we begin to think at the speed of our technology, that
+technology will suddenly seem pitifully slow in comparison to how
+it seems now. And no amount of technical progress will remedy it,
+because that same progress will also make us all think
+faster. We'll either have to settle with living in "slow time" to
+do some computations, or learn to make smarter hardware with
+special optimizations. But this is actually really hard, because
+we'll be working with machines that will appear to us about as fast
+as MECHANICAL computers. So, in the future, all the cool parties
+will be in cyperspace at vastly accelerated speeds compared to how
+we exist now. But at these parties, the computers will SUCK!  Of
+course, this is one of the few things that can save us from AI
+risk, because those AI's won't seem so scary when the're build out
+of rickety old mechanical parts form our perspective.
+** Unitary Reverse Evolution of Chaos+Minds
+Chaotic systems diverge exponentially in state space. Do you get
+anything interesting when part of the physical system associated
+with the chaotic system is a object that performs some sort of
+computation? Is it possible for the computational system to play a
+percision-enabling role in determining the final/initial conditions
+of the chaotic system, just by tracing out thoughts in its decision
+paths? This is probably too vague of an idea right now, I just
+wanted to write it down.
+** Microwave-Time
+The cooking time you enter on most microwaves is insane. It's
+expressed in what I call a "hybrid base", a combination of base 10
+and base 60. You can get absurd things like 100 < 61, and 120 ==
+80! I wonder if these hybrid base systems could be very useful for
+some purposes!
+** Three Eyes
+If you had three eyes, would you still draw cubes like we currently
+draw them? Or would all 2D-representations of 3D space always look
+hopelessly fake?
+** Digital Taste/Smell Assay
+Get a grid of bacteria, each expressing a human taste/smell
+receptor linked to some sort of fluorscent activity or ion
+pump. Use a camera / electrical grid to transduce the smell / taste
+signal into bits! Inspired by gel-sight from MIT.
+** Childrens' Tool Shop
+I think that kids should be provided with tool shops -- these would
+be nice sheds with a good collection of tools to do various things
+-- circuit components and soldering irons, wires, a small lathe,
+drill press, belt sander, a centrifuge, microscope, and telescope,
+etc. The idea is that the kid can now think, "I could use X to do
+this thing that I'm thinking about" -- the building becomes an
+extension of the kid's body & mind.
+** Fluid Display
+Like the previous idea about matching refractances between glass
+and liquid, except you make a lot of switchable glass tubes in
+various patterns in the glass, and actively pump colored liquid
+through the tubes (the tubes have glass-like fluid in them by
+default.) The result is that you can cause the tubes to appear and
+dissappear, and vary their colors as well!
+** Immunoincompatibility
+Take the human genome, and refactor it so that it doesn't use a
+particular codon at all. Then remove the support from our ribosomes
+for that codon. What does this do for us? It makes us immune to
+almost all viruses! There is at least one bacteria that already
+does this to great effect.
+** Life Cycle
+It's called a cycle, right? So, the thing that repeats itself over
+and over, right? Not much of a cycle if you don't come back after
+you die, if you ask me!
+** Car with no Blind Spots
+Use some cameras in the back of the car to augment the rear-view
+mirror so that you never have to turn around in order to lane
+change.
+** Metabolic Windows and Freezing
+You freeze a set of cells using some cryo protocol and 60%
+survive. How can this be explained? It seems to me that if the
+cells are the same, and the conditions homogoneous, then all the
+cells should either die or live. However, suppose that there is a
+metabolic cycle that needs to be in a certain phase for the cell to
+survive. If the cells are asynchronous, then you might end up with
+some cells dying because there were in the wrong part of their
+cycle. This implies that you might be able to cryoprotect cells by
+causing them to enter a certain metabolic mode before freezing.
+** Cryonics Color Appeal
+Perfusate used by cryonics companies could have red food coloring
+in it. It's just a nice touch so that the cryonics patient looks
+more life-like than with clear CPAs, and hopefully might get
+treated with more respect.
+** Paramagnetic CPA
+you take a CPA that can be influenced by magnetic fields so that
+its degrees of freedom are limited. Then, you release the field,
+instantaly increasing the size of the state space of the system and
+dramatically decreasing the temperature enough to plunge the system
+past homogenous nucleation temperature and directly to the glass
+transition temperature, creating a doubly unstable glass at much
+lower CPA concentrations than possible at conventional CPA
+concentrations. A major technical limitation facing this technique
+is that it's a very minor effect -- you can only get about 0.1C
+with most systems that have been studied so far.
+- room temp noodles :: how does the physics of cooking noodles work?
+Could you use a vacuum instead of heat to force water into the
+noodle?
+- personal carbon offset :: feel bad about contribuiting to global
+warming by using electricity / driving a car? Forget trying to
+"conserve" or "minimize your carbon footprint". Follow the
+Platinum rule -- make the world BETTER off than you found it!
