1.1 --- a/org/ideas.org	Thu Jan 16 10:30:23 2014 -0500
     1.2 +++ b/org/ideas.org	Thu Jan 16 10:37:11 2014 -0500
     1.3 @@ -31,14 +31,133 @@
     1.4  getting credit.
     1.5  #+end_quote
     1.6  
     1.7 +<<<<<<< local
     1.8  - pronuncation guide :: a simple webpage where you type in a word and
     1.9       it returns a simpe, English sentence describing exactly how to
    1.10       pronounce the word. For people who don't want to learn IPA. 
    1.11 +=======
    1.12 +- learning to teleport :: scifi idea, this is a story about a person
    1.13 +     who is struggling with his/her society's ideas about
    1.14 +     teleportation. It's considered a fundamental part of being a
    1.15 +     member of that society (after all, the difference between animals
    1.16 +     and humans is that humans are creatures of pure information while
    1.17 +     animals are burdened with base matter, "that's how you travel the
    1.18 +     stars, etc") Humans are born normally, grow up, and then
    1.19 +     eventually transcend via destructive upload. Analogies to jumping
    1.20 +     off a diving board into a pool (which I simply /could not do/ for
    1.21 +     a long time), etc.     
    1.22 +>>>>>>> other
    1.23  
    1.24 +<<<<<<< local
    1.25  - touch vision :: inspired by GelSight, I want to reexamine cortex and
    1.26                    see if I could implement touch as a very low range
    1.27                    form of vision.
    1.28 +=======
    1.29 +- bitcoins for immigrants :: A common case with Mexican immigrants
    1.30 +     (illegal or not) is that they want to send money they've earned
    1.31 +     in the US back to their families in Mexico. They currently do this
    1.32 +     through things like Money Gram or Western Union, and they get
    1.33 +     fleeced in the process with fees. Bitcoin could greatly reduce
    1.34 +     the cost of sending money from America to Mexico, but I don't
    1.35 +     believe that it's currently used for that among Mexican
    1.36 +     immigrants currently due to lack of knowledge. I bet you could
    1.37 +     set up physical locations like those obnoxious Western Union huts
    1.38 +     in places like Texas, Arizona, etc, and greatly undercut
    1.39 +     them. Or, perhaps some educational seminars about bitcoin might
    1.40 +     be in order. There's some money to be made there because there is
    1.41 +     great demand, and it's a good thing to boot!
    1.42 +>>>>>>> other
    1.43  
    1.44 +<<<<<<< local
    1.45 +=======
    1.46 +- reverse eye-tracking :: A painting that is actually a digital screen
    1.47 +     with a camera. It records people's eye tracks permanently. It's
    1.48 +     "artistic" because paintings are normally these things that you
    1.49 +     look at without changing, but this one is changed the second you
    1.50 +     look at it, recording where /you/ looked forever for others to
    1.51 +     see. Make it be a painting of a woman and see the trolling as the
    1.52 +     breasts and groin area light up with interest from all the males
    1.53 +     passing by.
    1.54 +
    1.55 +- smart toilets :: Instead of using indirect measures like infrared
    1.56 +                   detectors of the presence of a person, use computer
    1.57 +                   vision to directly measure whether the toilet needs
    1.58 +                   to be flushed. I think a lot of things will end up
    1.59 +                   going this way as we get better computer vision.
    1.60 +
    1.61 +- validate chemopreservation :: chemopreservation is difficult to
    1.62 +     validate because it destroys the functionality of a brain, and
    1.63 +     brain simulation will take a long time to mature as a
    1.64 +     technology. However, one very powerful way to validate
    1.65 +     chemopreservation would be to have a person/animal learn
    1.66 +     something with high complexity such as a number or the solution
    1.67 +     to a maze, or a flashbulb memory. Then you preserve their brain
    1.68 +     chemically, slice it up, and read /that specific memory/ from the
    1.69 +     detailed brain scan. Much more difficult, but much more doable.
    1.70 +
    1.71 +- candy screw :: edible candy screw with candy nuts that you can screw
    1.72 +                 as well. 
    1.73 +
    1.74 +- better bibliography :: when writing a thesis or paper, have the
    1.75 +     bibliography not just be an opaque list of resources, but have it
    1.76 +     be a list of /summaries/ and /qualities/ that each paper has in
    1.77 +     the context of the paper being written. When examining a
    1.78 +     bibliography, I want to know if reading the papers in the
    1.79 +     bibliography are worth my time, and I also am probably also
    1.80 +     interested in exactly the things that are being discussed in the
    1.81 +     paper I'm reading. The bibliography is the perfect place to
    1.82 +     provide information about the referenced papers from the
    1.83 +     author's perspective. I will use this biographic form in my own
    1.84 +     thesis. 
    1.85 +
    1.86 +- digital inter-library loan :: libraries at universities already do
    1.87 +     inter-library loans for books, so why not do the same for access
    1.88 +     to stupid paywalled digital papers? All the universities could
    1.89 +     allow access to articles for registered students to all the files
    1.90 +     available through any participating university. This could be
    1.91 +     achieved by sending requests through proxies at participating
    1.92 +     universities. Each university would decide who at the university
    1.93 +     can access the proxy network. Access to the proxy network could
    1.94 +     be made easy using something like http://libx.org/.
