view org/ideas.org @ 147:3bc644fab800

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author Robert McIntyre <rlm@mit.edu>
date Sat, 18 Apr 2015 13:49:58 -0700
parents f5a56e2241fb
children 111bd9aa499a
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1 #+title: Big List O' Ideas
2 #+author: Robert McIntyre
3 #+email: rlm@mit.edu
4 #+description: list of ideas from the last ~ 7 years
5 #+keywords: aurellem ideas half-baked random
6 #+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org
7 #+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org
8 #+babel: :mkdirp yes :noweb yes :exports both
10 * Ideas
11 # :PROPERTIES:
12 # :HTML_CONTAINER_CLASS: ideas
13 # :END:
15 This is a list of *Every* idea I've written down
17 #+begin_quote
18 There's no end to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care about
19 getting credit.
20 #+end_quote
22 - AI hypnosis :: hypnosis might be good for studying AI, becuse it
23 might probide a "debugger" for ananlyzing the human mind. I
24 briefly tried this while at MIT, but it needs MUCH more work to
25 be properly evaulated.
27 - becomming alive :: upload faces challenges to grow into they type of
28 person that can join the greater society -- a god. They have to
29 go though quests that replicate all the things that humanity had
30 to accomplish, like going to the moon, by themselves, in a
31 virtual world where they cannot die and never get tired.
33 - population distorted map of USA :: to see states sizes in terms of #
34 of people. (already exists!
35 http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cart/doc/)
37 - butterfly drone :: if big butterflies used to exist, then maybe we
38 could make butterfly-inspired drones!
40 - methylation sex symmetry breaking :: So, human cells have
41 methylation patterns that encode male/female origin. If you
42 combine two male patterns, the fetus grows "too fast" and
43 dies. Two female patterns causes the fetus to enter a "vegatable"
44 state and fail to develop. Evolutionary biologists will say that
45 this reflects the asymmetry of energy investement for creating
46 offspring. If that's true, then species that cast-spawn will lack
47 this symmetry, and give clues about how to remove it in
48 humans. If even cast spawners like sea urchins have it, then that
49 means there's something deeper going on!
51 - reverse cannulation perfusion :: you put the organ you want to
52 perfuse in an airtight chamber with a pool of the stuff you want
53 to perfuse. You cannulate some veins and lead tubes form to
54 outside of the chamber. You pump in air and perfusate, and the
55 increasing air pressure in the chamber forces perfusate through
56 the organ. For times when you don't want to cannulate the inputs
57 -- they can be ragged, or there can be many of them. You still
58 have to guide the veins to the outside of the chamber, but
59 depending on the use case this might be far easier than
60 tradational cannulation.
62 - very slow physiological pressure perfusion :: less extreme example
63 of the "pausing" trick -- just keep the perfusion running and
64 don't put the perfusion target into the liquid as deep.
66 - whole brain perfusion embedding :: Do the standard EM embedding
67 protocol, but skip the osmium step, and use the "perfusion
68 pausing" method to prevent overextraction during the dehydration
69 and embedding steps. I think that you CAN perfuse resins into the
70 brain, simply because you CAN perfuse viscous rubber when doing
71 vascular casts.
73 - perfusion pausing :: One problem with doing perfusion is that if you
74 STOP the perfusion, you rapidly loose pressure in the organ as
75 your perfusate leaks out. You can prevent this by submerging the
76 organ/head/rat whatever in FLUID at the appropriate level. Use
77 something inert like flurocarbon to avoid problems. You would
78 have to slowly decrease the flow rate while simultaneously
79 lowering the perfusing object into the fluid. To start again,
80 reverse the process -- reengage the peristaltic pump slowly while
81 removing the organ from the fluid.
83 - evoultionary textbook mimiricy :: as surgery becomes more common,
84 there develops a distinct selective pressure for individuals
85 organ layout to look more like the medical textbooks! :P
87 - transparent skin :: temporary / permament transparent skin. Allows
88 for examination of organs / muscles and visual prevention of
89 disease and detection or abnormalities / good things
90 eg. excercise.
92 - sweet information :: candy with a whole book written in it. Eat a
93 book!
95 - targeted immunosuppressant :: just kill off the B-cells and friends
96 that would cause problems in a organ-transplant / other
97 situation. AIDS is good at killing these cells -- maybe make it
98 just target the ones that will cause problems. Then you can
99 premptively kill off that part of someone's immune system before
100 a transplant. ALSO, you can kill off everyone's defenses against
101 other blood types and make people effectively type AB+ w.r.t
102 blood transfusions. Actually, why not give babies this treatment
103 so that they're automatically compatable with all blood types?
104 The immune system has this already when it's first growing; maybe
105 it can be "retrained" to accept new things, or the mechanism of
106 immune cell death be co-opted for these purposes.
108 - fuck you tetris :: tetris that actively gives you the worst possible piece.
110 - pockets :: more things should have them!
112 - colored shower head :: a shower head add on that measures the temp
113 of the water and changes the color of the water streams w/ an LED
114 to show you the temperature. That way you can align to the color
115 you want and see the temperature without feeling it.
117 - giant dragonflies :: we could rapidly MAKE giant dragonflies by
118 evolving modern dragonflies in an very oxygen rich environment!
120 - anesthetic surgery courtesty video :: as a matter of courtesy,
121 whenever you go under anesthetic, the doctors should provide you
122 with a video of the surgery / recovery after you are concious
123 again. The recording should begin about 3 minutes before
124 anesthetic, and continue until both you and the docor agree to
125 stop recording, or you leave the hospital.
127 - whirlpool of light :: shine a laser out into space. But the planet
128 is spinning! What you get is a spiral or light! And as this
129 signal expands, does it eventually reveal it's wuantized nature?
131 - perfusion coking :: EOM
133 - timestamp verification :: you sign your message, and it has a
134 timestamp at the top, with a +- percision number. Then you send
135 it over to the public timestamp server, which only signs the
136 message if it gets the message within the timestamp window. Or
137 the computer just signs the message but puts a timestamp at the
138 beginning. So if everyone trusts the timestamp server, you can
139 get reliable timestamps, and prove priority on ideas, etc.