+This would be a small, self contained system that sucks C02 out
+of the air. It uses electricity, but it's so efficient at
+removing CO2 that it more than offsets the CO2 produced by even a
+coal plant to produce that electricity. This way, you can still
+drive even a gas guzzler, but have a net negative carbon
+footprint! Maybe something cool could be done with the carbon as
+well. Use as much electricity as you want, but negate the damage
+to the enviroment with more technology.
+- undoing spermogenesis :: with enough sperm, you can derive the
+donor's entire genome. You gain more confidence in the alleles
+for a particular gene the more sperm you have. Each additional
+sperm gives you the same sort of information you'd get flipping a
+coin and trying to decide whether the coin is H/T of H/H. Is
+there enough sperm in the the average load for you to be as
+confident as mitosis?
+- mars life :: we could engineer life that could survive on mars
+(probably some non-vascular photosynthetic poikilohydric creature
+like a lichen) by taking an extremophile from Antarctica and
+evolving it in increasingly Martian conditions. This could be an
+easy start to a terraforming process.
+- problem with Aubrey de Grey's ideas :: Aubrey de Grey says that we
+might be able to live forever by continually repairing our bodies
+at the cellular level -- he details 7 different mechanisms of
+damage and says that if all of them are dealt with /together/
+that it would stop aging. (You can't miss even one because
+they're all fatal.)  However, it doesn't take into account that
+we are also beings of information and that there is a very real
+software component to our existence. Even if our biological
+chassies can be maintained forever, I think it is unlikely that
+our minds will operate well far outside of the design constraints
+that we've evolved to handle. Say I programmed a webserver with
+the express goal of it being able to serve webpages for month on
+some stock server. I'll do fairly rigorous testing to make sure
+that it can handle the expected load then then some. Now say that
+you want to keep a particular instance of this webserver running
+indefinitely. (The program instance is like your mind and the
+computer it's running on is like your body). You might very well
+be able to keep the physical computer infrastructure running for
+forever by replacing hard drives / ram / CPUs, etc. However,
+since I designed the webserver to work for a month, it probably
+has memory leaks, rare stochastic bugs, or other built in limits
+/ constraints (think log files or some date rollover shenanigans)
+that will ultimately kill the webserver even with eternally
+perfect hardware. Do you really expect that a webserver
+engineered to work for 1 month will run for 10 years without
+catastrophically crashing? Not even Apache can do this! In fact,
+if I put in the extreme effort to make it that robust, I've
+wasted time that I could have spent on other projects by pursuing
+an unnecessary engineering goal. Likewise, human minds have only
+ever run for at most 122 years before they are destroyed due to
+hardware degradation. Fixing the hardware doesn't change any
+software bugs that are almost certainly present in the human
+mind. Think of all the pathological things that can go wrong with
+a webserver, multiply it by a million, and that likely how
+evolution has designed our minds. For example, consider memory :
+why should you expect that we have evolved the ability to
+coherently organize memories past say 150 years? There's been
+absolutely no selective pressure for this ability, so you can bet
+that if there's any fitness to be gained from not having
+unlimited memory potential (such as better metabolic efficiency),
+we have it! You might think that maybe we would just forget
+things the same way that we sort of forget things that happen
+earlier in our lives, but complicated information processing
+systems don't have to fail gracefully when they're pushed far
+past their design constraints. A 150 year old person is just as
+likely to suffer a catastrophic psychosis due to software
+limitations associated with memory as he is to do something with
+all those memories we might consider reasonable. More likely, in
+fact, since there are so very many ways for a complicated
+software system to break and so few ways for it to run
+successfully. Therefore, I think Aubrey de Grey's "hardware-only"
+approach is missing a very important component of longevity
+science, and any successful effort to make people live orders of
+magnitude longer than they do naturally will need to deal with
+people's software as well as their hardware.
+- validating neurocryopreservation :: Problem : you want to test
+whether a brain is functionally preserved through vitrification,
+but you don't want to figure out how to preserve all the other
+organs in the animal. It might be possible to keep the rest of
+the body at almost 0C and vitrify just the head for only a few
+minutes. Induce hypothermia, then separate out the head's blood
+supply from the rest of the body, then just cryoptotect and
+vitrify the head. Might need some sort of thermal guard to keep
+the outer head / neck from becoming too cold. You leave the
+spinal cord intact! Then you devitrify to 0C, remove
+cryoprotectant, and then reattach the blood supply. You can
+determine brain preservation using behavioral assays!
+- freezing water purifier :: you slowly freeze water, but also run
+liquid water over the frozen mass. This takes away basically all
+impurities and creates "washed ice" then you melt the ice. Maybe
+you could re-use the heat from creating the ice to melt the ice?
+- ultra strength :: allow a person to visualize their muscle
+recruitment patterns. Give them adrenaline and let them feel what
+it's like to have the normal limits removed. See if they can
+replicate the effects.
