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     1.4 +#+title: Big List O' Ideas
     1.5 +#+author: Robert McIntyre
     1.6 +#+email: rlm@mit.edu
     1.7 +#+description: list of ideas from Robert McIntyre
     1.8 +#+keywords: aurellem ideas half-baked random
     1.9 +#+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org
    1.10 +#+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org
    1.11 +#+babel: :mkdirp yes :noweb yes :exports both
    1.12 +#+HTML_HEAD_EXTRA: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../css/ideas.css" />
    1.13 +#+OPTIONS: num:nil
    1.14 +
    1.15 +* Ideas
    1.16 +  # :PROPERTIES:
    1.17 +  # :HTML_CONTAINER_CLASS: ideas
    1.18 +  # :END:
    1.19 +
    1.20 +  This is a list of all the good ideas I've had that I felt like writing
    1.21 +  down for the past ~ 10 years. Some of them could be practical
    1.22 +  inventions and are "just" waiting for that 95% perspiration to bring
    1.23 +  them to fruition, some are ideas for science fiction, and some are
    1.24 +  simple observations.  They are arranged roughly in reverse
    1.25 +  chronological order, with the most recent ideas at the top of the
    1.26 +  list. The ones at the bottom of the list are heavily influenced by my
    1.27 +  time at MIT, the ones at the top, by my time at 21st Century Medicine.
    1.28 +
    1.29 +  If you find some of these interesting and would like to collaborate on
    1.30 +  them with me or discuss them in more detail, I'd love to hear from
    1.31 +  you. You can email me at ideas@aurellem.org.
    1.32 +
    1.33 +  If you want to use one of these ideas as your own and run with it,
    1.34 +  please feel free. I'd love to hear about it if you do.
    1.35 +
    1.36 +  #+begin_quote
    1.37 +  There's no end to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care about
    1.38 +  getting credit.
    1.39 +  #+end_quote
    1.40 +
    1.41 +
    1.42 +  #+BEGIN_HTML
    1.43 +<hr/>
    1.44 +  #+END_HTML
    1.45 +
    1.46 +** The Ocean becomes a Drop 
    1.47 +   Upload faces challenges to grow into they type of person that can
    1.48 +   join the greater society -- a god. They have to go though quests
    1.49 +   that replicate all the things that humanity had to accomplish, like
    1.50 +   going to the moon, by themselves.
    1.51 +
    1.52 +** Butterfly Drone
    1.53 +   If big butterflies used to exist, then maybe we could make
    1.54 +   butterfly-inspired drones!
    1.55 +
    1.56 +** Methylation Sex-Symmetry Breaking
    1.57 +   Human sex cells have methylation patterns that encode male/female
    1.58 +   origin. If you combine two male patterns, the fetus grows "too
    1.59 +   fast" and dies. Two female patterns causes the fetus to enter a
    1.60 +   "vegatable" state and fail to develop. Evolutionary biologists say
    1.61 +   that this reflects the asymmetry of energy investement for creating
    1.62 +   offspring. If that's true, then species that cast-spawn will lack
    1.63 +   this asymmetry, and give clues about how to remove it in humans. If
    1.64 +   even cast spawners like sea urchins have it, then that means
    1.65 +   there's something deeper going on!
    1.66 +
    1.67 +** Homosexual Reproduction
    1.68 +   You take genetic material from two males and put it into an egg
    1.69 +   cell that has had all genetic material removed. Or, you take the
    1.70 +   genetic material from one egg and put it in another egg. This would
    1.71 +   allow homosexual couples to genetically reproduce. One technical
    1.72 +   challenge blocking this technique is that human gametes have
    1.73 +   methylation patterns that encode male/female origin, and only a
    1.74 +   male+female pattern gives rise to viable offspring. You could
    1.75 +   "recondition" male / female gametes to give them the opposite
    1.76 +   pattern, perhaps by incubating them in the appropriate
    1.77 +   environment. You also could try taking stem cells and making them
    1.78 +   form the appropriate structures in vitro.
    1.79 +
    1.80 +** Poly-Vitrification
    1.81 +   Large molecules such as PVP are able to vitrify at around -20C, and
    1.82 +   at farily small concentrations. IF they could be introduced into
    1.83 +   cells, they would be quite useful as vitrification agents. However,
    1.84 +   it's difficult to get them in because they are so big. So instead,
    1.85 +   use smaller agents which combine together into polymers at low
    1.86 +   temperature. In particular, Fructose, trehalose, and glycerol seem
    1.87 +   to have the desired properties (though you need to make versions of
    1.88 +   fructose and trehalose that can penetrate).
    1.89 +
    1.90 +** Whole Brain Perfusion Embedding
    1.91 +   Do the standard EM embedding protocol, but skip the osmium step,
    1.92 +   and use the "perfusion pausing" method to prevent overextraction
    1.93 +   during the dehydration and embedding steps. I think that you can
    1.94 +   perfuse resins into the brain, simply because you can perfuse
    1.95 +   viscous rubber when doing vascular casts.
    1.96 +
    1.97 +** Very Slow Physiological Pressure Perfusion
    1.98 +   Less extreme example of the "perfusion pausing" trick -- just keep
    1.99 +   the perfusion running and don't put the perfusion target into the
   1.100 +   liquid as deep.
   1.101 +
   1.102 +** Perfusion Pausing
   1.103 +   One problem with doing perfusion of heads / organs where the veins
   1.104 +   freely leak fluid is that if you STOP the perfusion, you rapidly
   1.105 +   loose pressure in the organ as your perfusate leaks out. You can
   1.106 +   prevent this by submerging the organ/head/rat whatever in fluid at
   1.107 +   an appropriate deepness. You would have to slowly decrease the flow
   1.108 +   rate while simultaneously lowering the perfusing object into the
   1.109 +   fluid. To start again, reverse the process -- reengage the
   1.110 +   peristaltic pump slowly while removing the organ from the fluid.
   1.111 +
   1.112 +** Textbook Mimiricy Evolution
   1.113 +   As surgery becomes more common, there develops a distinct selective
   1.114 +   pressure for individuals' organ layouts to look more like the
   1.115 +   medical textbooks!
   1.116 +
   1.117 +** Transparent Skin
   1.118 +   Temporary / permament transparent skin. Allows for examination of
   1.119 +   organs / muscles and visual prevention of disease and detection or
   1.120 +   abnormalities / good things eg. excercise optimization.
   1.121 +
   1.122 +** Sweet Information
   1.123 +   Candy with a whole book written in it. Eat a book!
   1.124 +
   1.125 +** Targeted Immunosuppressant
   1.126 +   Just kill off the B-cells and friends that would cause problems in
   1.127 +   a organ-transplant / other situation. AIDS is good at killing these
   1.128 +   cells -- maybe make it can be modified to just target the ones that
   1.129 +   will cause problems. Then you can premptively kill off that part of
   1.130 +   someone's immune system before a transplant. ALSO, you can kill off
   1.131 +   everyone's defenses against other blood types and make people
   1.132 +   effectively type AB+ w.r.t blood transfusions. Actually, why not
   1.133 +   give babies this treatment so that they're automatically compatable
   1.134 +   with all blood types?  It would be like a blood transfusion
   1.135 +   vaccine. The immune system does this already when it's first
   1.136 +   growing; maybe it can be "retrained" to accept new things, or the
   1.137 +   mechanism of immune cell death be co-opted for these purposes.
   1.138 +
   1.139 +** Fuck-you Tetris
   1.140 +   Tetris that actively gives you the worst possible piece.
   1.141 +
   1.142 +** Pockets
   1.143 +   More things should have them! Chairs, tables, cups, hats,
   1.144 +   trashcans, basically anything is better with a pocket.