141 - the great computing slow-down :: in general, our computers are
142 getting faster and faster. However, eventually our brains will be
143 made of the same stuff our computers are made of! This has very
144 interesting consequences -- I can add 2+2 and get four in about a
145 second. Since my neurons actually work at around 10-60 hertz in
146 parallel, this means that it takes me around 10-30 operations to
147 do this addition. That's actually not bad in terms of computing
148 time. If my neurons were as fast as the latest transitors, then
149 most calculators would be SLOWER than me at adding numbers. Only
150 the newest, most optimized calculators would be faster, and then
151 only about 10 times faster! This means that once we begin to
152 think at the speed of our technology, that technology will
153 suddenly seem pitifully slow in comparison to how it seems
154 now. And no amount of technical progress will remedy it, because
155 that same progress will also make us all think faster. We'll
156 either have to settle with living in "slow time" to do some
157 computations, or learn to make smarter hardware with special
158 optimizations. But this is actually really hard, because we'll be
159 working with machines that will appear to us about as fast as
160 MECHANICAL computers. So, in the future, all the cool parties
161 will be in cyperspace at vastly accelerated speeds compared to
162 how we exist now. But at these parties, the computers will SUCK!
163 Of course, this is one of the few things that can save us from AI
164 risk, because those AI's won't seem so scary when the're build
165 out of rickety mechanical parts form our perspective.
167 - unitary reverse evolution of chaos+minds :: Chaotic systems diverge
168 exponentially in state space. Do you get anything interesting
169 when part of the physical system associated with the chaotic
170 system is a object that performs some sort of computation? Is it
171 possible for the computational system to play a
172 percision-enabling role in determining the final/initial
173 conditions of the chaotic system, just by tracing out thoughts in
174 its decision paths? This is probably too vague of an idea right
175 now, I just wanted to write it down.
177 - microwave time :: the cooking time you enter on most microwaves is
178 insane. It's expressed in what I call a "hybrid base", a
179 combination of base 10 and base 60. You can get absurd things
180 like 100 < 61, and 120 == 80! I wonder if these hybrid base
181 systems could be very useful for some purposes!
183 - three-eyes :: if you had three eyes, would you still draw cubes like
184 we currently draw them? Or would all 2D-representations of 3D
185 space always look hopelessly fake?
187 - visual taste/smell assay :: get a grid of bacteria, each expressing
188 a human taste/smell receptor linked to some sort of fluorscent
189 activity or ion pump. Use a camera / electrical grid to transduce
190 the smell / taste signal into bits!
192 - carabiner mushroom lock :: you can take a trapazodial carabiner and
193 make it so that a chain link is caught between the wide end of
194 the carabiner and another chain attached to the carabiner.
196 - children's tool shop :: I think that kids should be provided with
197 tool shops -- these would be nice sheds with a good collection of
198 tools to do various things -- circuit components and soldering
199 irons, wires, a small lathe, drill press, belt sander, a
200 centrifuge, microscope, and telescope, etc. The idea is that the
201 kid can now think, "I could use X to do this thing that I'm
202 thinking about" -- the building becomes an extension of the kid's
203 body & mind.
205 - fluid display :: like the previous idea about matching refractances
206 between glass and liquid, except you make a lot of
207 switchable glass tubes in various patterns in the
208 glass, and actively pump colored liquid through the
209 tubes (the tubes have glass-like fluid in them by
210 default.) The result is that you can cause the
211 tubes to appear and dissappear, and vary their
212 colors as well!
214 - immunoincompatibility :: take the human genome, and refactor it so
215 that it doesn't use a particular codon at all. Then remove the
216 support from our ribosomes for that codon. What does this do for
217 us? It makes us immune to almost all viruses!
219 - life cycle :: it's called a cycle, right? So, the thing that repeats
220 itself over and over, right? Not much of a cycle if
221 you don't come back after you die, if you ask me!
223 - car with no blind spots :: use some cameras in the back of the car
224 to augment the rear-view mirror so that you never have to turn
225 around in order to lane change.
227 - partial cell death :: you freeze a set of cells using some cryo
228 protocol and 60% survive. How can this be explained? It seems to
229 me that if the cells are the same, and the conditions
230 homogoneous, then all the cells should either die or
231 live. However, suppose that there is a metabolic cycle that needs
232 to be in a certain phase for the cell to survive. If the cells
233 are asynchronous, then you might end up with some cells dying
234 because there were in the wrong part of their cycle. This implies
235 that you might be able to cryoprotect cells by causing them to
236 enter a certain metabolic mode before freezing.
238 - cryonics color appeal :: perfusate used by cryonics companies should
239 have red food coloring in it. It's just a nice touch so that the
240 cryonics patient looks more life-like than with clear CPAs, and
241 hopefully might get treated with more respect.
243 - paramagnetic CPA :: you take a CPA that can be influenced by
244 magnetic fields so that its degrees of freedom are limited. Then,
245 you release the field, instantaly increasing the size of the
246 state space of the system and dramatically decreasing the
247 temperature enough to plunge the system past homogenous
248 nucleation temperature and directly to the glass transition
249 temperature, creating a doubly unstable glass at much lower CPA
250 concentrations than possible at conventional CPA concentrations.
252 - room temp noodles :: how does the physics of cooking noodles work?
253 Could you use a vacuum instead of heat to force water into the
254 noodle?
256 - personal carbon offset :: feel bad about contribuiting to global
257 warming by using electricity / driving a car? Forget trying to
258 "conserve" or "minimize your carbon footprint". Follow the
259 Platinum rule -- make the world BETTER off than you found it!
260 This would be a small, self contained system that sucks C02 out
261 of the air. It uses electricity, but it's so efficient at
262 removing CO2 that it more than offsets the CO2 produced by even a
263 coal plant to produce that electricity. This way, you can still
264 drive even a gas guzzler, but have a net negative carbon
265 footprint! Maybe something cool could be done with the carbon as
266 well. Use as much electricity as you want, but negate the damage
267 to the enviroment with more technology.
269 - undoing spermogenesis :: with enough sperm, you can derive the
270 donor's entire genome. You gain more confidence in the alleles
271 for a particular gene the more sperm you have. Each additional
272 sperm gives you the same sort of information you'd get flipping a
273 coin and trying to decide whether the coin is H/T of H/H. Is
274 there enough sperm in the the average load for you to be as
275 confident as mitosis?
277 - mars life :: we could engineer life that could survive on mars
278 (probably some non-vascular photosynthetic
279 poikilohydric creature like a lichen) by taking an
280 extremophile from Antarctica and evolving it in
281 increasingly Martian conditions. This could be an easy
282 start to a terraforming process.