+- phone names :: make a PX record for domain names that's like the MX
+record, except that it is a phone number instead of an IP
+address. That way, you can use the domain name registration
+system to provide names for phone numbers. Then, as long as you
+control the domain, you can point people to your current phone
+number by updating that record.
+- edible flowers :: Edible white flowers that you put in a colored
+solution with flavor. When the flower turns the right color, it
+is also flavored and ready to eat!
+- lead bone :: Could you fill in all the empty spaces in a bone with
+lead? Might be cool!
+- the quest for life  :: Many stories that have immortal characters
+have the "immortal who wants to become mortal" trope. I want to
+story where the protagonist loses their immortality and feels
+/angry/ and ashamed about losing something that's so absolutely
+crucial to their identity. A reverse of "death makes life worth
+living", they feel that living forever is what makes life worth
+living. Now they've "lost their sunrise" or their "connection to
+the timeless universe" or something. So they go on a quest to get
+it back, learning about themselves along the way, and regaining
+the precious thing they lost in the beginning. Which, it they can
+actually gain their immortality back, means that they never lost
+it in the first place!
+- world-map :: take a small table and paint the continents in
+toothpaste on the table. Make a slightly raised barrier around
+the table. Slowly pour water onto the table, and it will form the
+oceans!
+- stage magic rituals :: rituals should incorporate elements of stage
+magic. For example in Teller's rendition of Shakespeare's
+Tempest, they have a scene where they levitate a crown in front
+of someone, then put it on his head. They also have a wedding
+ceremony where they levitated the bride as well. Actual weddings
+and other ceremonies should incorporate stage magic as an
+enhancement to the gravitas!
+- isotope time dilation :: use a cyclotron to speed up rare isotopes
+developed in nuclear fusion experiments. The relativistic time
+dilation will stop the isotopes from decaying, and allow time to
+study them. This is based on radioactive isotopes that fall
+through the earth's atmosphere that take hundreds of times longer
+to decay than normal.
+- marsupial stimulation :: You take a freshly pouched marsupial baby,
+and show it videos and other interactive things while it matures
+in the pouch. What mental effects would this have?
+- The dynamically well tempered clavier :: Some older ways of tuning
+instruments sound better, but we use the even-tempered scale
+today because it makes it easier to switch keys. With electronic
+music, why not make key-annotations and dynamically re-tune the
+piece to sound good in the current key? Could be done as a
+midi+annotation -> midi compiler for initial experimentation.
+- death always implies damage :: is is possible for a corpse to differ
+from a living person only in the fact that one is dead and the
+other is alive? NO! A corpse must always have some sort of
+molecular damage which causes the loss of function!
+- inner eye :: Surgically install a bunch of tiny cameras inside a
+person. Then, you can activate them all and get a picture of your
+internal organs for diagnostic purposes.
+- chaos rails :: The homoclinic tangle (which I call the "rails of
+chaos") is very beautiful. We couldn't even visualize it before
+computers because it's so complicated! Someone should make a
+visualization of it. Here's my inital [[/thoughts/images/rails-of-chaos.png][The Rails of Chaos]]
+- cryonics middle ages :: some people say that cryonics is an
+experiment and that it is foolish to wait until we have revived a
+human. There is a middle ground where the procedure has a dismal
+success rate on humans, say 1 in 20, so that you'd be a fool to
+try revival. Nonetheless, this very risky procedure could be the
+legal proof of concept needed to create a new class of life
+between "living" and "dead": "stasis".
+- Minds and Mirrors :: neat thought experiment -- if you take a mirror
+of someone by actually reversing a person's chirality molecule by
+molecule, then will the only be able to read mirror writing? The
+answer is yes, by analogy to a purely mechanical scan-tron
+device. This is one of the only interesting transforms I know
+that can take a human brain and change it in subtle,
+non-destructive ways. It's also an argument against dualism.
+- biosphere in a bottle :: There are around 15 million species. 15
+million stem cells will fill only a tiny size, far less than a cubic
+inch. Preserve a single cell from every species on earth in this
+small space, and you will have a record of our current biosphere
+that can be protected. "Hold the genetic data of all species in
+your hand!"
+- chaos lock :: The "arrow of time" points in the direction of
+increasing entropy. The time evolution of chaotic systems depend
+exquisitely on their initial state. If you take a measurement of
+a chaotic system at any given point of time, you can evolve that
+system backwards or forwards based on your measurement. So let's
+say you start the chaotic system in a VERY low entropy state,
+then let it run for a while, then take a measurement with some
+uncertainty. Your measurement is pretty good, but obviously not
+PERFECT. If you evolve the chaotic system back in time, then you
+will see that you don't really reach a state with low entropy an
+hour before (the entropy is easy to measure with surrogates like
+alignment, etc). So use this technique to SEARCH for a more
+accurate measurement! This potentially can give you many more
+orders of magnitude than you could get alone just using an
+instrument. Sometimes it will give you bad results, the the odds
+of it doing that are infinitesimal, and you can just measure a
+couple of times.