   1.145 +
   1.146 +** Colored Shower Head
   1.147 +   A shower head add-on that measures the temp of the water and
   1.148 +   changes the color of the water streams w/ an LED to show you the
   1.149 +   temperature. That way you can align to the color you want and see
   1.150 +   the temperature without feeling it.
   1.151 +
   1.152 +** Giant Dragonflies
   1.153 +   We could rapidly MAKE giant dragonflies by evolving modern
   1.154 +   dragonflies in an very oxygen rich environment!
   1.155 +
   1.156 +** Whirlpool of Light
   1.157 +   Shine a laser out into space. But the planet is spinning! What you
   1.158 +   get is a spiral of light! And as this signal expands, does it
   1.159 +   eventually reveal it's quantized nature?
   1.160 +
   1.161 +** Perfusion Cooking
   1.162 +   You do cardiac bypass on an animal like a pig, then pump in tasty,
   1.163 +   tasty perfusate (like marinade) into the animal's
   1.164 +   vasculature. Then, you switch out to saline and increase the
   1.165 +   temperature of the saline to rapidly and uniformly cook the
   1.166 +   animal. It could be the tastiest meat ever!
   1.167 +
   1.168 +** Timestamp Verification
   1.169 +   You sign your message, and it has a timestamp at the top, with a +-
   1.170 +   percision number.  Then you send it over to the public timestamp
   1.171 +   server, which only signs the message if it gets the message within
   1.172 +   the timestamp window. Or the computer just signs the message but
   1.173 +   puts a timestamp at the beginning. So if everyone trusts the
   1.174 +   timestamp server, you can get reliable timestamps, and prove
   1.175 +   priority on ideas, etc.
   1.176 +
   1.177 +** The Great Computing Slow-Down
   1.178 +   In general, our computers are getting faster and faster according
   1.179 +   to Moore's law. However, eventually our brains will be made of the
   1.180 +   same stuff our computers are made of! This has very interesting
   1.181 +   consequences -- I can add 2+2 and get four in about a second. Since
   1.182 +   my neurons actually work at around 10-60 hertz in parallel, this
   1.183 +   means that it takes me around 10-30 operations to do this
   1.184 +   addition. That's actually not bad in terms of computing time. If my
   1.185 +   neurons were as fast as the latest transitors, then most
   1.186 +   calculators (made with earlier transistors) would be SLOWER than me
   1.187 +   at adding numbers. Only the newest, most optimized calculators
   1.188 +   would be faster, and then only about 10 times faster!  This means
   1.189 +   that once we begin to think at the speed of our technology, that
   1.190 +   technology will suddenly seem pitifully slow in comparison to how
   1.191 +   it seems now. And no amount of technical progress will remedy it,
   1.192 +   because that same progress will also make us all think
   1.193 +   faster. We'll either have to settle with living in "slow time" to
   1.194 +   do some computations, or learn to make smarter hardware with
   1.195 +   special optimizations. But this is actually really hard, because
   1.196 +   we'll be working with machines that will appear to us about as fast
   1.197 +   as MECHANICAL computers. So, in the future, all the cool parties
   1.198 +   will be in cyperspace at vastly accelerated speeds compared to how
   1.199 +   we exist now. But at these parties, the computers will SUCK!  Of
   1.200 +   course, this is one of the few things that can save us from AI
   1.201 +   risk, because those AI's won't seem so scary when the're build out
   1.202 +   of rickety old mechanical parts form our perspective.
   1.203 +
   1.204 +** Unitary Reverse Evolution of Chaos+Minds
   1.205 +   Chaotic systems diverge exponentially in state space. Do you get
   1.206 +   anything interesting when part of the physical system associated
   1.207 +   with the chaotic system is a object that performs some sort of
   1.208 +   computation? Is it possible for the computational system to play a
   1.209 +   percision-enabling role in determining the final/initial conditions
   1.210 +   of the chaotic system, just by tracing out thoughts in its decision
   1.211 +   paths? This is probably too vague of an idea right now, I just
   1.212 +   wanted to write it down.
   1.213 +
   1.214 +** Microwave-Time
   1.215 +   The cooking time you enter on most microwaves is insane. It's
   1.216 +   expressed in what I call a "hybrid base", a combination of base 10
   1.217 +   and base 60. You can get absurd things like 100 < 61, and 120 ==
   1.218 +   80! I wonder if these hybrid base systems could be very useful for
   1.219 +   some purposes!
   1.220 +
   1.221 +** Three Eyes
   1.222 +   If you had three eyes, would you still draw cubes like we currently
   1.223 +   draw them? Or would all 2D-representations of 3D space always look
   1.224 +   hopelessly fake?
   1.225 +
   1.226 +** Digital Taste/Smell Assay
   1.227 +   Get a grid of bacteria, each expressing a human taste/smell
   1.228 +   receptor linked to some sort of fluorscent activity or ion
   1.229 +   pump. Use a camera / electrical grid to transduce the smell / taste
   1.230 +   signal into bits! Inspired by gel-sight from MIT.
   1.231 +
   1.232 +** Childrens' Tool Shop
   1.233 +   I think that kids should be provided with tool shops -- these would
   1.234 +   be nice sheds with a good collection of tools to do various things
   1.235 +   -- circuit components and soldering irons, wires, a small lathe,
   1.236 +   drill press, belt sander, a centrifuge, microscope, and telescope,
   1.237 +   etc. The idea is that the kid can now think, "I could use X to do
   1.238 +   this thing that I'm thinking about" -- the building becomes an
   1.239 +   extension of the kid's body & mind.
   1.240 +
   1.241 +** Fluid Display
   1.242 +   Like the previous idea about matching refractances between glass
   1.243 +   and liquid, except you make a lot of switchable glass tubes in
   1.244 +   various patterns in the glass, and actively pump colored liquid
   1.245 +   through the tubes (the tubes have glass-like fluid in them by
   1.246 +   default.) The result is that you can cause the tubes to appear and
   1.247 +   dissappear, and vary their colors as well!
   1.248 +
   1.249 +** Immunoincompatibility
   1.250 +   Take the human genome, and refactor it so that it doesn't use a
   1.251 +   particular codon at all. Then remove the support from our ribosomes
   1.252 +   for that codon. What does this do for us? It makes us immune to
   1.253 +   almost all viruses! There is at least one bacteria that already
   1.254 +   does this to great effect.
   1.255 +
   1.256 +** Life Cycle
   1.257 +   It's called a cycle, right? So, the thing that repeats itself over
   1.258 +   and over, right? Not much of a cycle if you don't come back after
   1.259 +   you die, if you ask me!
   1.260 +
   1.261 +** Car with no Blind Spots
   1.262 +   Use some cameras in the back of the car to augment the rear-view
   1.263 +   mirror so that you never have to turn around in order to lane
   1.264 +   change.
   1.265 +
   1.266 +** Metabolic Windows and Freezing
   1.267 +   You freeze a set of cells using some cryo protocol and 60%
   1.268 +   survive. How can this be explained? It seems to me that if the
   1.269 +   cells are the same, and the conditions homogoneous, then all the
   1.270 +   cells should either die or live. However, suppose that there is a
   1.271 +   metabolic cycle that needs to be in a certain phase for the cell to
   1.272 +   survive. If the cells are asynchronous, then you might end up with
   1.273 +   some cells dying because there were in the wrong part of their
   1.274 +   cycle. This implies that you might be able to cryoprotect cells by
   1.275 +   causing them to enter a certain metabolic mode before freezing.
   1.276 +
   1.277 +** Cryonics Color Appeal
   1.278 +   Perfusate used by cryonics companies could have red food coloring
   1.279 +   in it. It's just a nice touch so that the cryonics patient looks
   1.280 +   more life-like than with clear CPAs, and hopefully might get
   1.281 +   treated with more respect.