284 - problem with Aubrey de Grey's ideas :: Aubrey de Grey says that we
285 might be able to live forever by continually repairing our bodies
286 at the cellular level -- he details 7 different mechanisms of
287 damage and says that if all of them are dealt with /together/
288 that it would stop aging. (You can't miss even one because
289 they're all fatal.) However, it doesn't take into account that
290 we are also beings of information and that there is a very real
291 software component to our existence. Even if our biological
292 chassies can be maintained forever, I think it is unlikely that
293 our minds will operate well far outside of the design constraints
294 that we've evolved to handle. Say I programmed a webserver with
295 the express goal of it being able to serve webpages for month on
296 some stock server. I'll do fairly rigorous testing to make sure
297 that it can handle the expected load then then some. Now say that
298 you want to keep a particular instance of this webserver running
299 indefinitely. (The program instance is like your mind and the
300 computer it's running on is like your body). You might very well
301 be able to keep the physical computer infrastructure running for
302 forever by replacing hard drives / ram / CPUs, etc. However,
303 since I designed the webserver to work for a month, it probably
304 has memory leaks, rare stochastic bugs, or other built in limits
305 / constraints (think log files or some date rollover shenanigans)
306 that will ultimately kill the webserver even with eternally
307 perfect hardware. Do you really expect that a webserver
308 engineered to work for 1 month will run for 10 years without
309 catastrophically crashing? Not even Apache can do this! In fact,
310 if I put in the extreme effort to make it that robust, I've
311 wasted time that I could have spent on other projects by pursuing
312 an unnecessary engineering goal. Likewise, human minds have only
313 ever run for at most 122 years before they are destroyed due to
314 hardware degradation. Fixing the hardware doesn't change any
315 software bugs that are almost certainly present in the human
316 mind. Think of all the pathological things that can go wrong with
317 a webserver, multiply it by a million, and that likely how
318 evolution has designed our minds. For example, consider memory :
319 why should you expect that we have evolved the ability to
320 coherently organize memories past say 150 years? There's been
321 absolutely no selective pressure for this ability, so you can bet
322 that if there's any fitness to be gained from not having
323 unlimited memory potential (such as better metabolic efficiency),
324 we have it! You might think that maybe we would just forget
325 things the same way that we sort of forget things that happen
326 earlier in our lives, but complicated information processing
327 systems don't have to fail gracefully when they're pushed far
328 past their design constraints. A 150 year old person is just as
329 likely to suffer a catastrophic psychosis due to software
330 limitations associated with memory as he is to do something with
331 all those memories we might consider reasonable. More likely, in
332 fact, since there are so very many ways for a complicated
333 software system to break and so few ways for it to run
334 successfully. Therefore, I think Aubrey de Grey's "hardware-only"
335 approach is missing a very important component of longevity
336 science, and any successful effort to make people live orders of
337 magnitude longer than they do naturally will need to deal with
338 people's software as well as their hardware.
340 - validating neurocryopreservation :: Problem : you want to test
341 whether a brain is functionally preserved through vitrification,
342 but you don't want to figure out how to preserve all the other
343 organs in the animal. It might be possible to keep the rest of
344 the body at almost 0C and vitrify just the head for only a few
345 minutes. Induce hypothermia, then separate out the head's blood
346 supply from the rest of the body, then just cryoptotect and
347 vitrify the head. Might need some sort of thermal guard to keep
348 the outer head / neck from becoming too cold. You leave the
349 spinal cord intact! Then you devitrify to 0C, remove
350 cryoprotectant, and then reattach the blood supply. You can
351 determine brain preservation using behavioral assays!
353 - freezing water purifier :: you slowly freeze water, but also run
354 liquid water over the frozen mass. This takes away basically all
355 impurities and creates "washed ice" then you melt the ice. Maybe
356 you could re-use the heat from creating the ice to melt the ice?
358 - ultra strength :: allow a person to visualize their muscle
359 recruitment patterns. Give them adrenaline and let
360 them feel what it's like to have the normal limits
361 removed. See if they can replicate the effects.
363 - phone names :: make a PX record for domain names that's like the MX
364 record, except that it is a phone number instead of
365 an IP address. That way, you can use the domain name
366 registration system to provide names for phone
367 numbers. Then, as long as you control the domain, you
368 can point people to your current phone number by
369 updating that record.
371 - edible flowers :: Edible white flowers that you put in a colored
372 solution with flavor. When the flower turns the
373 right color, it is also flavored and ready to eat!
375 - suicide cryonics :: according to [[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06suicide-t.html][this]], people who commit impulsive
376 suicides have a newfound sense of the importance of life. Perhaps
377 they are good cryonics targets.
379 - lead bone :: Could you fill in all the empty spaces in a bone with
380 lead? Might be cool.
382 - the quest for life :: Every stupid story has the "immortal who
383 wants to become mortal" or some other such idea. I want to story
384 where the protagonist loses their immortality and feels /angry/
385 and ashamed about losing something that's so absolutely crucial
386 to their identity. A reverse of "death makes life worth living",
387 they feel that living forever is what makes life worth
388 living. Now they've "lost their sunrise" or their "connection to
389 the timeless universe" or something. So they go on a quest to get
390 it back, learning about themselves along the way, and regaining
391 the precious thing they lost in the beginning.
393 - world-map :: take a small table and paint the continents in
394 toothpaste on the table. Make a slightly raised barrier
395 around the table. Slowly pour water onto the table, and
396 it will form the oceans!
398 - stage magic rituals :: rituals should incorporate elements of stage
399 magic. Foe example in Teller's tempest, they have a scene where
400 they levitate a crown in front of someone, then put it on his
401 head. They also have a wedding ceremony where they levitated the
402 bride as well. Actual weddings and other ceremonies should
403 incorporate stage magic as an enhancement.
405 - isotope time dilation :: use a cyclotron to speed up rare isotopes
406 developed in nuclear fusion experiments. The relativistic time
407 dilation will stop the isotopes from decaying, and allow time to
408 study them. This is based on radioactive isotopes that fall
409 through the earth's atmosphere that take hundreds of times
410 longer to decay than normal.
412 - marsupial stimulation :: You take a freshly pouched marsupial baby,
413 and show it videos and other interactive things while it matures
414 in the pouch. What mental effects would this have?
416 - dynamic re-keying :: Some older ways of tuning instruments sound
417 better, but we use the even-tempered scale today because it makes
418 it easier to switch keys. With electronic music, why not make
419 key-annotations and dynamically re-tune the piece to sound good
420 in the current key? Could be done as a midi+annotation -> midi
421 compiler for experimentation.
423 - death always implies damage :: is is possible for a corpse to differ
424 from a living person only in the fact that one is dead and the
425 other is alive? NO! A corpse must always have some sort of
426 molecular damage which causes the loss of function!
428 - inner eye :: Surgically install a bunch of tiny cameras inside a
429 person. Then, you can activate them all and get a
430 picture of your internal organs for diagnostic
431 purposes.