+- cryo-evolution :: perhaps there would be a way to rapidly evolve a
+symbiotic bacterial organism that could protect human tissues
+from freezing damage.
+- suicide parasite :: sometimes, people kill themselves for no good
+reason. We often explain this with things like "hidden
+depression" or we say that they had something like chronic jaw or
+back pain. I think that smells of rationalization. I don't buy
+it. I propose that in many suicide cases there is a disease that
+causes the suicidal behavior. We already know that certain
+parasites have mind-bending properties in other animals, even
+mammals like mice. It's not much of a stretch to imagine a
+parasite that causes suicides in humans. Some problems:
+- What does the suicide parasite get out of it? :: This might be
+answered by the whole thing being a glitch caused by
+cross-species contamination. Toxoplasma works this way.
+- What predictions does a disease model make :: suicide should
+be more common among people who share a contagion
+vector. There should be suicides that don't make any
+sense : people who weren't really depressed, who had no
+reason to kill themselves. People who have killed themselves
+should have a higher incidence of some unknown parasite in
+their brains.
+- domestic insects :: People should eat more bugs because they're much
+more efficient, so why not do some major domestication research
+to make very appealing bugs? Beetles, in particular, seem to be
+excellent targets for domestication because they have extreme
+levels of genetic malleability. Remember that lobster was once
+seen as an animal only fit for prisoners to consume!
+- birth-clones :: What if each person was intentionally split at birth
+into a normal embryo and a few "backup" cells which are then
+frozen. The backup cells are created just the same way as natural
+identical twins. The backups can be used to regenerate
+organs. etc. Also, it would be a good sci-fi concept, because you
+could have a culture where people reward people who were
+especially awesome are "reborn" from their backups. Imagine
+having a young Bach every generation, etc.
+- pronunciation guide :: a simple webpage where you type in a word and
+it returns a simple, English sentence describing exactly how to
+pronounce the word. For people who don't want to learn IPA.
+- Learning to Teleport :: This is a story about a person who is
+struggling with his/her society's ideas about teleportation. It's
+considered a fundamental part of being a member of that society
+(after all, the difference between animals and humans is that
+humans are creatures of pure information while animals are
+burdened with base matter, "that's how you travel the stars,
+etc") Humans are born normally, grow up, and then eventually
+transcend via destructive upload. Analogies to jumping off a
+diving board into a pool (which I simply /could not do/ for a
+long time), etc.
+- no-float-ice :: cup that has cross beams at the bottom where ice
+forms. Then when you drink liquid from the glass, the ice stays
+at the bottom and doesn't hit your lips. For bars and fancy
+things.
+- bitcoins for immigrants :: A common case with Mexican immigrants
+(illegal or not) is that they want to send money they've earned
+in the US back to their families in Mexico. They currently do
+this through things like Money Gram or Western Union, and they
+get fleeced in the process with fees. Bitcoin could greatly
+reduce the cost of sending money from America to Mexico, but I
+don't believe that it's currently used for that among Mexican
+immigrants currently due to lack of knowledge. I bet you could
+set up physical locations like those obnoxious Western Union huts
+in places like Texas, Arizona, etc, and greatly undercut
+them. Or, perhaps some educational seminars about bitcoin might
+be in order. There's some money to be made there because there is
+great demand, and it's a good thing to boot!
+- reverse eye-tracking :: A painting that is actually a digital screen
+with a camera. It records people's eye tracks permanently. It's
+"artistic" because paintings are normally these things that you
+look at without changing, but this one is changed the second you
+look at it, recording where /you/ looked forever for others to
+see. Make it be a painting of a woman and see the trolling as the
+breasts and groin area light up with interest from all the males
+passing by.
+- smart toilets :: Instead of using indirect measures like infrared
+detectors of the presence of a person, use computer vision to
+directly measure whether the toilet needs to be flushed. I think
+a lot of things will end up going this way as we get better
+computer vision.
+- validate chemopreservation :: chemopreservation is difficult to
+validate because it destroys the functionality of a brain, and
+brain simulation will take a long time to mature as a
+technology. However, one very powerful way to validate
+chemopreservation would be to have a person/animal learn
+something with high complexity such as a number or the solution
+to a maze, or a flashbulb memory. Then you preserve their brain
+chemically, slice it up, and read /that specific memory/ from the
+detailed brain scan. Much more difficult, but much more doable.
+- candy screw :: edible candy screw with candy nuts that you can screw
+as well.
+- better bibliography :: when writing a thesis or paper, have the
+bibliography not just be an opaque list of resources, but have it
+be a list of /summaries/ and /qualities/ that each paper has in
+the context of the paper being written. When examining a
+bibliography, I want to know if reading the papers in the
+bibliography are worth my time, and I also am probably also
+interested in exactly the things that are being discussed in the
+paper I'm reading. The bibliography is the perfect place to
+provide information about the referenced papers from the
+author's perspective. I will use this biographic form in my own
+thesis!