   1.282 +
   1.283 +** Paramagnetic CPA
   1.284 +   you take a CPA that can be influenced by magnetic fields so that
   1.285 +   its degrees of freedom are limited. Then, you release the field,
   1.286 +   instantaly increasing the size of the state space of the system and
   1.287 +   dramatically decreasing the temperature enough to plunge the system
   1.288 +   past homogenous nucleation temperature and directly to the glass
   1.289 +   transition temperature, creating a doubly unstable glass at much
   1.290 +   lower CPA concentrations than possible at conventional CPA
   1.291 +   concentrations. A major technical limitation facing this technique
   1.292 +   is that it's a very minor effect -- you can only get about 0.1C
   1.293 +   with most systems that have been studied so far.
   1.294 +
   1.295 +- room temp noodles :: how does the physics of cooking noodles work?
   1.296 +     Could you use a vacuum instead of heat to force water into the
   1.297 +     noodle?
   1.298 +
   1.299 +- personal carbon offset :: feel bad about contribuiting to global
   1.300 +     warming by using electricity / driving a car? Forget trying to
   1.301 +     "conserve" or "minimize your carbon footprint". Follow the
   1.302 +     Platinum rule -- make the world BETTER off than you found it!
   1.303 +     This would be a small, self contained system that sucks C02 out
   1.304 +     of the air. It uses electricity, but it's so efficient at
   1.305 +     removing CO2 that it more than offsets the CO2 produced by even a
   1.306 +     coal plant to produce that electricity. This way, you can still
   1.307 +     drive even a gas guzzler, but have a net negative carbon
   1.308 +     footprint! Maybe something cool could be done with the carbon as
   1.309 +     well. Use as much electricity as you want, but negate the damage
   1.310 +     to the enviroment with more technology. 
   1.311 +
   1.312 +- undoing spermogenesis :: with enough sperm, you can derive the
   1.313 +     donor's entire genome. You gain more confidence in the alleles
   1.314 +     for a particular gene the more sperm you have. Each additional
   1.315 +     sperm gives you the same sort of information you'd get flipping a
   1.316 +     coin and trying to decide whether the coin is H/T of H/H. Is
   1.317 +     there enough sperm in the the average load for you to be as
   1.318 +     confident as mitosis?
   1.319 +
   1.320 +- mars life :: we could engineer life that could survive on mars
   1.321 +     (probably some non-vascular photosynthetic poikilohydric creature
   1.322 +     like a lichen) by taking an extremophile from Antarctica and
   1.323 +     evolving it in increasingly Martian conditions. This could be an
   1.324 +     easy start to a terraforming process.
   1.325 +
   1.326 +- problem with Aubrey de Grey's ideas :: Aubrey de Grey says that we
   1.327 +     might be able to live forever by continually repairing our bodies
   1.328 +     at the cellular level -- he details 7 different mechanisms of
   1.329 +     damage and says that if all of them are dealt with /together/
   1.330 +     that it would stop aging. (You can't miss even one because
   1.331 +     they're all fatal.)  However, it doesn't take into account that
   1.332 +     we are also beings of information and that there is a very real
   1.333 +     software component to our existence. Even if our biological
   1.334 +     chassies can be maintained forever, I think it is unlikely that
   1.335 +     our minds will operate well far outside of the design constraints
   1.336 +     that we've evolved to handle. Say I programmed a webserver with
   1.337 +     the express goal of it being able to serve webpages for month on
   1.338 +     some stock server. I'll do fairly rigorous testing to make sure
   1.339 +     that it can handle the expected load then then some. Now say that
   1.340 +     you want to keep a particular instance of this webserver running
   1.341 +     indefinitely. (The program instance is like your mind and the
   1.342 +     computer it's running on is like your body). You might very well
   1.343 +     be able to keep the physical computer infrastructure running for
   1.344 +     forever by replacing hard drives / ram / CPUs, etc. However,
   1.345 +     since I designed the webserver to work for a month, it probably
   1.346 +     has memory leaks, rare stochastic bugs, or other built in limits
   1.347 +     / constraints (think log files or some date rollover shenanigans)
   1.348 +     that will ultimately kill the webserver even with eternally
   1.349 +     perfect hardware. Do you really expect that a webserver
   1.350 +     engineered to work for 1 month will run for 10 years without
   1.351 +     catastrophically crashing? Not even Apache can do this! In fact,
   1.352 +     if I put in the extreme effort to make it that robust, I've
   1.353 +     wasted time that I could have spent on other projects by pursuing
   1.354 +     an unnecessary engineering goal. Likewise, human minds have only
   1.355 +     ever run for at most 122 years before they are destroyed due to
   1.356 +     hardware degradation. Fixing the hardware doesn't change any
   1.357 +     software bugs that are almost certainly present in the human
   1.358 +     mind. Think of all the pathological things that can go wrong with
   1.359 +     a webserver, multiply it by a million, and that likely how
   1.360 +     evolution has designed our minds. For example, consider memory :
   1.361 +     why should you expect that we have evolved the ability to
   1.362 +     coherently organize memories past say 150 years? There's been
   1.363 +     absolutely no selective pressure for this ability, so you can bet
   1.364 +     that if there's any fitness to be gained from not having
   1.365 +     unlimited memory potential (such as better metabolic efficiency),
   1.366 +     we have it! You might think that maybe we would just forget
   1.367 +     things the same way that we sort of forget things that happen
   1.368 +     earlier in our lives, but complicated information processing
   1.369 +     systems don't have to fail gracefully when they're pushed far
   1.370 +     past their design constraints. A 150 year old person is just as
   1.371 +     likely to suffer a catastrophic psychosis due to software
   1.372 +     limitations associated with memory as he is to do something with
   1.373 +     all those memories we might consider reasonable. More likely, in
   1.374 +     fact, since there are so very many ways for a complicated
   1.375 +     software system to break and so few ways for it to run
   1.376 +     successfully. Therefore, I think Aubrey de Grey's "hardware-only"
   1.377 +     approach is missing a very important component of longevity
   1.378 +     science, and any successful effort to make people live orders of
   1.379 +     magnitude longer than they do naturally will need to deal with
   1.380 +     people's software as well as their hardware.
   1.381 +
   1.382 +- validating neurocryopreservation :: Problem : you want to test
   1.383 +     whether a brain is functionally preserved through vitrification,
   1.384 +     but you don't want to figure out how to preserve all the other
   1.385 +     organs in the animal. It might be possible to keep the rest of
   1.386 +     the body at almost 0C and vitrify just the head for only a few
   1.387 +     minutes. Induce hypothermia, then separate out the head's blood
   1.388 +     supply from the rest of the body, then just cryoptotect and
   1.389 +     vitrify the head. Might need some sort of thermal guard to keep
   1.390 +     the outer head / neck from becoming too cold. You leave the
   1.391 +     spinal cord intact! Then you devitrify to 0C, remove
   1.392 +     cryoprotectant, and then reattach the blood supply. You can
   1.393 +     determine brain preservation using behavioral assays!
   1.394 +
   1.395 +- freezing water purifier :: you slowly freeze water, but also run
   1.396 +     liquid water over the frozen mass. This takes away basically all
   1.397 +     impurities and creates "washed ice" then you melt the ice. Maybe
   1.398 +     you could re-use the heat from creating the ice to melt the ice?
   1.399 +
   1.400 +- ultra strength :: allow a person to visualize their muscle
   1.401 +     recruitment patterns. Give them adrenaline and let them feel what
   1.402 +     it's like to have the normal limits removed. See if they can
   1.403 +     replicate the effects.
   1.404 +
   1.405 +- phone names :: make a PX record for domain names that's like the MX
   1.406 +     record, except that it is a phone number instead of an IP
   1.407 +     address. That way, you can use the domain name registration
   1.408 +     system to provide names for phone numbers. Then, as long as you
   1.409 +     control the domain, you can point people to your current phone
   1.410 +     number by updating that record.