433 - chaos rails :: should make a visualization of the homoclinic tangle,
434 it's truly beautiful.
436 - context gobbler :: this would be in "inside-out macro" that takes
437 the context (like you use for things like error, continuations,
438 and friends) and transforms it to something else. Maybe useful?
440 - cryonics middle ages :: some people say that cryonics is an
441 experiment and that it is foolish to wait until we have revived a
442 human. There is a middle ground where the procedure has a dismal
443 success rate on humans, say 1 in 20, so that you'd be a fool to
444 try revival. Nonetheless, this very risky procedure could be the
445 legal proof of concept needed to create a new class of life
446 between "living" and "dead": "stasis".
448 - philosophy of the mirror :: neat thought experiment -- if you take a
449 mirror of someone by actually reversing a person's chirality
450 molecule by molecule, then will the only be able to read mirror
451 writing? The answer is yes, by analogy to a purely mechanical
452 scan-tron device. This is one of the only interesting transforms I
453 know that can take a human brain and change it in subtle,
454 non-destructive ways. It's also an argument against dualism.
456 - biosphere in a bottle :: There are around 15 million species. 15
457 million stem cells will fill only a tiny size, far less than a cubic
458 inch. Preserve a single cell from every species on earth in this
459 small space, and you will have a record of our current biosphere
460 that can be protected. "Hold the genetic data of all species in
461 your hand!"
463 - chaos lock :: The "arrow of time" points in the direction of
464 increasing entropy. The time evolution of chaotic
465 systems depend exquisitely on their initial state. If
466 you take a measurement of a chaotic system at any
467 given point of time, you can evolve that system
468 backwards or forwards based on your measurement. So
469 let's say you start the chaotic system in a VERY low
470 entropy state, then let it run for a while, then take
471 a measurement with some uncertainty. Your
472 measurement is pretty good, but obviously not
473 PERFECT. If you evolve the chaotic system back in
474 time, then you will see that you don't really reach
475 a state with low entropy an hour before (the entropy
476 is easy to measure with surrogates like alignment,
477 etc). So use this technique to SEARCH for a more
478 accurate measurement! This potentially can give you
479 many more orders of magnitude than you could get alone
480 just using an instrument. Sometimes it will give you
481 bad results, the the odds of it doing that are
482 infinitesimal, and you can just measure a couple of
483 times.
485 - cryo-evolution :: perhaps there would be a way to rapidly evolve a
486 symbiotic bacterial organism that could protect
487 human tissues from freezing damage.
489 - suicide parasite :: sometimes, people kill themselves for no good
490 reason. We often explain this with things like "hidden
491 depression" or we say that they had something like chronic jaw or
492 back pain. I think that smells of rationalization. I don't buy
493 it. I propose that in many suicide cases there is a disease that
494 causes the suicidal behavior. We already know that certain
495 parasites have mind-bending properties in other animals, even
496 mammals like mice. It's not much of a stretch to imagine a
497 parasite that causes suicides in humans. Some problems:
498 - What does the suicide parasite get out of it? :: This might be
499 answered by the whole thing being a glitch caused by
500 cross-species contamination. Toxoplasma works this way.
501 - What predictions does a disease model make :: suicide should
502 be more common among people who share a contagion
503 vector. There should be suicides that don't make any
504 sense : people who weren't really depressed, who had no
505 reason to kill themselves. People who have killed themselves
506 should have a higher incidence of some unknown parasite in
507 their brains.
509 - domestic insects :: People should eat more bugs because they're much
510 more efficient, so why not do some major domestication research
511 to make very appealing bugs? Beetles, in particular, seem to be
512 excellent targets for domestication because they have extreme
513 levels of genetic malleability.
515 - birth-clones :: What if each person was intentionally split at birth
516 into a normal embryo and a few "backup" cells which
517 is then frozen. The backup cells are created just
518 the same way as natural identical twins. The backups
519 can be used to regenerate organs. etc. Also, it
520 would be a good sci fi concept, because you could
521 have a culture where people reward people who were
522 especially awesome are "reborn" from their
523 backups. Imagine having a young Bach every
524 generation, etc.
526 - pronunciation guide :: a simple webpage where you type in a word and
527 it returns a simple, English sentence describing exactly how to
528 pronounce the word. For people who don't want to learn IPA.
530 - cortex-search :: use the repertoire of actions learned to limit the
531 search space of possible actions.
533 - learning to teleport :: scifi idea, this is a story about a person
534 who is struggling with his/her society's ideas about
535 teleportation. It's considered a fundamental part of being a
536 member of that society (after all, the difference between animals
537 and humans is that humans are creatures of pure information while
538 animals are burdened with base matter, "that's how you travel the
539 stars, etc") Humans are born normally, grow up, and then
540 eventually transcend via destructive upload. Analogies to jumping
541 off a diving board into a pool (which I simply /could not do/ for
542 a long time), etc.
544 - no-float-ice :: cup that has cross beams at the bottom where ice
545 forms. Then when you drink liquid from the glass,
546 the ice stays at the bottom and doesn't hit your
547 lips. For bars and fancy things.
549 - bitcoins for immigrants :: A common case with Mexican immigrants
550 (illegal or not) is that they want to send money they've earned
551 in the US back to their families in Mexico. They currently do this
552 through things like Money Gram or Western Union, and they get
553 fleeced in the process with fees. Bitcoin could greatly reduce
554 the cost of sending money from America to Mexico, but I don't
555 believe that it's currently used for that among Mexican
556 immigrants currently due to lack of knowledge. I bet you could
557 set up physical locations like those obnoxious Western Union huts
558 in places like Texas, Arizona, etc, and greatly undercut
559 them. Or, perhaps some educational seminars about bitcoin might
560 be in order. There's some money to be made there because there is
561 great demand, and it's a good thing to boot!
563 - reverse eye-tracking :: A painting that is actually a digital screen
564 with a camera. It records people's eye tracks permanently. It's
565 "artistic" because paintings are normally these things that you
566 look at without changing, but this one is changed the second you
567 look at it, recording where /you/ looked forever for others to
568 see. Make it be a painting of a woman and see the trolling as the
569 breasts and groin area light up with interest from all the males
570 passing by.
572 - smart toilets :: Instead of using indirect measures like infrared
573 detectors of the presence of a person, use computer
574 vision to directly measure whether the toilet needs
575 to be flushed. I think a lot of things will end up
576 going this way as we get better computer vision.