+- chess visual :: to show the vast size of the game trees considered
+by computers, show two people playing chess in a void. They are
+floating in space, and there is a simple chess board between
+them. Then, as they play, the game tree's they are considering
+are drawn behind him. The root of the tree starts centered in
+their heads or whatever they use to think, and the tree grows out
+from behind, never crossing the dividing plane between the two
+players. Each player's tree is a different color. As they grow,
+there are animations for pruning, etc. Eventually, they look like
+the hemispheres of a brain, wings, etc. A human's tree might
+occasionally have a long chain, while the computer tree would be
+more uniform. You could compare deep blue and a modern
+laptop. Use actual data when fighting two computers!
+- tamper proof gold bars :: [[http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/gold-plated-tungsten-alloy-bar.html][this site]] offers gold plated tungsten bars
+as "novelty" items. One reason to prefer coins is because they
+are much harder to counterfeit because there is less surface area
+to mass ratio. However, gold bars are still a great design
+because they can hold a lot of value in a small space. A gold bar
+could be given the same protections (and more) that gold coins
+have to offer by changing it into a "gold book", which would have
+hundreds of "pages" of gold bound together. This could be
+implemented with multiple steel rods going through the book which
+can be removed, or some more classier mechanism for holding the
+pages. The point is that the bar can be EASILY subdivided (and
+people would perform this test before buying), thus guaranteeing
+it's authenticity.
+- high school science :: this is a lesson in scientific ethics. The
+goal is to calculate /g/, the local gravitational
+acceleration. The students are told that the textbook says it's
+/exactly/ 9.81 before they start the experiment. See how they
+doctor their results to get closer to the textbook value. It's
+neat because for any given school, /g/ is probably *not* exactly
+equal to 9.81, because that is just an average!
+- opencourseware subtitles :: there are people who type up lectures at
+MIT while they are being given, so that hearing impared students
+can follow along. These recordings should be kept and given to
+OCW for subtitles. If the timestamps of keys are recorded, then
+it is easy to make subtitles.
+- screen locking timing :: you use your computer camera to see if you
+are sitting in front of the computer. If you are, then the screen
+will never lock. If you are, then the screen will lock with a
+30-40 second timeout. It's an extension of using inactivity to
+initiate the countdown, just with more information.
+- mirror toilet :: a toilet with a square basin made of mirror instead
+of porcelain. That way, you can see how good of a wipe job you
+have done / watch how your excretion system works.
+- X-ray telepresence :: given that a doctor is operating on a patient
+via telepresence, one cool things you can do is shine X-rays into
+the patient to view the insides during real time. (This doesn't
+expose either the doctor or patient to chronically damaging
+amounts of X-rays) If the system was coupled with a Bayesian
+model of the layout of the structure, and the x-rays were only
+fired whenever the uncertainty of the model reached a certain
+threshold, then the radiation damage and surgery risk could be
+minimized.
+- superfluid vascular system :: I wonder what would happen if you
+replaced the blood in a human with a superfluid. What would the
+physical dynamics be? Would the superfluid flow through the
+vasculature, or would it ignore it and travel through the cells,
+or something else entirely. Since superfluids need to be cold to
+retain their superfluidity, how would the dynamics change during
+perfusion of a superfluid, where the fluid gains and looses
+superfluidity as it goes deeper into the body and is cooled by
+superfluid from upstream. In summary there are two things to
+simulate 1.) replace all blood in human with superfluid
+instantly. 2.) perfuse superfluid into human.
+- projective guessing :: I think that we read and see things by
+making a really good guess about what we're expecting to see,
+and then searching for our guess in what we see. If it really
+doesn't match, then we start to make more guesses / analyze the
+image from first principles, but most stuff is projective
+guessing.
+- Intestinal flora maintenance :: why not inoculate babies at birth
+with "ideal" gut flora instead of whatever bullshit they
+naturally get, thus giving them optimal digestive/nutrient
+extraction capabilities. Might also be able to make their farts
+not stink for life, too. MORE IMPORTANTLY, might help to
+preventatively stop some forms of /colic/, which affects 1 in 5
+babies and causes constant screaming and pain for about 5 weeks.
+- server culture -- mirrors :: make a distributed system where people
+can mirror the websites of people they like -- essentially cover
+the server costs of favored websites. This could make popular
+websites run at no cost. The system would require that the
+mirrored content be the same as the official source. Sort of like
+bit-torrent for websites.