    1.95 +
    1.96 +- chess visual :: to show the vast size of the game trees considered
    1.97 +                  by computers, show two people playing chess in a
    1.98 +                  void. They are floating in space, and there is a
    1.99 +                  simple chess board between them. Then, as they play,
   1.100 +                  the game tree's they are considering are drawn
   1.101 +                  behind him. The root of the tree starts centered in
   1.102 +                  their heads or whatever they use to think, and the
   1.103 +                  tree grows out from behind, never crossing the
   1.104 +                  dividing plane between the two players. Each
   1.105 +                  player's tree is a different color. As they grow,
   1.106 +                  there are animations for pruning, etc. Eventually,
   1.107 +                  they look like the hemispheres of a brain, wings,
   1.108 +                  etc. A human's tree might occasionally have a long
   1.109 +                  chain, while the computer tree would be more
   1.110 +                  uniform. You could compare deep blue and a modern
   1.111 +                  laptop. Use actual data when fighting two computers! 
   1.112 +
   1.113 +- time verification :: some standard way to verify that some piece of
   1.114 +     data was recorded at a specific time. Might involve a time
   1.115 +     server, a key for each time period, something like that.
   1.116 +
   1.117 +- tamper proof gold bars :: [[http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/gold-plated-tungsten-alloy-bar.html][this site]] offers gold plated tungsten bars
   1.118 +     as "novelty" items. One reason to prefer coins is because they
   1.119 +     are much harder to counterfeit because there is less surface area
   1.120 +     to mass ratio. However, gold bars are still a great design
   1.121 +     because they can hold a lot of value in a small space. A gold bar
   1.122 +     could be given the same protections (and more) that gold coins
   1.123 +     have to offer by changing it into a "gold book", which would have
   1.124 +     hundreds of "pages" of gold bound together. This could be
   1.125 +     implemented with multiple steel rods going through the book which
   1.126 +     can be removed, or some more classier mechanism for holding the
   1.127 +     pages. The point is that the bar can be EASILY subdivided (and
   1.128 +     people would perform this test before buying), thus guaranteeing
   1.129 +     it's authenticity.
   1.130 +
   1.131 +- aurellem shirt :: I should make an aurellem star symbol tee-shirt. 
   1.132 +
   1.133 +>>>>>>> other
   1.134  - high school science :: this is a lesson in scientific ethics. The
   1.135       goal is to calculate /g/, the local gravitational
   1.136       acceleration. The students are told that the textbook says it's
   1.137 @@ -63,7 +182,7 @@
   1.138                     wipe job you have done / watch how your excretion
   1.139                     system works.
   1.140  
   1.141 -- test dummies :: why don't we clone encephalic humans and use then to
   1.142 +- test dummies :: why don't we clone anencephalic humans and use then to
   1.143                    test /in vivo/ human organ systems and drugs? It
   1.144                    would be ethical as long as there are women who are
   1.145                    willing to host the clones, and it would be a
   1.146 @@ -75,7 +194,7 @@
   1.147  - X-ray telepresence :: given that a doctor is operating on a patient
   1.148       via telepresence, one cool things you can do is shine X-rays into
   1.149       the patient to view the insides during real time. If the system
   1.150 -     was coupled with a Baysean model of the layout of the structure,
   1.151 +     was coupled with a Bayesian model of the layout of the structure,
   1.152       and the x-rays were only fired whenever the uncertainty of the
   1.153       model reached a certain threshold, then the radiation damage
   1.154       and surgery risk could be minimized.
   1.155 @@ -138,8 +257,8 @@
   1.156  - image compression :: use a library like gimp or opencv to process an
   1.157       image to make it have less entropy, then store the reverse of
   1.158       those operations along with the compressed simpler image as a
   1.159 -     super-compressed image file (possibly sccapting some
   1.160 -     lesses). Trades file size for decompression time, and allows one
   1.161 +     super-compressed image file (possibly accepting some
   1.162 +     losses). Trades file size for decompression time, and allows one
   1.163       to cheat by using information in gimp/opencv to compress the
   1.164       image. 
   1.165  
   1.166 @@ -318,7 +437,7 @@
   1.167       by the sensor array).
   1.168  
   1.169  - intelligent microwave :: it learns where the hot nodes of its fields
   1.170 -  are, and uses them to evenly heat any food item. It has an infared
   1.171 +  are, and uses them to evenly heat any food item. It has an infrared
   1.172    camera or something to keep track of how hot the food is. That way,
   1.173    you don't get bowls where the edges are boiling, while the center is
   1.174    still frozen. Requires a little bit of intelligence/vision, since
   1.175 @@ -362,7 +481,7 @@
   1.176  
   1.177  - UROP :: magnet gear/metal teeth tape 
   1.178  
   1.179 -- rod of moses :: device to distill urine through evaporation and
   1.180 +- Rod of Moses :: device to distill urine through evaporation and
   1.181                    easily dispose of urea crystals for use in desert --
   1.182                    produce drinkable water.
   1.183