diff org/good-ideas.org @ 155:9bf4f0d5af68

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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     1.1 --- a/org/good-ideas.org	Thu Dec 10 20:55:09 2015 -0800
     1.2 +++ b/org/good-ideas.org	Tue Jan 26 23:32:36 2016 -0800
     1.3 @@ -40,6 +40,119 @@
     1.4  <hr/>
     1.5    #+END_HTML
     1.6  
     1.7 +** Cure for Color Blindness 
     1.8 +
     1.9 +   Could it be possible to administer some retroviruses via direct
    1.10 +   injection to the retina, to cause some of the cells in the retina
    1.11 +   to begin expressing different color pigments? The brain ought to
    1.12 +   easily sort out the rest and enable color vision. Furthremore,
    1.13 +   could we add some more colors to baesline human eyes? Theory --
    1.14 +   people who are color blind have better color spatial accuity for
    1.15 +   the colors they can see, because this it the tradeoff here involved
    1.16 +   with the retrovirus therapy. Re-purposing color detectors to see
    1.17 +   new colors at the expense of spatial acuity for the old set of
    1.18 +   colors.
    1.19 +
    1.20 +** Passion of the Christ Missed Opportunity 
    1.21 + 
    1.22 +   In the Passion of the Christ, they do the entire show using Latin,
    1.23 +   Aramaic, etc, with subtitles. They should have had a part where
    1.24 +   Jesus does the sermon on the mount, he turns to the camera, and
    1.25 +   starts speaking in English, with no subtitles. It would have been
    1.26 +   1.) biblically accurate and 2.) awesome. It would have been such a
    1.27 +   powerful example of Jesus' divinity, and it felt like they were
    1.28 +   setting up for it the entire movie, and they missed it!
    1.29 +   
    1.30 +** Xenobiotic Chimeric Methalation Rewriting
    1.31 +
    1.32 +   You make chimeric sea urchins with human reproductive stem cells,
    1.33 +   so that the sea urchins produce sea urchin like HUMAN sperm and
    1.34 +   eggs. Then you can have two males / females reproduce without the
    1.35 +   methylation problem, by using the sea urchins as intermediades. And
    1.36 +   the normal problems of human chimeras are avoided because the sea
    1.37 +   urchins are too simple. 
    1.38 +
    1.39 +** Physical PGP Signatures
    1.40 +   
    1.41 +   You punch into your phone "I want to sign a contract" It gives you
    1.42 +   a gensym (or you enter a name) like:
    1.43 +   https://contracts.example.com/car-insurance-2015-09-26
    1.44 +   
    1.45 +   Then you sign your name, date, and include the link on the contract
    1.46 +   under "PGP sig". Then you take a picture with your phone and enter
    1.47 +   your signing password. It gets uploaded to your website and the
    1.48 +   image gets PGP signed with your key. Now you have a timestamped
    1.49 +   archive of the contract, and anyone can verify it by looking at the
    1.50 +   physical contract itself! 
    1.51 +
    1.52 +** The Digital Third Eye
    1.53 +
    1.54 +   You wire in a third optical input to the human brain, but it
    1.55 +   doesn't tranduce light form the real world, bus instead is
    1.56 +   connected to the "internet of things" and shows you metadata about
    1.57 +   things you are looking at // serves as an interface to your own
    1.58 +   mind and body. Then eventually simply real things without metadata
    1.59 +   seem flat and fake compared to the objects in cities and other
    1.60 +   annotated areas. This third eye doesn't occupy any of your normal
    1.61 +   visual field but actually EXPANDS your visual field.
    1.62 +
    1.63 +** Ultimate Limits of Monogamy
    1.64 +
    1.65 +   Let's say that you're immortal and monogamous. The longer you live
    1.66 +   with your partner, the more you build an internal model of them,
    1.67 +   and they you. Eventually these models may become complete, and then
    1.68 +   you two are actually one single recursive entity which references
    1.69 +   itself. As you offload more processing to the other (such as old
    1.70 +   couples actually do -- "remember when we were at that place,
    1.71 +   what-was-his-name honey?"), then computationally you are a single
    1.72 +   mind distributed across two bodies. (There's a reason why old
    1.73 +   couples often die as a pair). You might decide to actually merge
    1.74 +   bodies eventually. But then, you were both monogamous, so the
    1.75 +   combined person will be monogamous (and lonely because it lacks a
    1.76 +   partner). So you get married again, rinse, wash, repeat. All the
    1.77 +   monogamous people within a certain "compatability group" eventually
    1.78 +   become one. Our "social center of mass" doesn't lie within our own
    1.79 +   bodies! 
    1.80 +
    1.81 +** Dream Rewinding 
    1.82 +
    1.83 +   How to record a complete dream without disturbing it or modifying
    1.84 +   your brain? you need to be an upload: split yourself, and one of
    1.85 +   you stays awake whike the other sleeps. then you detect a dream in
    1.86 +   progress by monotoring rapid eye movememt in your sleeping self,
    1.87 +   and you wake yourself up every few minutes and tell yoursef about
    1.88 +   the dream. Then sleeping-your restarts the dream, continuation
    1.89 +   passing style, forgetting everything that was just said, and you
    1.90 +   repeat this process until the dream is over. Then awake-you and
    1.91 +   sleeping-you merge each other by taking sleeping-you and replaying
    1.92 +   the memories of awake-you, and you write a final report on the
    1.93 +   dream using the "saccade" reports to jog your memory.
    1.94 +
    1.95 +   It would really let you directly test theories of memory because
    1.96 +   you can test a person every second if you want to. I see a couple
    1.97 +   ways this could play out: you could report a dream that follows a
    1.98 +   linear narrative, with the story advancing a little bit each time
    1.99 +   (the "storytelling" hypothesis), you might say something totally
   1.100 +   different each time (the "garbage memory access" hypothesis), or
   1.101 +   something even weider like where you report exactly the same thing
   1.102 +   between seconds 0-20, then something totally different during
   1.103 +   seconds 20-40, etc.
   1.104 +
   1.105 +** Denser than Osmium
   1.106 +
   1.107 +   Do the "misicibility" thing with an osmium alloy to get something
   1.108 +   even more dense. Basically osmium + something else might be denser
   1.109 +   then pure osmium.
   1.110 +
   1.111 +** AI Hypnosis 
   1.112 +  
   1.113 +   Hypnosis might be good for studying AI, becuse it might probide a
   1.114 +   "debugger" for ananlyzing the human mind. I briefly tried this
   1.115 +   while at MIT, but it needs MUCH more work to be properly
   1.116 +   evaulated. Also, things you can do under hypnosis provide
   1.117 +   constraints on what the mind's capabilities are. Also, hypnosis
   1.118 +   iteslf is a worthwhile thing to study in its own right. 
   1.119 +
   1.120  ** The Ocean Becomes a Drop 
   1.121     Upload faces challenges to grow into the type of person that can
   1.122     join the greater society -- a god. They have to go though quests