+- map programming :: one problem with functional programming is that
+in order to remain functional, you have to pass up arguments up
+into each calling function to get the full range of behavior
+from the lower level functions. Normally people come to a
+compromise involving abstraction and sparing use of dynamic
+variables to configure runtime behavior. What would be the
+advantages of making a programming language where every function
+receives one argument, a map, which contains all the symbol
+bindings it would ever need? This map is passed on to all
+subordinate functions. This way, you could replace functions on
+the fly, and arrange for there to be sensible defaults,
+etc. Might cause more harm than good but is an interesting idea.
+- rest nest :: a small EEG device you would attach to your head when
+you go to sleep at night. ML algorithms would determine your
+particular sleep cycles. This would mostly be an alarm clock that
+you could give a time range, say 7:00AM - 7:15AM, and it would
+wake you up during an ideal time corresponding to then end of one
+of your 90 min sleep cycles. You would feel much more rested upon
+waking up, and would wake up faster. There might be some other
+uses for the EEG data as well.
+- image compression :: use a library like gimp or opencv to process an
+image to make it have less entropy, then store the reverse of
+those operations along with the compressed simpler image as a
+super-compressed image file (possibly accepting some
+losses). Trades file size for decompression time, and allows one
+to cheat by using information in gimp/opencv to compress the
+image.
+- aldehyde-stabalized cryopreservation :: why not use a fixative to
+buy enough time to ramp up cryoprotectants to an acceptable level
+at room temperature? Then, the whole system can be rapidly cooled
+and vitrified. This method "severs the biological link" in that
+the fixatives are highly toxic, but current vitrification
+procedures do this anyway since there can be a lot of freezing
+damage.
+- dilated security camera :: a security camera that would capture
+full video footage of everything at 60fps but then decide to keep
+only every 1 frame every 5 seconds unless there's something
+"interesting" happening.
+- bitcoin wallet :: Part of "server culture", this would be something
+like "coin.your-domain.com" which would serve as
+your personal trusted access to your own bitcoins
+from anywhere.
+- libpay :: this would be a free library which would enable
+micro-donations to software projects and other projects,
+so that you could donate a penny to "emacs" and it would
+be automatically split up to every person who has ever
+contributed to emacs in proportion to the amount of
+community esteem, code quantity, bugs fixed, whatever the
+community decides. This might make it possible for
+programmers to live entirely off of free programming.
+- pronouns :: use capital letters A-Z instead of pronouns. They solve
+pronoun referents and gender neutrality, are short to
+say, and you can encode useful information into the
+choice of letter. For example, instead of "Meetings
+shall be presided over by the president, unless she is
+absent." USE "Meetings shall be presided over by the
+president, unless P is absent." We already use this a
+little, since I and U are reserved for the subject and
+object respectively.
+- phone DSP :: software app that inserts an audio DSP between the
+input to a phone and the output. The DSP is delicious
+and configurable, and can allow men to make their
+voices deeper, etc. The app would allow you to hear
+your own voice as others hear it. Most people hate how
+their own voice sounds. The app would also allow one to
+immediately change the parameters of the DSP using good
+presets.
+- restaurant receipts :: use a carbon copy receipt instead of two stupid
+copies.
+- crossdressing :: Easiest way to disguise oneself as a woman is to
+wear a burka.
+- book-mode :: intelligent color highlighting for books and
+articles. It would disambiguate pronouns and involved
+references. For example, if "Rachael" was assigned the
+color red, and "the blonde haired girl" refers to
+"Rachael", then "the blonde haired girl" would be
+colored red. Also, you could disambiguate multi part
+run-on sentences by highlighting each
+subcomponent. Maybe would also have applications to
+scientific reading.
+- Handheld light Rain measurement :: this would be a clear, teflon
+coated plastic disk with a camera underneath the disk. You would
+be able to hold the device out and it would measure the rate of
+accumulation of water droplets from fine mists and light rain by
+using computer vision to measure the diameters of the drops.
+- Big Brother Farming :: This would be a vision system that would
+individually monitor each plant and turn on water, etc to ensure
+maximum/uniform growth for each plant.
+- Discrete Faucet :: A faucet with discrete ticks instead of
+continuous.
+- Laser Circle :: take a glass microfiliment and shine a laser at one
+end at an oblique angle. It will make a perfect,
+large circle on the wall, converting a laser beam
+into a laser cone, preserving most of the energy of
+the laser.
+- Invisible Glass :: Take a container of liquid and embed a
+glass sculpture made out of glass that has exactly the same index
+of refraction and color of the liquid. Then the sculpture will be
+totally invisible in the container, and will only be revealed
+when the liquid is drained. The container might be a fancy
+wine/spirit bottle or an hourglass.