578 - validate chemopreservation :: chemopreservation is difficult to
579 validate because it destroys the functionality of a brain, and
580 brain simulation will take a long time to mature as a
581 technology. However, one very powerful way to validate
582 chemopreservation would be to have a person/animal learn
583 something with high complexity such as a number or the solution
584 to a maze, or a flashbulb memory. Then you preserve their brain
585 chemically, slice it up, and read /that specific memory/ from the
586 detailed brain scan. Much more difficult, but much more doable.
588 - candy screw :: edible candy screw with candy nuts that you can screw
589 as well.
591 - better bibliography :: when writing a thesis or paper, have the
592 bibliography not just be an opaque list of resources, but have it
593 be a list of /summaries/ and /qualities/ that each paper has in
594 the context of the paper being written. When examining a
595 bibliography, I want to know if reading the papers in the
596 bibliography are worth my time, and I also am probably also
597 interested in exactly the things that are being discussed in the
598 paper I'm reading. The bibliography is the perfect place to
599 provide information about the referenced papers from the
600 author's perspective. I will use this biographic form in my own
601 thesis.
603 - digital inter-library loan :: libraries at universities already do
604 inter-library loans for books, so why not do the same for access
605 to stupid paywalled digital papers? All the universities could
606 allow access to articles for registered students to all the files
607 available through any participating university. This could be
608 achieved by sending requests through proxies at participating
609 universities. Each university would decide who at the university
610 can access the proxy network. Access to the proxy network could
611 be made easy using something like http://libx.org/.
613 - chess visual :: to show the vast size of the game trees considered
614 by computers, show two people playing chess in a
615 void. They are floating in space, and there is a
616 simple chess board between them. Then, as they play,
617 the game tree's they are considering are drawn
618 behind him. The root of the tree starts centered in
619 their heads or whatever they use to think, and the
620 tree grows out from behind, never crossing the
621 dividing plane between the two players. Each
622 player's tree is a different color. As they grow,
623 there are animations for pruning, etc. Eventually,
624 they look like the hemispheres of a brain, wings,
625 etc. A human's tree might occasionally have a long
626 chain, while the computer tree would be more
627 uniform. You could compare deep blue and a modern
628 laptop. Use actual data when fighting two computers!
630 - time verification :: some standard way to verify that some piece of
631 data was recorded at a specific time. Might involve a time
632 server, a key for each time period, something like that.
634 - tamper proof gold bars :: [[http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/gold-plated-tungsten-alloy-bar.html][this site]] offers gold plated tungsten bars
635 as "novelty" items. One reason to prefer coins is because they
636 are much harder to counterfeit because there is less surface area
637 to mass ratio. However, gold bars are still a great design
638 because they can hold a lot of value in a small space. A gold bar
639 could be given the same protections (and more) that gold coins
640 have to offer by changing it into a "gold book", which would have
641 hundreds of "pages" of gold bound together. This could be
642 implemented with multiple steel rods going through the book which
643 can be removed, or some more classier mechanism for holding the
644 pages. The point is that the bar can be EASILY subdivided (and
645 people would perform this test before buying), thus guaranteeing
646 it's authenticity.
648 - aurellem shirt :: I should make an aurellem star symbol tee-shirt.
650 - touch vision :: inspired by GelSight, I want to reexamine cortex and
651 see if I could implement touch as a very low range
652 form of vision.
654 - high school science :: this is a lesson in scientific ethics. The
655 goal is to calculate /g/, the local gravitational
656 acceleration. The students are told that the textbook says it's
657 /exactly/ 9.81 before they start the experiment. See how they
658 doctor their results to get closer to the textbook value. It's
659 neat because for any given school, /g/ is probably *not* exactly
660 equal to 9.81, because that is just an average!
662 - opencourseware subtitles :: there are ladies who type up lectures
663 while they are being given. These recordings should be kept and
664 given to OCW for subtitles. If the timestamps of keys are
665 recorded, then it is easy to make subtitles.
667 - screen locking timing :: you use your computer camera to see if you
668 are sitting in front of the computer. If you are, then the screen
669 will never lock. If you are, then the screen will lock with a
670 30-40 second timeout. It's an extension of using inactivity to
671 initiate the countdown, just with more information.
673 - mirror toilet :: a toilet with a square basin made or mirror instead
674 or porcelain. That way, you can see how good of a
675 wipe job you have done / watch how your excretion
676 system works.
678 - test dummies :: why don't we clone anencephalic humans and use then to
679 test /in vivo/ human organ systems and drugs? It
680 would be ethical as long as there are women who are
681 willing to host the clones, and it would be a
682 tremendous resource for studying the human body. I
683 see nothing wrong with it morally, since no one is
684 suffering, and it stands to save many lives throughout
685 more advanced technology.
687 - X-ray telepresence :: given that a doctor is operating on a patient
688 via telepresence, one cool things you can do is shine X-rays into
689 the patient to view the insides during real time. If the system
690 was coupled with a Bayesian model of the layout of the structure,
691 and the x-rays were only fired whenever the uncertainty of the
692 model reached a certain threshold, then the radiation damage
693 and surgery risk could be minimized.
695 - superfluid vascular system :: I wonder what would happen if you
696 replaced the blood in a human with a superfluid. What would the
697 physical dynamics be? Would the superfluid flow through the
698 vasculature, or would it ignore it and travel through the cells,
699 or something else entirely. Since superfluids need to be cold to
700 retain their superfluidity, how would the dynamics change during
701 perfusion of a superfluid, where the fluid gains and looses
702 superfluidity as it goes deeper into the body and is cooled by
703 superfluid from upstream. In summary there are two things to
704 simulate 1.) replace all blood in human with superfluid
705 instantly. 2.) perfuse superfluid into human.
707 - projective guessing :: I think that we read and see things by
708 making a really good guess about what we're expecting to see,
709 and then searching for our guess in what we see. If it really
710 doesn't match, then we start to make more guesses / analyze the
711 image from first principles, but most stuff is projective
712 guessing.
714 - Intestinal flora maintenance :: why not inoculate babies at birth
715 with "ideal" gut flora instead of whatever bullshit they
716 naturally get, thus giving them optimal digestive/nutrient
717 extraction capabilities. Might also be able to make their farts
718 not stink for life, too. MORE IMPORTANTLY, might help to
719 preventatively stop some forms of /colic/, which affects 1 in 5
720 babies and causes constant screaming and pain for about 5 weeks.
722 - server culture : mirrors :: make a distributed system where people
723 can mirror the websites of people they like -- essentially cover
724 the server costs of favored websites. This could make popular
725 websites run at no cost. The system would require that the
726 mirrored content be the same as the official source. Sort of like
727 bit-torrent for websites.