   1.411 +
   1.412 +- edible flowers :: Edible white flowers that you put in a colored
   1.413 +     solution with flavor. When the flower turns the right color, it
   1.414 +     is also flavored and ready to eat!
   1.415 +
   1.416 +- lead bone :: Could you fill in all the empty spaces in a bone with
   1.417 +     lead? Might be cool!
   1.418 +
   1.419 +- the quest for life  :: Many stories that have immortal characters
   1.420 +     have the "immortal who wants to become mortal" trope. I want to
   1.421 +     story where the protagonist loses their immortality and feels
   1.422 +     /angry/ and ashamed about losing something that's so absolutely
   1.423 +     crucial to their identity. A reverse of "death makes life worth
   1.424 +     living", they feel that living forever is what makes life worth
   1.425 +     living. Now they've "lost their sunrise" or their "connection to
   1.426 +     the timeless universe" or something. So they go on a quest to get
   1.427 +     it back, learning about themselves along the way, and regaining
   1.428 +     the precious thing they lost in the beginning. Which, it they can
   1.429 +     actually gain their immortality back, means that they never lost
   1.430 +     it in the first place!
   1.431 +
   1.432 +- world-map :: take a small table and paint the continents in
   1.433 +     toothpaste on the table. Make a slightly raised barrier around
   1.434 +     the table. Slowly pour water onto the table, and it will form the
   1.435 +     oceans!
   1.436 +
   1.437 +- stage magic rituals :: rituals should incorporate elements of stage
   1.438 +     magic. For example in Teller's rendition of Shakespeare's
   1.439 +     Tempest, they have a scene where they levitate a crown in front
   1.440 +     of someone, then put it on his head. They also have a wedding
   1.441 +     ceremony where they levitated the bride as well. Actual weddings
   1.442 +     and other ceremonies should incorporate stage magic as an
   1.443 +     enhancement to the gravitas!
   1.444 +
   1.445 +- isotope time dilation :: use a cyclotron to speed up rare isotopes
   1.446 +     developed in nuclear fusion experiments. The relativistic time
   1.447 +     dilation will stop the isotopes from decaying, and allow time to
   1.448 +     study them. This is based on radioactive isotopes that fall
   1.449 +     through the earth's atmosphere that take hundreds of times longer
   1.450 +     to decay than normal.
   1.451 +
   1.452 +- marsupial stimulation :: You take a freshly pouched marsupial baby,
   1.453 +     and show it videos and other interactive things while it matures
   1.454 +     in the pouch. What mental effects would this have?
   1.455 +
   1.456 +- The dynamically well tempered clavier :: Some older ways of tuning
   1.457 +     instruments sound better, but we use the even-tempered scale
   1.458 +     today because it makes it easier to switch keys. With electronic
   1.459 +     music, why not make key-annotations and dynamically re-tune the
   1.460 +     piece to sound good in the current key? Could be done as a
   1.461 +     midi+annotation -> midi compiler for initial experimentation.
   1.462 +
   1.463 +- death always implies damage :: is is possible for a corpse to differ
   1.464 +     from a living person only in the fact that one is dead and the
   1.465 +     other is alive? NO! A corpse must always have some sort of
   1.466 +     molecular damage which causes the loss of function!
   1.467 +
   1.468 +- inner eye :: Surgically install a bunch of tiny cameras inside a
   1.469 +     person. Then, you can activate them all and get a picture of your
   1.470 +     internal organs for diagnostic purposes.
   1.471 +
   1.472 +- chaos rails :: The homoclinic tangle (which I call the "rails of
   1.473 +     chaos") is very beautiful. We couldn't even visualize it before
   1.474 +     computers because it's so complicated! Someone should make a
   1.475 +     visualization of it. Here's my inital [[/thoughts/images/rails-of-chaos.png][The Rails of Chaos]]
   1.476 +
   1.477 +- cryonics middle ages :: some people say that cryonics is an
   1.478 +     experiment and that it is foolish to wait until we have revived a
   1.479 +     human. There is a middle ground where the procedure has a dismal
   1.480 +     success rate on humans, say 1 in 20, so that you'd be a fool to
   1.481 +     try revival. Nonetheless, this very risky procedure could be the
   1.482 +     legal proof of concept needed to create a new class of life
   1.483 +     between "living" and "dead": "stasis".
   1.484 +
   1.485 +- Minds and Mirrors :: neat thought experiment -- if you take a mirror
   1.486 +     of someone by actually reversing a person's chirality molecule by
   1.487 +     molecule, then will the only be able to read mirror writing? The
   1.488 +     answer is yes, by analogy to a purely mechanical scan-tron
   1.489 +     device. This is one of the only interesting transforms I know
   1.490 +     that can take a human brain and change it in subtle,
   1.491 +     non-destructive ways. It's also an argument against dualism.
   1.492 +
   1.493 +- biosphere in a bottle :: There are around 15 million species. 15
   1.494 +     million stem cells will fill only a tiny size, far less than a cubic
   1.495 +     inch. Preserve a single cell from every species on earth in this
   1.496 +     small space, and you will have a record of our current biosphere
   1.497 +     that can be protected. "Hold the genetic data of all species in
   1.498 +     your hand!"
   1.499 +
   1.500 +- chaos lock :: The "arrow of time" points in the direction of
   1.501 +     increasing entropy. The time evolution of chaotic systems depend
   1.502 +     exquisitely on their initial state. If you take a measurement of
   1.503 +     a chaotic system at any given point of time, you can evolve that
   1.504 +     system backwards or forwards based on your measurement. So let's
   1.505 +     say you start the chaotic system in a VERY low entropy state,
   1.506 +     then let it run for a while, then take a measurement with some
   1.507 +     uncertainty. Your measurement is pretty good, but obviously not
   1.508 +     PERFECT. If you evolve the chaotic system back in time, then you
   1.509 +     will see that you don't really reach a state with low entropy an
   1.510 +     hour before (the entropy is easy to measure with surrogates like
   1.511 +     alignment, etc). So use this technique to SEARCH for a more
   1.512 +     accurate measurement! This potentially can give you many more
   1.513 +     orders of magnitude than you could get alone just using an
   1.514 +     instrument. Sometimes it will give you bad results, the the odds
   1.515 +     of it doing that are infinitesimal, and you can just measure a
   1.516 +     couple of times.
   1.517 +
   1.518 +- cryo-evolution :: perhaps there would be a way to rapidly evolve a
   1.519 +     symbiotic bacterial organism that could protect human tissues
   1.520 +     from freezing damage.
   1.521 +
   1.522 +- suicide parasite :: sometimes, people kill themselves for no good
   1.523 +     reason. We often explain this with things like "hidden
   1.524 +     depression" or we say that they had something like chronic jaw or
   1.525 +     back pain. I think that smells of rationalization. I don't buy
   1.526 +     it. I propose that in many suicide cases there is a disease that
   1.527 +     causes the suicidal behavior. We already know that certain
   1.528 +     parasites have mind-bending properties in other animals, even
   1.529 +     mammals like mice. It's not much of a stretch to imagine a
   1.530 +     parasite that causes suicides in humans. Some problems:
   1.531 +     - What does the suicide parasite get out of it? :: This might be
   1.532 +          answered by the whole thing being a glitch caused by
   1.533 +          cross-species contamination. Toxoplasma works this way.
   1.534 +     - What predictions does a disease model make :: suicide should
   1.535 +          be more common among people who share a contagion
   1.536 +          vector. There should be suicides that don't make any
   1.537 +          sense : people who weren't really depressed, who had no
   1.538 +          reason to kill themselves. People who have killed themselves
   1.539 +          should have a higher incidence of some unknown parasite in
   1.540 +          their brains. 
   1.541 +
   1.542 +- domestic insects :: People should eat more bugs because they're much
   1.543 +     more efficient, so why not do some major domestication research
   1.544 +     to make very appealing bugs? Beetles, in particular, seem to be
   1.545 +     excellent targets for domestication because they have extreme
   1.546 +     levels of genetic malleability. Remember that lobster was once
   1.547 +     seen as an animal only fit for prisoners to consume!