+- Caterpillar people :: A race of caterpillar like creatures gains
+intelligence after eons of predation by birds, etc. These
+caterpillar creatures still undergo metamorphosis into a large
+butterfly-like creature. The metamorphosis process turns the
+caterpillar's brain into mush and reforms it into a minimal,
+dumb, truly insect-like mind, completely destroying the person
+the caterpillar was. The society develops all sorts of customs and
+religious interpretations of the metamorphosis. It is viewed as
+good and natural by some since it is part of their life cycle and
+necessary to propagate the species, as only the butterflies can
+mate. Some think that the butterflies are still the same person
+because they have the same soul, even they no longer posses the
+memories or personality of the original caterpillar. Some see the
+butterfly form as the "true form" of the species, since the
+butterflies can fly, mate, and are beautiful. Many make a big
+deal out of the fact that 1-2% of the caterpillar's mind is
+actually preserved in the butterfly. Some see it as a terrible
+tragedy and argue that the caterpillars should try to stop the
+metamorphosis by technology. Practically, some very important
+members of society undergo hormone therapy and/or surgery to
+prevent metamorphosis so that they can live longer as themselves.
+This is a continuation of Marvin Minsky's ideas about pain being
+something that preserves our bodies while destroying our minds,
+something that is a remnant from our too harsh animal days that
+hasn't caught up to the fact that we have very complex brains
+now. It's a worst-case scenario about a maladaptive genetic
+legacy. Also, it's inspired by "There She Is!!!", which makes a
+compelling point about homosexuality by introducing a second
+gender characteristic (bunny/cat, male/female), which makes
+homophobia look very silly. Here, our own biological legacy of
+pain and death is made to look like the tragedy it is through the
+lens of the the caterpillar people.
+- relationships as a business :: [[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx][Turnover-Crisis]] is an excellent talk
+about the "culture of quitting," which is about better business
+by letting people go instead of keeping them around past their
+"apex". Focuses on information transfer. Cool idea of an alumni
+network, which for relationships would be a group of satisfied
+ex-lovers, who would recommend new people your way, and who might
+consider coming to you again, refreshed from their time away with
+new stories/experiences. I should look for examples of this and
+how they worked out.
+- psychic crystal :: in a science fiction story, this would be an
+object that is very easy to move physically but is extremely
+difficult to move with telekinesis.
+- true reflection :: There's a "true mirror" in the MIT student center
+-- it's two normal mirrors at right angles, like staring at a
+corner of a room. The light reflects so that it shows you what
+you actually look like, instead of your mirror image.
+- remote control wasp :: use computer to drive wings with remote
+power/logic.
+- encrypted email phone book :: public (distributed?) database of
+email->private-key pairs, to enable automatic encryption.
+- universal eye color :: every equivalent creature will see each
+others' eyes as black -- it's universal. Even if the creatures
+see in radio waves, and their eyes are 2m long pieces of jagged
+metal, when those creatures look at each other, they will see
+black, the absence of light and color (since it's being absorbed
+by the sensor array).
+- intelligent microwave :: it learns where the hot nodes of its fields
+are, and uses them to evenly heat any food item. It has an infrared
+camera or something to keep track of how hot the food is. That way,
+you don't get bowls where the edges are boiling, while the center is
+still frozen. Requires a little bit of intelligence/vision, since
+the exact pattern of heating totally depends on the exact shape of
+the food.  Wouldn't need a carousel, and wouldn't need a timer,
+just a desired temperature. Could also detect ice, and automatically
+defrost the parts which are frozen. Might be able to work much
+faster since it can avoid overheating; might have problems with
+heating the insides of thick things, might need a weight sensor too.
++ Would be much cleaner than other microwaves, since food would
+"sputter" and splash liquid much less.
++ Throw in some SIFT+R processing to match previously cooked foods
+and learn the exact heating profiles for things that have been
+cooked before -- it can get faster the more it's used.
+- Flesh pillow :: a pillow like the arm or torso of a human, complete
+with simulated temperature, bones, and heartbeat.
+- light filter :: (like light tweezers) to mechanically separate
+fluids with different index of refraction
+- silver socks :: socks laced with silver for the antimicrobial
+properties.
+- Rod of Moses :: device to distill urine through evaporation and
+easily dispose of urea crystals for use in desert -- produce
+drinkable water and live an extra few days!
+- lottery scraper :: web scraper which monitors various lotteries,
+looking for "special" gimmick changes in the rules (like 4x
+winnings on Wednesdays) and computes expected value...
+- Memristiors novel design :: make an evolutionary algorithm to make
+old stuff using all four basic circuit elements.
+- Conductive concrete :: concrete that has embedded metal fibers so
+that it can conduct electricity.
+- little bitty melting pot :: might be useful for some types of
+manufacturing/3D printing -- how small can an induction melter be
+made, for example.
+- true pure tones :: hear a true pure tone by direct stimulation of the
+nerves of the ear
+- mechanical analogue to the electrical op-amp ::  would be an object
+with two levers -- you pull on one lever and the other moves the
+same way, no matter what's in the way or what it is driving. This
+analogy could be useful to teach op amps to people.
+- light capacitor :: suspend some ball of material with a high index
+of refraction and shine light into it so it gets stuck -- would
+the light stay trapped forever? Could you build up unlimited
+quantities of light inside the sphere (which could then be
+released slowly by frustrated internal reflection?