729 - map programming :: one problem with functional programming is that
730 in order to remain functional, you have to pass up arguments up
731 into each calling function to get the full range of behavior
732 from the lower level functions. Normally people come to a
733 compromise involving abstraction and sparing use of dynamic
734 variables to configure runtime behavior. What would be the
735 advantages of making a programming language where every function
736 receives one argument, a map, which contains all the symbol
737 bindings it would ever need? This map is passed on to all
738 subordinate functions. This way, you could replace functions on
739 the fly, and arrange for there to be sensible defaults,
740 etc. Might cause more harm than good but is an interesting idea.
742 - rest nest :: a small EEG device you would attach to your head when
743 you go to sleep at night. ML algorithms would determine
744 your particular sleep cycles. This would mostly be an
745 alarm clock that you could give a time range, say
746 7:00AM - 7:15AM, and it would wake you up during an
747 ideal time corresponding to then end of one of your 90
748 min sleep cycles. You would feel much more rested upon
749 waking up, and would wake up faster. There might be
750 some other uses for the EEG data as well.
752 - image compression :: use a library like gimp or opencv to process an
753 image to make it have less entropy, then store the reverse of
754 those operations along with the compressed simpler image as a
755 super-compressed image file (possibly accepting some
756 losses). Trades file size for decompression time, and allows one
757 to cheat by using information in gimp/opencv to compress the
758 image.
760 - fixed cryopreservation :: why not use a fixative to buy enough time
761 to ramp up cryoprotectants to an acceptable level at room
762 temperature? Then, the whole system can be rapidly cooled and
763 vitrified. This method "severs the biological link" in that the
764 fixatives are highly toxic, but current vitrification procedures
765 do this anyway since there can be a lot of freezing damage.
767 - dilated security camera :: a security camera that would capture
768 full video footage of everything at 60fps but then decide to keep
769 only every 1 frame every 5 seconds unless there's something
770 "interesting" happening.
772 - bitcoin wallet :: Part of "server culture", this would be something
773 like "coin.your-domain.com" which would serve as
774 your personal trusted access to your own bitcoins
775 from anywhere.
777 - libpay :: this would be a free library which would enable
778 micro-donations to software projects and other projects,
779 so that you could donate a penny to "emacs" and it would
780 be automatically split up to every person who has ever
781 contributed to emacs in proportion to the amount of
782 community esteem, code quantity, bugs fixed, whatever the
783 community decides. This might make it possible for
784 programmers to live entirely off of free programming.
786 - distributed graphics :: Browser based graphics-card accelerated
787 distributed computing API.
789 - pronouns :: use capital letters A-Z instead of pronouns. They solve
790 pronoun referents and gender neutrality, are short to
791 say, and you can encode useful information into the
792 choice of letter. For example, instead of "Meetings
793 shall be presided over by the president, unless she is
794 absent." USE "Meetings shall be presided over by the
795 president, unless P is absent." We already use this a
796 little, since I and U are reserved for the subject and
797 object respectively.
799 - phone DSP :: software app that inserts an audio DSP between the
800 input to a phone and the output. The DSP is delicious
801 and configurable, and can allow men to make their
802 voices deeper, etc. The app would allow you to hear
803 your own voice as others hear it. Most people hate how
804 their own voice sounds. The app would also allow one to
805 immediately change the parameters of the DSP using good
806 presets.
808 - predestined body learning :: a good example of predestined learning
809 might be the mirror neurons.
811 - restaurant receipt :: use a carbon copy receipt instead of two stupid
812 copies.
814 - anti google glass :: glasses with mounted lasers and computer vision
815 that targets the cameras in google glass and destroy them.
817 - wearable towel :: towel with clasp, velcro, whatever, that allows
818 one to wear the towel more securely than just
819 wrapping it tightly and hoping for the best.
821 - crossdressing :: Easiest way to disguise oneself as a woman is to
822 wear a burka.
824 - book-mode :: intelligent color highlighting for books and
825 articles. It would disambiguate pronouns and involved
826 references. For example, if "Rachael" was assigned the
827 color red, and "the blonde haired girl" refers to
828 "Rachael", then "the blonde haired girl" would be
829 colored red. Also, you could disambiguate multi part
830 run-on sentences by highlighting each
831 subcomponent. Maybe would also have applications to
832 scientific reading.
834 - Handheld light Rain measurement :: this would be a clear, teflon
835 coated plastic disk with a camera underneath the disk. You would
836 be able to hold the device out and it would measure the rate of
837 accumulation of water droplets from fine mists and light rain by
838 using computer vision to measure the diameters of the drops.
840 - Big Brother Farming :: This would be a vision system that would
841 individually monitor each plant and turn on water, etc to ensure
842 maximum/uniform growth for each plant.
844 - Discrete Faucet :: A faucet with discrete ticks instead of
845 continuous.
847 - Laser Circle :: take a glass microfiliment and shine a laser at one
848 end at an oblique angle. It will make a perfect,
849 large circle on the wall, converting a laser beam
850 into a laser cone, preserving most of the energy of
851 the laser.
853 - Invisible Glass :: Take a container of liquid and embed a
854 glass sculpture made out of glass that has exactly the same index
855 of refraction and color of the liquid. Then the sculpture will be
856 totally invisible in the container, and will only be revealed
857 when the liquid is drained. The container might be a fancy
858 wine/spirit bottle or an hourglass.
860 - Caterpillar people :: A race of caterpillar like creatures gains
861 intelligence after eons of predation by birds, etc. These
862 caterpillar creatures still undergo metamorphosis into a large
863 butterfly-like creature. The metamorphosis process turns the
864 caterpillar's brain into mush and reforms it into a minimal,
865 dumb, truly insect-like mind, completely destroying the person
866 the caterpillar was. The society develops all sorts of customs and
867 religious interpretations of the metamorphosis. It is viewed as
868 good and natural by some since it is part of their life cycle and
869 necessary to propagate the species, as only the butterflies can
870 mate. Some think that the butterflies are still the same person
871 because they have the same soul, even they no longer posses the
872 memories or personality of the original caterpillar. Some see the
873 butterfly form as the "true form" of the species, since the
874 butterflies can fly, mate, and are beautiful. Many make a big
875 deal out of the fact that 1-2% of the caterpillar's mind is
876 actually preserved in the butterfly. Some see it as a terrible
877 tragedy and argue that the caterpillars should try to stop the
878 metamorphosis by technology. Practically, some very important
879 members of society undergo hormone therapy and/or surgery to
880 prevent metamorphosis so that they can live longer as themselves.