   1.548 +
   1.549 +- birth-clones :: What if each person was intentionally split at birth
   1.550 +     into a normal embryo and a few "backup" cells which are then
   1.551 +     frozen. The backup cells are created just the same way as natural
   1.552 +     identical twins. The backups can be used to regenerate
   1.553 +     organs. etc. Also, it would be a good sci-fi concept, because you
   1.554 +     could have a culture where people reward people who were
   1.555 +     especially awesome are "reborn" from their backups. Imagine
   1.556 +     having a young Bach every generation, etc.
   1.557 +
   1.558 +- pronunciation guide :: a simple webpage where you type in a word and
   1.559 +     it returns a simple, English sentence describing exactly how to
   1.560 +     pronounce the word. For people who don't want to learn IPA.
   1.561 +
   1.562 +- Learning to Teleport :: This is a story about a person who is
   1.563 +     struggling with his/her society's ideas about teleportation. It's
   1.564 +     considered a fundamental part of being a member of that society
   1.565 +     (after all, the difference between animals and humans is that
   1.566 +     humans are creatures of pure information while animals are
   1.567 +     burdened with base matter, "that's how you travel the stars,
   1.568 +     etc") Humans are born normally, grow up, and then eventually
   1.569 +     transcend via destructive upload. Analogies to jumping off a
   1.570 +     diving board into a pool (which I simply /could not do/ for a
   1.571 +     long time), etc.
   1.572 +
   1.573 +- no-float-ice :: cup that has cross beams at the bottom where ice
   1.574 +     forms. Then when you drink liquid from the glass, the ice stays
   1.575 +     at the bottom and doesn't hit your lips. For bars and fancy
   1.576 +     things.
   1.577 +
   1.578 +- bitcoins for immigrants :: A common case with Mexican immigrants
   1.579 +     (illegal or not) is that they want to send money they've earned
   1.580 +     in the US back to their families in Mexico. They currently do
   1.581 +     this through things like Money Gram or Western Union, and they
   1.582 +     get fleeced in the process with fees. Bitcoin could greatly
   1.583 +     reduce the cost of sending money from America to Mexico, but I
   1.584 +     don't believe that it's currently used for that among Mexican
   1.585 +     immigrants currently due to lack of knowledge. I bet you could
   1.586 +     set up physical locations like those obnoxious Western Union huts
   1.587 +     in places like Texas, Arizona, etc, and greatly undercut
   1.588 +     them. Or, perhaps some educational seminars about bitcoin might
   1.589 +     be in order. There's some money to be made there because there is
   1.590 +     great demand, and it's a good thing to boot!
   1.591 +
   1.592 +- reverse eye-tracking :: A painting that is actually a digital screen
   1.593 +     with a camera. It records people's eye tracks permanently. It's
   1.594 +     "artistic" because paintings are normally these things that you
   1.595 +     look at without changing, but this one is changed the second you
   1.596 +     look at it, recording where /you/ looked forever for others to
   1.597 +     see. Make it be a painting of a woman and see the trolling as the
   1.598 +     breasts and groin area light up with interest from all the males
   1.599 +     passing by.
   1.600 +
   1.601 +- smart toilets :: Instead of using indirect measures like infrared
   1.602 +     detectors of the presence of a person, use computer vision to
   1.603 +     directly measure whether the toilet needs to be flushed. I think
   1.604 +     a lot of things will end up going this way as we get better
   1.605 +     computer vision.
   1.606 +
   1.607 +- validate chemopreservation :: chemopreservation is difficult to
   1.608 +     validate because it destroys the functionality of a brain, and
   1.609 +     brain simulation will take a long time to mature as a
   1.610 +     technology. However, one very powerful way to validate
   1.611 +     chemopreservation would be to have a person/animal learn
   1.612 +     something with high complexity such as a number or the solution
   1.613 +     to a maze, or a flashbulb memory. Then you preserve their brain
   1.614 +     chemically, slice it up, and read /that specific memory/ from the
   1.615 +     detailed brain scan. Much more difficult, but much more doable.
   1.616 +
   1.617 +- candy screw :: edible candy screw with candy nuts that you can screw
   1.618 +     as well.
   1.619 +
   1.620 +- better bibliography :: when writing a thesis or paper, have the
   1.621 +     bibliography not just be an opaque list of resources, but have it
   1.622 +     be a list of /summaries/ and /qualities/ that each paper has in
   1.623 +     the context of the paper being written. When examining a
   1.624 +     bibliography, I want to know if reading the papers in the
   1.625 +     bibliography are worth my time, and I also am probably also
   1.626 +     interested in exactly the things that are being discussed in the
   1.627 +     paper I'm reading. The bibliography is the perfect place to
   1.628 +     provide information about the referenced papers from the
   1.629 +     author's perspective. I will use this biographic form in my own
   1.630 +     thesis!
   1.631 +
   1.632 +- chess visual :: to show the vast size of the game trees considered
   1.633 +     by computers, show two people playing chess in a void. They are
   1.634 +     floating in space, and there is a simple chess board between
   1.635 +     them. Then, as they play, the game tree's they are considering
   1.636 +     are drawn behind him. The root of the tree starts centered in
   1.637 +     their heads or whatever they use to think, and the tree grows out
   1.638 +     from behind, never crossing the dividing plane between the two
   1.639 +     players. Each player's tree is a different color. As they grow,
   1.640 +     there are animations for pruning, etc. Eventually, they look like
   1.641 +     the hemispheres of a brain, wings, etc. A human's tree might
   1.642 +     occasionally have a long chain, while the computer tree would be
   1.643 +     more uniform. You could compare deep blue and a modern
   1.644 +     laptop. Use actual data when fighting two computers!
   1.645 +
   1.646 +- tamper proof gold bars :: [[http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/gold-plated-tungsten-alloy-bar.html][this site]] offers gold plated tungsten bars
   1.647 +     as "novelty" items. One reason to prefer coins is because they
   1.648 +     are much harder to counterfeit because there is less surface area
   1.649 +     to mass ratio. However, gold bars are still a great design
   1.650 +     because they can hold a lot of value in a small space. A gold bar
   1.651 +     could be given the same protections (and more) that gold coins
   1.652 +     have to offer by changing it into a "gold book", which would have
   1.653 +     hundreds of "pages" of gold bound together. This could be
   1.654 +     implemented with multiple steel rods going through the book which
   1.655 +     can be removed, or some more classier mechanism for holding the
   1.656 +     pages. The point is that the bar can be EASILY subdivided (and
   1.657 +     people would perform this test before buying), thus guaranteeing
   1.658 +     it's authenticity.
   1.659 +
   1.660 +- high school science :: this is a lesson in scientific ethics. The
   1.661 +     goal is to calculate /g/, the local gravitational
   1.662 +     acceleration. The students are told that the textbook says it's
   1.663 +     /exactly/ 9.81 before they start the experiment. See how they
   1.664 +     doctor their results to get closer to the textbook value. It's
   1.665 +     neat because for any given school, /g/ is probably *not* exactly
   1.666 +     equal to 9.81, because that is just an average!
   1.667 +
   1.668 +- opencourseware subtitles :: there are people who type up lectures at
   1.669 +     MIT while they are being given, so that hearing impared students
   1.670 +     can follow along. These recordings should be kept and given to
   1.671 +     OCW for subtitles. If the timestamps of keys are recorded, then
   1.672 +     it is easy to make subtitles.
   1.673 +
   1.674 +- screen locking timing :: you use your computer camera to see if you
   1.675 +     are sitting in front of the computer. If you are, then the screen
   1.676 +     will never lock. If you are, then the screen will lock with a
   1.677 +     30-40 second timeout. It's an extension of using inactivity to
   1.678 +     initiate the countdown, just with more information.