+- reading comprehension :: use the screen capture routine to make a
+quiz program that constructs questions about the content you
+seemed to gloss over while reading. could be easy if the pdf came
+with embedded questions.  Dylan: automatically generate
+word-cloud about the parts you found most interesting; help
+others who read the same stuff by drawing attention to the
+interesting parts.
+- optimize an article :: capture reading of a scientific article via
+screen capture while people read it, then use it to make the
+article better. like the movie-pruning idea.
+- movie pruning :: Movies always are too long at first. One way to
+shorten them ``scientifically" is to record blink rate during the
+move and then remove / shorten the frames of the parts in which
+there are a lot of blinking (average this over multiple people)
+better yet, put it online and do it across thousands of people. I
+got this from youtube in which there is an episode of kill bill
+which is composed entirely of the parts in which people had their
+eyes closed. slogan: want to make a movie people can't take their
+eyes off of? Just take those parts out!
+- explosive thermite epoxy putty :: one part would contain the rust,
+one part the aluminum.
+- concrete epoxy :: epoxy with sand/ some other solid material.
+- hard sword :: make a samurai sword, but use osmiridum instead of
+martensite for the cutting part; it should be a better
+sword.
+- close range wireless :: use the induction technology used to
+recharge electric toothbrushes with no metal links to send data
+without any metal at all!
+- perfect pitch :: learn perfect pitch using another sense in
+combination (sight or touch)
+- bio metallic structure :: metal grids with seeds inside, which grow
+together and form a durable biological matrix. The metal
+substrate delivers water. (maybe use plastic instead of metal?)
+Dylan: enrich plants with inorganic compounds; electrical
+interfaces in cellular plant matter => remote-controlled
+photosynthetic/bioluminescent structures.
+- conducting extracellular matrix :: to allow better control of
+organic systems and an enhanced nervous system.
+- cross-modal memory hashing :: a way to retrieve memories more
+robustly.
+- wooden refrigerator :: to give food a better taste Dylan: like
+barrels for wine, or planks for salmon. Maybe just have "flavor
+planks" for your pre-existing fridge. Need to mitigate effect of
+temperature on volatility?
+- radioactive transmutation molecule by molecule :: create precious
+metals or something else economically advantageous. Best
+transmutation I can come up with is mercury into gold, but it's
+not economically viable.
+- preservation via crowding :: inoculate food with tons of harmless
+bacteria so that there's no room for bad bacteria as a method of
+preservation
+- old school preservation :: Pasteur - style holding jar with siphon
+as a way to store sterilized liquids at room temperature
+indefinitely w/o refrigeration.
+- restaurant policy :: Throw rude people out of restaurant as a matter
+of course -- make ambiance much better.
+- clean windows :: make something that mixes soap with fire hydrant
+water (and reduces the pressure a bit) and use it
+to clean windows of buildings.
+- ocarina :: make an ocarina out of pure silver
+- fire pen :: pen which burns words on to the page, thus never needing
+any ink. Is there a way to make it runnable from body heat?
+- website to design your own soda :: and label, and have it mailed to
+you / sell it from your own online store.
+- solar panels :: that float on the ocean
+- handcuffs with more than two cuffs (3?) :: great for daisy chaining
+people, binding them to environment, etc.
+- vector based SOUND files :: like the pictures but with SOUND. codify
+sound in a language with enough symbols so that it can describe
+everything and encode it in that. would be like going from speech
+to text or smtg. Could also store sound as an image of the
+wavefront encoded as a vector image.
+- genetically engineered glowing fruit :: They have some animals that
+can glow, but glowing fruit that you eat would be AWESOME!
+- The body as a key to memory :: IF memories are encoded using
+particular sensory impressions, what happens if the sensory organ
+itself changes?  those memories would become inaccessible. maybe
+this is why we can't remember much from our childhoods. also,
+could this happen throughout life as well? Could S remember stuff
+from his childhood?
+- lighter flint on spring :: make hot, throw it at something, and it
+makes sparkles!
+- rare bubbles :: Engineer a material which has both ductility and high
+surface tension to make the "third"
+minimal-surface-energy solution to a bubble suspended
+between two equal-diameter rings. (Solutions are
+cylindrical catenary curve, two separated half-bubbles,
+and a double-cone)
+- Textbook whose content can be varied continuously :: alter level of
+difficulty, rigor, diction, emphasize crossover with certain
+other discipline, etc. Content generated dynamically from
+knowledge base, along with questions that are moreover altered to
+guide knowledge acquisition. Motivation: One book of
+knowledge. /One./
+#+BEGIN_HTML
+<p class="end"> Still want more? Visit the <a href="./ideas.html">Raw
+Ideas</a> page, but prepare for extreme half-bakedness. </p>
+#+END_HTML

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