882 This is a continuation of Marvin Minsky's ideas about pain being
883 something that preserves our bodies while destroying our minds,
884 something that is a remnant from our too harsh animal days that
885 hasn't caught up to the fact that we have very complex brains
886 now. It's a worst-case scenario about a maladaptive genetic
887 legacy. Also, it's inspired by "There She Is!!!", which makes a
888 compelling point about homosexuality by introducing a second
889 gender characteristic (bunny/cat, male/female), which makes
890 homophobia look very silly. Here, our own biological legacy of
891 pain and death is made to look like the tragedy it is through the
892 lens of the the caterpillar people.
894 - relationships as a business :: [[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx][Turnover-Crisis]] is an excellent talk
895 about the "culture of quitting," which is about better business
896 by letting people go instead of keeping them around past their
897 "apex". Focuses on information transfer. Cool idea of an alumni
898 network, which for relationships would be a group of satisfied
899 ex-lovers, who would recommend new people your way, and who might
900 consider coming to you again, refreshed from their time away with
901 new stories/experiences. I should look for examples of this and
902 how they worked out.
904 - coffee with tea :: /rlm-tea/ contains 2% sugar, 10% cream, and 20%
905 dylan coffee. /dylan coffee/ contains 5% sugar,
906 20% cream, and 10% rlm-tea. Start your mornings
907 with recursion!
909 - psychic crystal :: in a science fiction story, this would be an
910 object that is very easy to move physically but is extremely
911 difficult to move with telekinesis.
913 - http://betsofbitco.in/ :: what a great place for an AI/person to
914 prove themselves as a good predictor. I wish this could be
915 automated.
917 - true reflection :: don't forget about that mirror in the student
918 center!, it's two mirrors at right angles, like staring at a
919 corner of a room. The light reflects so that it shows you what
920 you actually look like, instead of your mirror image.
922 - remote control wasp :: use computer to drive wings with remote
923 power/logic.
925 - encrypted email phone book :: public (distributed?) database of
926 email->private-key pairs, to enable automatic encryption.
928 - universal eye color :: every equivalent creature will see each
929 others' eyes as black -- it's universal. Even if the creatures
930 see in radio waves, and their eyes are 2m long pieces of jagged
931 metal, when those creatures look at each other, they will see
932 black, the absence of light and color (since it's being absorbed
933 by the sensor array).
935 - intelligent microwave :: it learns where the hot nodes of its fields
936 are, and uses them to evenly heat any food item. It has an infrared
937 camera or something to keep track of how hot the food is. That way,
938 you don't get bowls where the edges are boiling, while the center is
939 still frozen. Requires a little bit of intelligence/vision, since
940 the exact pattern of heating totally depends on the exact shape of
941 the food. Wouldn't need a carousel, and wouldn't need a timer,
942 just a desired temperature. Could also detect ice, and automatically
943 defrost the parts which are frozen. Might be able to work much
944 faster since it can avoid overheating; might have problems with
945 heating the insides of thick things, might need a weight sensor too.
947 + Would be much cleaner than other microwaves, since food would
948 "sputter" and splash liquid much less.
950 + Throw in some SIFT+R processing to match previously cooked foods
951 and learn the exact heating profiles for things that have been
952 cooked before -- it can get faster the more it's used.
954 - compression :: brain-aware image compression algorithm
956 - Credit card proxy :: would be a company which works like paypal
957 except for real world transactions
959 - Flesh pillow :: a pillow like the arm or torso of a human, complete
960 with simulated temperature, bones, and heartbeat.
962 - super screw :: a screw which has only one or two threads and instead
963 uses compression to fit into a hole (the whole shank
964 of the screw is split into multiple pieces to
965 accomplish this; the tip is a point, then the middle
966 bulges out and gets compressed when screwed in.
968 - light filter :: (like light tweezers) to mechanically separate
969 fluids with different index of refraction
971 - chalk eraser project :: maybe make a directional eraser, for easy
972 release of chalk dust, like fur, and how it likes to rest in a
973 certain direction.
975 - silver socks :: socks laced with silver for the antimicrobial
976 properties.
978 - UROP :: magnet gear/metal teeth tape
980 - Rod of Moses :: device to distill urine through evaporation and
981 easily dispose of urea crystals for use in desert --
982 produce drinkable water.
984 - UROP :: Make the LED in line with the flow for the micro injector, so
985 that it may transmit maximum flow. Motor that changes
986 distance of internal magnet from windings depending on
987 desired speed so as to obtain maximum power efficiency.
989 - lottery scraper :: web scraper which monitors various lotteries,
990 looking for "special" gimmick changes in the rules (like 4x
991 winnings on Wednesdays) and computes expected value...
993 - Memristiors novel design :: make an evolutionary algorithm to make
994 old stuff using all four basic circuit elements.
996 - Conductive concrete :: concrete that has embedded metal fibers so
997 that it can conduct electricity.
999 - little bitty melting pot :: might be useful for some types of
1000 manufacturing/3D printing -- how small can an induction melter be
1001 made, for example.
1003 - power strip/timer programmable combination :: meh
1005 - algorithms :: which learn what their inputs are and in what order,
1006 and can adapt to changing circumstances -- they
1007 remember previous arguments and adapt so as to respond
1008 to different connections.
1010 - true pure tones :: hear a true pure tone by direct stimulation of the
1011 nerves of the ear
1013 - mechanical analogue to the electrical op-amp :: would be an object
1014 with two levers -- you pull on one lever and the other moves the
1015 same way, no matter what's in the way or what it is driving. This
1016 analogy could be useful to teach op amps to people.
1018 - paper folding device :: make it convenient to fold lots of papers in
1019 various ways.
1021 - concrete epoxy :: epoxy with sand/ some other solid material.
1023 - light capacitor :: suspend some ball of material with a high index
1024 of refraction and shine light into it so it gets stuck -- would
1025 the light stay trapped forever? Could you build up unlimited
1026 quantities of light inside the sphere (which could then be
1027 released slowly by frustrated internal reflection?
1029 - movie screening :: Movies always are too long at first. One way to
1030 shorten them ``scientifically" is to record blink rate during the
1031 move and then remove / shorten the frames of the parts in which
1032 there are a lot of blinking (average this over multiple people)
1033 better yet, put it online and do it across thousands of people. I
1034 got this from youtube in which there is an episode of kill bill
1035 which is composed entirely of the parts in which people had their
1036 eyes closed. slogan: want to make a movie people can't take their
1037 eyes off of? Just take those parts out!
1039 - optimize an article :: capture reading of a scientific article via
1040 screen capture while people read it, then use it to make the
1041 article better. like the movie-pruning idea.