   1.679 +
   1.680 +- mirror toilet :: a toilet with a square basin made of mirror instead
   1.681 +     of porcelain. That way, you can see how good of a wipe job you
   1.682 +     have done / watch how your excretion system works.
   1.683 +
   1.684 +- X-ray telepresence :: given that a doctor is operating on a patient
   1.685 +     via telepresence, one cool things you can do is shine X-rays into
   1.686 +     the patient to view the insides during real time. (This doesn't
   1.687 +     expose either the doctor or patient to chronically damaging
   1.688 +     amounts of X-rays) If the system was coupled with a Bayesian
   1.689 +     model of the layout of the structure, and the x-rays were only
   1.690 +     fired whenever the uncertainty of the model reached a certain
   1.691 +     threshold, then the radiation damage and surgery risk could be
   1.692 +     minimized.
   1.693 +
   1.694 +- superfluid vascular system :: I wonder what would happen if you
   1.695 +     replaced the blood in a human with a superfluid. What would the
   1.696 +     physical dynamics be? Would the superfluid flow through the
   1.697 +     vasculature, or would it ignore it and travel through the cells,
   1.698 +     or something else entirely. Since superfluids need to be cold to
   1.699 +     retain their superfluidity, how would the dynamics change during
   1.700 +     perfusion of a superfluid, where the fluid gains and looses
   1.701 +     superfluidity as it goes deeper into the body and is cooled by
   1.702 +     superfluid from upstream. In summary there are two things to
   1.703 +     simulate 1.) replace all blood in human with superfluid
   1.704 +     instantly. 2.) perfuse superfluid into human.
   1.705 +
   1.706 +- projective guessing :: I think that we read and see things by
   1.707 +     making a really good guess about what we're expecting to see,
   1.708 +     and then searching for our guess in what we see. If it really
   1.709 +     doesn't match, then we start to make more guesses / analyze the
   1.710 +     image from first principles, but most stuff is projective
   1.711 +     guessing.
   1.712 +
   1.713 +- Intestinal flora maintenance :: why not inoculate babies at birth
   1.714 +     with "ideal" gut flora instead of whatever bullshit they
   1.715 +     naturally get, thus giving them optimal digestive/nutrient
   1.716 +     extraction capabilities. Might also be able to make their farts
   1.717 +     not stink for life, too. MORE IMPORTANTLY, might help to
   1.718 +     preventatively stop some forms of /colic/, which affects 1 in 5
   1.719 +     babies and causes constant screaming and pain for about 5 weeks.
   1.720 +
   1.721 +- server culture -- mirrors :: make a distributed system where people
   1.722 +     can mirror the websites of people they like -- essentially cover
   1.723 +     the server costs of favored websites. This could make popular
   1.724 +     websites run at no cost. The system would require that the
   1.725 +     mirrored content be the same as the official source. Sort of like
   1.726 +     bit-torrent for websites.
   1.727 +
   1.728 +- map programming :: one problem with functional programming is that
   1.729 +     in order to remain functional, you have to pass up arguments up
   1.730 +     into each calling function to get the full range of behavior
   1.731 +     from the lower level functions. Normally people come to a
   1.732 +     compromise involving abstraction and sparing use of dynamic
   1.733 +     variables to configure runtime behavior. What would be the
   1.734 +     advantages of making a programming language where every function
   1.735 +     receives one argument, a map, which contains all the symbol
   1.736 +     bindings it would ever need? This map is passed on to all
   1.737 +     subordinate functions. This way, you could replace functions on
   1.738 +     the fly, and arrange for there to be sensible defaults,
   1.739 +     etc. Might cause more harm than good but is an interesting idea.
   1.740 +
   1.741 +- rest nest :: a small EEG device you would attach to your head when
   1.742 +     you go to sleep at night. ML algorithms would determine your
   1.743 +     particular sleep cycles. This would mostly be an alarm clock that
   1.744 +     you could give a time range, say 7:00AM - 7:15AM, and it would
   1.745 +     wake you up during an ideal time corresponding to then end of one
   1.746 +     of your 90 min sleep cycles. You would feel much more rested upon
   1.747 +     waking up, and would wake up faster. There might be some other
   1.748 +     uses for the EEG data as well.
   1.749 +
   1.750 +- image compression :: use a library like gimp or opencv to process an
   1.751 +     image to make it have less entropy, then store the reverse of
   1.752 +     those operations along with the compressed simpler image as a
   1.753 +     super-compressed image file (possibly accepting some
   1.754 +     losses). Trades file size for decompression time, and allows one
   1.755 +     to cheat by using information in gimp/opencv to compress the
   1.756 +     image. 
   1.757 +
   1.758 +- aldehyde-stabalized cryopreservation :: why not use a fixative to
   1.759 +     buy enough time to ramp up cryoprotectants to an acceptable level
   1.760 +     at room temperature? Then, the whole system can be rapidly cooled
   1.761 +     and vitrified. This method "severs the biological link" in that
   1.762 +     the fixatives are highly toxic, but current vitrification
   1.763 +     procedures do this anyway since there can be a lot of freezing
   1.764 +     damage.
   1.765 +
   1.766 +- dilated security camera :: a security camera that would capture
   1.767 +     full video footage of everything at 60fps but then decide to keep
   1.768 +     only every 1 frame every 5 seconds unless there's something
   1.769 +     "interesting" happening.
   1.770 +
   1.771 +- bitcoin wallet :: Part of "server culture", this would be something
   1.772 +                    like "coin.your-domain.com" which would serve as
   1.773 +                    your personal trusted access to your own bitcoins
   1.774 +                    from anywhere.
   1.775 +
   1.776 +- libpay :: this would be a free library which would enable
   1.777 +            micro-donations to software projects and other projects,
   1.778 +            so that you could donate a penny to "emacs" and it would
   1.779 +            be automatically split up to every person who has ever
   1.780 +            contributed to emacs in proportion to the amount of
   1.781 +            community esteem, code quantity, bugs fixed, whatever the
   1.782 +            community decides. This might make it possible for
   1.783 +            programmers to live entirely off of free programming.
   1.784 +
   1.785 +- pronouns :: use capital letters A-Z instead of pronouns. They solve
   1.786 +              pronoun referents and gender neutrality, are short to
   1.787 +              say, and you can encode useful information into the
   1.788 +              choice of letter. For example, instead of "Meetings
   1.789 +              shall be presided over by the president, unless she is
   1.790 +              absent." USE "Meetings shall be presided over by the
   1.791 +              president, unless P is absent." We already use this a
   1.792 +              little, since I and U are reserved for the subject and
   1.793 +              object respectively.
   1.794 +
   1.795 +- phone DSP :: software app that inserts an audio DSP between the
   1.796 +               input to a phone and the output. The DSP is delicious
   1.797 +               and configurable, and can allow men to make their
   1.798 +               voices deeper, etc. The app would allow you to hear
   1.799 +               your own voice as others hear it. Most people hate how
   1.800 +               their own voice sounds. The app would also allow one to
   1.801 +               immediately change the parameters of the DSP using good
   1.802 +               presets.
   1.803 +
   1.804 +- restaurant receipts :: use a carbon copy receipt instead of two stupid
   1.805 +     copies. 
   1.806 +
   1.807 +- crossdressing :: Easiest way to disguise oneself as a woman is to
   1.808 +                   wear a burka.
   1.809 +
   1.810 +- book-mode :: intelligent color highlighting for books and
   1.811 +               articles. It would disambiguate pronouns and involved
   1.812 +               references. For example, if "Rachael" was assigned the
   1.813 +               color red, and "the blonde haired girl" refers to
   1.814 +               "Rachael", then "the blonde haired girl" would be
   1.815 +               colored red. Also, you could disambiguate multi part
   1.816 +               run-on sentences by highlighting each
   1.817 +               subcomponent. Maybe would also have applications to
   1.818 +               scientific reading.
   1.819 +
   1.820 +- Handheld light Rain measurement :: this would be a clear, teflon
   1.821 +     coated plastic disk with a camera underneath the disk. You would
   1.822 +     be able to hold the device out and it would measure the rate of
   1.823 +     accumulation of water droplets from fine mists and light rain by
   1.824 +     using computer vision to measure the diameters of the drops.
   1.825 +
   1.826 +- Big Brother Farming :: This would be a vision system that would
   1.827 +     individually monitor each plant and turn on water, etc to ensure
   1.828 +     maximum/uniform growth for each plant. 
   1.829 +
   1.830 +- Discrete Faucet :: A faucet with discrete ticks instead of
   1.831 +     continuous. 
   1.832 +
   1.833 +- Laser Circle :: take a glass microfiliment and shine a laser at one
   1.834 +                  end at an oblique angle. It will make a perfect,
   1.835 +                  large circle on the wall, converting a laser beam
   1.836 +                  into a laser cone, preserving most of the energy of
   1.837 +                  the laser.
   1.838 +
   1.839 +- Invisible Glass :: Take a container of liquid and embed a
   1.840 +     glass sculpture made out of glass that has exactly the same index
   1.841 +     of refraction and color of the liquid. Then the sculpture will be
   1.842 +     totally invisible in the container, and will only be revealed
   1.843 +     when the liquid is drained. The container might be a fancy
   1.844 +     wine/spirit bottle or an hourglass.
   1.845 +
   1.846 +- Caterpillar people :: A race of caterpillar like creatures gains
   1.847 +     intelligence after eons of predation by birds, etc. These
   1.848 +     caterpillar creatures still undergo metamorphosis into a large
   1.849 +     butterfly-like creature. The metamorphosis process turns the
   1.850 +     caterpillar's brain into mush and reforms it into a minimal,
   1.851 +     dumb, truly insect-like mind, completely destroying the person
   1.852 +     the caterpillar was. The society develops all sorts of customs and
   1.853 +     religious interpretations of the metamorphosis. It is viewed as
   1.854 +     good and natural by some since it is part of their life cycle and
   1.855 +     necessary to propagate the species, as only the butterflies can
   1.856 +     mate. Some think that the butterflies are still the same person
   1.857 +     because they have the same soul, even they no longer posses the
   1.858 +     memories or personality of the original caterpillar. Some see the
   1.859 +     butterfly form as the "true form" of the species, since the
   1.860 +     butterflies can fly, mate, and are beautiful. Many make a big
   1.861 +     deal out of the fact that 1-2% of the caterpillar's mind is
   1.862 +     actually preserved in the butterfly. Some see it as a terrible
   1.863 +     tragedy and argue that the caterpillars should try to stop the
   1.864 +     metamorphosis by technology. Practically, some very important
   1.865 +     members of society undergo hormone therapy and/or surgery to
   1.866 +     prevent metamorphosis so that they can live longer as themselves.
   1.867 +
   1.868 +     This is a continuation of Marvin Minsky's ideas about pain being
   1.869 +     something that preserves our bodies while destroying our minds,
   1.870 +     something that is a remnant from our too harsh animal days that
   1.871 +     hasn't caught up to the fact that we have very complex brains
   1.872 +     now. It's a worst-case scenario about a maladaptive genetic
   1.873 +     legacy. Also, it's inspired by "There She Is!!!", which makes a
   1.874 +     compelling point about homosexuality by introducing a second
   1.875 +     gender characteristic (bunny/cat, male/female), which makes
   1.876 +     homophobia look very silly. Here, our own biological legacy of
   1.877 +     pain and death is made to look like the tragedy it is through the
   1.878 +     lens of the the caterpillar people.
   1.879 +
   1.880 +- relationships as a business :: [[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx][Turnover-Crisis]] is an excellent talk
   1.881 +     about the "culture of quitting," which is about better business
   1.882 +     by letting people go instead of keeping them around past their
   1.883 +     "apex". Focuses on information transfer. Cool idea of an alumni
   1.884 +     network, which for relationships would be a group of satisfied
   1.885 +     ex-lovers, who would recommend new people your way, and who might
   1.886 +     consider coming to you again, refreshed from their time away with
   1.887 +     new stories/experiences. I should look for examples of this and
   1.888 +     how they worked out.
   1.889 +
   1.890 +- psychic crystal :: in a science fiction story, this would be an
   1.891 +     object that is very easy to move physically but is extremely
   1.892 +     difficult to move with telekinesis.
   1.893 +
   1.894 +- true reflection :: There's a "true mirror" in the MIT student center
   1.895 +     -- it's two normal mirrors at right angles, like staring at a
   1.896 +     corner of a room. The light reflects so that it shows you what
   1.897 +     you actually look like, instead of your mirror image.
   1.898 +
   1.899 +- remote control wasp :: use computer to drive wings with remote
   1.900 +  power/logic.
   1.901 +
   1.902 +- encrypted email phone book :: public (distributed?) database of
   1.903 +     email->private-key pairs, to enable automatic encryption.
   1.904 +
   1.905 +- universal eye color :: every equivalent creature will see each
   1.906 +     others' eyes as black -- it's universal. Even if the creatures
   1.907 +     see in radio waves, and their eyes are 2m long pieces of jagged
   1.908 +     metal, when those creatures look at each other, they will see
   1.909 +     black, the absence of light and color (since it's being absorbed
   1.910 +     by the sensor array).
   1.911 +
   1.912 +- intelligent microwave :: it learns where the hot nodes of its fields
   1.913 +  are, and uses them to evenly heat any food item. It has an infrared
   1.914 +  camera or something to keep track of how hot the food is. That way,
   1.915 +  you don't get bowls where the edges are boiling, while the center is
   1.916 +  still frozen. Requires a little bit of intelligence/vision, since
   1.917 +  the exact pattern of heating totally depends on the exact shape of
   1.918 +  the food.  Wouldn't need a carousel, and wouldn't need a timer,
   1.919 +  just a desired temperature. Could also detect ice, and automatically
   1.920 +  defrost the parts which are frozen. Might be able to work much
   1.921 +  faster since it can avoid overheating; might have problems with
   1.922 +  heating the insides of thick things, might need a weight sensor too.
   1.923 +  
   1.924 +  + Would be much cleaner than other microwaves, since food would
   1.925 +    "sputter" and splash liquid much less.
   1.926 +
   1.927 +  + Throw in some SIFT+R processing to match previously cooked foods
   1.928 +    and learn the exact heating profiles for things that have been
   1.929 +    cooked before -- it can get faster the more it's used.
   1.930 +
   1.931 +- Flesh pillow :: a pillow like the arm or torso of a human, complete
   1.932 +                  with simulated temperature, bones, and heartbeat.
   1.933 +
   1.934 +- light filter :: (like light tweezers) to mechanically separate
   1.935 +                  fluids with different index of refraction
   1.936 +
   1.937 +- silver socks :: socks laced with silver for the antimicrobial
   1.938 +                  properties.
   1.939 +
   1.940 +- Rod of Moses :: device to distill urine through evaporation and
   1.941 +     easily dispose of urea crystals for use in desert -- produce
   1.942 +     drinkable water and live an extra few days!
   1.943 +
   1.944 +- lottery scraper :: web scraper which monitors various lotteries,
   1.945 +     looking for "special" gimmick changes in the rules (like 4x
   1.946 +     winnings on Wednesdays) and computes expected value...
   1.947 +
   1.948 +- Memristiors novel design :: make an evolutionary algorithm to make
   1.949 +  old stuff using all four basic circuit elements.
   1.950 +
   1.951 +- Conductive concrete :: concrete that has embedded metal fibers so
   1.952 +     that it can conduct electricity.