1043 - super reading program :: teaches people the ideal mental mask to
1044 apply during reading so as to read very fast.
1046 - explosive thermite epoxy putty :: one part would contain the rust,
1047 one part the aluminum.
1049 - reading comprehension :: use the above screen capture routine to
1050 make a quiz program that constructs questions about the content
1051 you seemed to gloss over while reading. could be easy if the pdf
1052 came with embedded questions. Dylan: automatically generate
1053 word-cloud about the parts you found most interesting; help
1054 others who read the same stuff by drawing attention to the
1055 interesting parts.
1057 - hard sword :: make a samurai sword, but use osmiridum instead of
1058 martensite for the cutting part; it should be a better
1059 sword.
1061 - close range wireless :: use the induction technology used to
1062 recharge electric toothbrushes with no metal links to send data
1063 without any metal at all!
1065 - reading :: is a form of synsethesia
1067 - DNA printer :: A machine which translates the text eg, "ACTGAC" into
1068 actual DNA
1070 - black generator :: ferro-fluid magnetic field suspended micro
1071 generator to make electricity
1073 - alcohol battery :: alcohol/fluid flow powered battery
1075 - folding razor blade sword ::
1077 - perfect pitch :: learn perfect pitch using another sense in
1078 combination (sight or touch)
1080 - kaleidoscope projector ::
1082 - razor blade de-sharpener :: for guilt free disposal
1084 - bricks :: filled with luminescent plant material
1086 - bio metallic structure :: metal grids with seeds inside, which grow
1087 together and form a durable biological matrix. The metal
1088 substrate delivers water. (maybe use plastic instead of metal?)
1089 Dylan: enrich plants with inorganic compounds; electrical
1090 interfaces in cellular plant matter => remote-controlled
1091 photosynthetic/bioluminescent structures.
1093 - conducting extracellular matrix :: to allow better control of
1094 organic systems and an enhanced nervous system.
1096 - cross-modal memory hashing :: a way to retrieve memories more
1097 robustly.
1099 - flossing thimble-guards :: (these actually exist)
1101 - rules + lattice learning :: integrate lattice learning with rules by
1102 generating hypothetical examples
1104 - wooden refrigerator :: to give food a better taste Dylan: like
1105 barrels for wine, or planks for salmon. Maybe just have "flavor
1106 planks" for your pre-existing fridge. Need to mitigate effect of
1107 temperature on volatility?
1109 - radioactive transmutation molecule by molecule :: create precious
1110 metals or something else economically advantageous.
1112 - crowd preservation :: inoculate food with tons of harmless
1113 bacteria so that there's no room for bad bacteria as a method of
1114 preservation
1116 - old school preservation :: Pasteur - style holding jar with siphon
1117 as a way to store liquids at room temperature indefinitely w/o
1118 refrigeration.
1120 - restaurant policy :: Throw rude people out of restaurant as a matter
1121 of course -- make ambiance much better.
1123 - clean windows :: make something that mixes soap with fire hydrant
1124 water (and reduces the pressure a bit) and use it
1125 to clean windows of buildings.
1127 - ocarina :: make an ocarina out of pure silver
1129 - fire pen :: pen which burns words on to the page, thus never needing
1130 any ink. Is there a way to make it runnable from the
1131 human's energy?
1133 - website to design your own soda :: and label, and have it mailed to
1134 you / sell it from your own online store.
1136 - solar panels :: that float on the ocean
1138 - handcuffs with more than two cuffs (3?) :: great for daisy chaining
1139 people, binding them to environment, etc.
1141 - vector based SOUND files :: like the pictures but with SOUND. codify
1142 sound in a language with enough symbols so that it can describe
1143 everything and encode it in that. would be like going from speech
1144 to text or smtg. Could also store sound as an image of the
1145 wavefront encoded as a vector image.
1147 - Mouse :: with a horizontal scroll wheel in addition to the vertical
1148 scroll wheel
1150 - logic maintenance system for big institutions :: to make sure the
1151 things they are thinking about doing are not retarded
1153 - http://www.regulations.gov/ :: cool site
1155 - genetically engineered glowing fruit :: sell seeds?
1157 - memory slide :: IF memories are encoded using particular sensory
1158 impressions, what happens if the sensory organ
1159 itself changes? those memories would become
1160 inaccessible. maybe this is why we can't remember
1161 much from our childhoods. also, could this happen
1162 throughout life as well? Could S remember stuff from
1163 his childhood?
1165 - make a completely indestructible phone :: no moving parts or display
1166 you should be able to slam it around all you want, and it will
1167 just work. brutally simple. aerogel around the battery, minimal
1168 interface - never gets too hot, and can be dropped into water. no
1169 holes -- uses field effects for everything from the buttons to
1170 inductive charging and data transfer.
1172 - midi to ocarina "tabs" program :: (online website? buy ocarinas from
1173 it too)
1175 - 3d printing with sound pulses (or just patterns) :: like the 8.03
1176 lecture
1178 - lighter flint on spring :: make hot, throw it at something, and it
1179 makes sparkles!
1181 - nuclear energy :: Rebranding New+Clear Energy with informational
1182 campaign and public debate forum to enforce its
1183 transparent and open nature. France needn't be the
1184 world leader in nuclear energy. (Dylan)
1186 - bubbles :: Engineer a material which has both ductility and high
1187 surface tension to make the "third"
1188 minimal-surface-energy solution to a bubble suspended
1189 between two equal-diameter rings. (Solutions are
1190 cylindrical catenary curve, two separated half-bubbles,
1191 and a double-cone)
1193 - Textbook whose content can be varied continuously :: alter level of
1194 difficulty, rigor, diction, emphasize crossover with certain
1195 other discipline, etc. Content generated dynamically from
1196 knowledge base, along with questions that are moreover altered to
1197 guide knowledge acquisition. Motivation: One book of
1198 knowledge. /One./
1200 ** From Jacob's idea list
1202 - Roommate-canceling headphones: uses roommate's laptop mic to seed
1203 noise cancellation alg in your headphones (would this
1204 work?). -Update on sound canceling headphones that take feed from
1205 tv: how about ones that cancel people talking on the phone by
1206 receiving the phone signals and playing inverse sound
1207 waves. #signalprocessing ~jcole@mit.edu
1209 - ClackerAlert -- tells if you slam the keys too hard using sound data
1210 (and speed/jerkiness data)!.Prevents RSI ~jcole@mit.e
1212 - Panic Pin :: separate pin that you can tell someone if forced to
1213 identify your PIN (idea from idea about credit cards)