   1.953 +
   1.954 +- little bitty melting pot :: might be useful for some types of
   1.955 +     manufacturing/3D printing -- how small can an induction melter be
   1.956 +     made, for example.
   1.957 +
   1.958 +- true pure tones :: hear a true pure tone by direct stimulation of the
   1.959 +     nerves of the ear
   1.960 +  
   1.961 +- mechanical analogue to the electrical op-amp ::  would be an object
   1.962 +     with two levers -- you pull on one lever and the other moves the
   1.963 +     same way, no matter what's in the way or what it is driving. This
   1.964 +     analogy could be useful to teach op amps to people.
   1.965 +
   1.966 +- light capacitor :: suspend some ball of material with a high index
   1.967 +     of refraction and shine light into it so it gets stuck -- would
   1.968 +     the light stay trapped forever? Could you build up unlimited
   1.969 +     quantities of light inside the sphere (which could then be
   1.970 +     released slowly by frustrated internal reflection?
   1.971 +
   1.972 +- reading comprehension :: use the screen capture routine to make a
   1.973 +     quiz program that constructs questions about the content you
   1.974 +     seemed to gloss over while reading. could be easy if the pdf came
   1.975 +     with embedded questions.  Dylan: automatically generate
   1.976 +     word-cloud about the parts you found most interesting; help
   1.977 +     others who read the same stuff by drawing attention to the
   1.978 +     interesting parts.
   1.979 +
   1.980 +- optimize an article :: capture reading of a scientific article via
   1.981 +     screen capture while people read it, then use it to make the
   1.982 +     article better. like the movie-pruning idea.
   1.983 +
   1.984 +- movie pruning :: Movies always are too long at first. One way to
   1.985 +     shorten them ``scientifically" is to record blink rate during the
   1.986 +     move and then remove / shorten the frames of the parts in which
   1.987 +     there are a lot of blinking (average this over multiple people)
   1.988 +     better yet, put it online and do it across thousands of people. I
   1.989 +     got this from youtube in which there is an episode of kill bill
   1.990 +     which is composed entirely of the parts in which people had their
   1.991 +     eyes closed. slogan: want to make a movie people can't take their
   1.992 +     eyes off of? Just take those parts out!
   1.993 +
   1.994 +- explosive thermite epoxy putty :: one part would contain the rust,
   1.995 +     one part the aluminum.
   1.996 +
   1.997 +- concrete epoxy :: epoxy with sand/ some other solid material.
   1.998 +
   1.999 +- hard sword :: make a samurai sword, but use osmiridum instead of
  1.1000 +                martensite for the cutting part; it should be a better
  1.1001 +                sword.
  1.1002 +
  1.1003 +- close range wireless :: use the induction technology used to
  1.1004 +     recharge electric toothbrushes with no metal links to send data
  1.1005 +     without any metal at all!
  1.1006 +
  1.1007 +- perfect pitch :: learn perfect pitch using another sense in
  1.1008 +                   combination (sight or touch)
  1.1009 +
  1.1010 +- bio metallic structure :: metal grids with seeds inside, which grow
  1.1011 +     together and form a durable biological matrix. The metal
  1.1012 +     substrate delivers water. (maybe use plastic instead of metal?)
  1.1013 +     Dylan: enrich plants with inorganic compounds; electrical
  1.1014 +     interfaces in cellular plant matter => remote-controlled
  1.1015 +     photosynthetic/bioluminescent structures.
  1.1016 +
  1.1017 +- conducting extracellular matrix :: to allow better control of
  1.1018 +     organic systems and an enhanced nervous system.
  1.1019 +
  1.1020 +- cross-modal memory hashing :: a way to retrieve memories more
  1.1021 +     robustly. 
  1.1022 +
  1.1023 +- wooden refrigerator :: to give food a better taste Dylan: like
  1.1024 +     barrels for wine, or planks for salmon. Maybe just have "flavor
  1.1025 +     planks" for your pre-existing fridge. Need to mitigate effect of
  1.1026 +     temperature on volatility?
  1.1027 +
  1.1028 +- radioactive transmutation molecule by molecule :: create precious
  1.1029 +     metals or something else economically advantageous. Best
  1.1030 +     transmutation I can come up with is mercury into gold, but it's
  1.1031 +     not economically viable.
  1.1032 +
  1.1033 +- preservation via crowding :: inoculate food with tons of harmless
  1.1034 +     bacteria so that there's no room for bad bacteria as a method of
  1.1035 +     preservation
  1.1036 +
  1.1037 +- old school preservation :: Pasteur - style holding jar with siphon
  1.1038 +     as a way to store sterilized liquids at room temperature
  1.1039 +     indefinitely w/o refrigeration.
  1.1040 +
  1.1041 +- restaurant policy :: Throw rude people out of restaurant as a matter
  1.1042 +     of course -- make ambiance much better.
  1.1043 +
  1.1044 +- clean windows :: make something that mixes soap with fire hydrant
  1.1045 +                   water (and reduces the pressure a bit) and use it
  1.1046 +                   to clean windows of buildings.
  1.1047 +
  1.1048 +- ocarina :: make an ocarina out of pure silver
  1.1049 +
  1.1050 +- fire pen :: pen which burns words on to the page, thus never needing
  1.1051 +     any ink. Is there a way to make it runnable from body heat?
  1.1052 +
  1.1053 +- website to design your own soda :: and label, and have it mailed to
  1.1054 +     you / sell it from your own online store.
  1.1055 +
  1.1056 +- solar panels :: that float on the ocean
  1.1057 +
  1.1058 +- handcuffs with more than two cuffs (3?) :: great for daisy chaining
  1.1059 +     people, binding them to environment, etc.
  1.1060 +
  1.1061 +- vector based SOUND files :: like the pictures but with SOUND. codify
  1.1062 +     sound in a language with enough symbols so that it can describe
  1.1063 +     everything and encode it in that. would be like going from speech
  1.1064 +     to text or smtg. Could also store sound as an image of the
  1.1065 +     wavefront encoded as a vector image.
  1.1066 +
  1.1067 +- genetically engineered glowing fruit :: They have some animals that
  1.1068 +     can glow, but glowing fruit that you eat would be AWESOME!
  1.1069 +
  1.1070 +- The body as a key to memory :: IF memories are encoded using
  1.1071 +     particular sensory impressions, what happens if the sensory organ
  1.1072 +     itself changes?  those memories would become inaccessible. maybe
  1.1073 +     this is why we can't remember much from our childhoods. also,
  1.1074 +     could this happen throughout life as well? Could S remember stuff
  1.1075 +     from his childhood?
  1.1076 +
  1.1077 +- lighter flint on spring :: make hot, throw it at something, and it
  1.1078 +     makes sparkles!
  1.1079 +
  1.1080 +- rare bubbles :: Engineer a material which has both ductility and high
  1.1081 +             surface tension to make the "third"
  1.1082 +             minimal-surface-energy solution to a bubble suspended
  1.1083 +             between two equal-diameter rings. (Solutions are
  1.1084 +             cylindrical catenary curve, two separated half-bubbles,
  1.1085 +             and a double-cone)
  1.1086 +
  1.1087 +- Textbook whose content can be varied continuously :: alter level of
  1.1088 +     difficulty, rigor, diction, emphasize crossover with certain
  1.1089 +     other discipline, etc. Content generated dynamically from
  1.1090 +     knowledge base, along with questions that are moreover altered to
  1.1091 +     guide knowledge acquisition. Motivation: One book of
  1.1092 +     knowledge. /One./
  1.1093 +
  1.1094 +
  1.1095 +   #+BEGIN_HTML
  1.1096 +<p class="end"> Still want more? Visit the <a href="./ideas.html">Raw
  1.1097 +Ideas</a> page, but prepare for extreme half-bakedness. </p>
  1.1098 +   #+END_HTML