view org/good-ideas.org @ 148:42b447a048aa

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author Robert McIntyre <rlm@mit.edu>
date Sun, 19 Apr 2015 03:58:17 -0700
parents e9c46842080b
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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 Robert McIntyre
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
9 #+HTML_HEAD_EXTRA: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../css/ideas.css" />
10 #+OPTIONS: num:nil
12 * Ideas
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14 # :HTML_CONTAINER_CLASS: ideas
15 # :END:
17 This is a list of all the good ideas I've had that I felt like writing
18 down for the past ~ 10 years. Some of them could be practical
19 inventions and are "just" waiting for that 95% perspiration to bring
20 them to fruition, some are ideas for science fiction, and some are
21 simple observations. They are arranged roughly in reverse
22 chronological order, with the most recent ideas at the top of the
23 list. The ones at the bottom of the list are heavily influenced by my
24 time at MIT, the ones at the top, by my time at 21st Century Medicine.
26 If you find some of these interesting and would like to collaborate on
27 them with me or discuss them in more detail, I'd love to hear from
28 you. You can email me at ideas@aurellem.org.
30 If you want to use one of these ideas as your own and run with it,
31 please feel free. I'd love to hear about it if you do.
33 #+begin_quote
34 There's no end to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care about
35 getting credit.
36 #+end_quote
39 #+BEGIN_HTML
40 <hr/>
41 #+END_HTML
43 ** The Ocean Becomes a Drop
44 Upload faces challenges to grow into they type of person that can
45 join the greater society -- a god. They have to go though quests
46 that replicate all the things that humanity had to accomplish, like
47 going to the moon, by themselves.
49 ** Butterfly Drone
50 If big butterflies used to exist, then maybe we could make
51 butterfly-inspired drones!
53 ** Methylation Sex-Symmetry Breaking
54 Human sex cells have methylation patterns that encode male/female
55 origin. If you combine two male patterns, the fetus grows "too
56 fast" and dies. Two female patterns causes the fetus to enter a
57 "vegatable" state and fail to develop. Evolutionary biologists say
58 that this reflects the asymmetry of energy investement for creating
59 offspring. If that's true, then species that cast-spawn will lack
60 this asymmetry, and give clues about how to remove it in humans. If
61 even cast spawners like sea urchins have it, then that means
62 there's something deeper going on!
64 ** Homosexual Reproduction
65 You take genetic material from two males and put it into an egg
66 cell that has had all genetic material removed. Or, you take the
67 genetic material from one egg and put it in another egg. This would
68 allow homosexual couples to genetically reproduce. One technical
69 challenge blocking this technique is that human gametes have
70 methylation patterns that encode male/female origin, and only a
71 male+female pattern gives rise to viable offspring. You could
72 "recondition" male / female gametes to give them the opposite
73 pattern, perhaps by incubating them in the appropriate
74 environment. You also could try taking stem cells and making them
75 form the appropriate structures in vitro.
77 ** Poly-Vitrification
78 Large molecules such as PVP are able to vitrify at around -20C, and
79 at farily small concentrations. IF they could be introduced into
80 cells, they would be quite useful as vitrification agents. However,
81 it's difficult to get them in because they are so big. So instead,
82 use smaller agents which combine together into polymers at low
83 temperature. In particular, Fructose, trehalose, and glycerol seem
84 to have the desired properties (though you need to make versions of
85 fructose and trehalose that can penetrate).
87 ** Whole Brain Perfusion Embedding
88 Do the standard EM embedding protocol, but skip the osmium step,
89 and use the "perfusion pausing" method to prevent overextraction
90 during the dehydration and embedding steps. I think that you can
91 perfuse resins into the brain, simply because you can perfuse
92 viscous rubber when doing vascular casts.
94 ** Very Slow Physiological Pressure Perfusion
95 Less extreme example of the "perfusion pausing" trick -- just keep
96 the perfusion running and don't put the perfusion target into the
97 liquid as deep.
99 ** Perfusion Pausing
100 One problem with doing perfusion of heads / organs where the veins
101 freely leak fluid is that if you STOP the perfusion, you rapidly
102 loose pressure in the organ as your perfusate leaks out. You can
103 prevent this by submerging the organ/head/rat whatever in fluid at
104 an appropriate deepness. You would have to slowly decrease the flow
105 rate while simultaneously lowering the perfusing object into the
106 fluid. To start again, reverse the process -- reengage the
107 peristaltic pump slowly while removing the organ from the fluid.
109 ** Textbook Mimiricy Evolution
110 As surgery becomes more common, there develops a distinct selective
111 pressure for individuals' organ layouts to look more like the
112 medical textbooks!
114 ** Transparent Skin
115 Temporary / permament transparent skin. Allows for examination of
116 organs / muscles and visual prevention of disease and detection or
117 abnormalities / good things eg. excercise optimization.
119 ** Sweet Information
120 Candy with a whole book written in it. Eat a book!
122 ** Targeted Immunosuppressant
123 Just kill off the B-cells and friends that would cause problems in
124 a organ-transplant / other situation. AIDS is good at killing these
125 cells -- maybe make it can be modified to just target the ones that
126 will cause problems. Then you can premptively kill off that part of
127 someone's immune system before a transplant. ALSO, you can kill off
128 everyone's defenses against other blood types and make people
129 effectively type AB+ w.r.t blood transfusions. Actually, why not
130 give babies this treatment so that they're automatically compatable
131 with all blood types? It would be like a blood transfusion
132 vaccine. The immune system does this already when it's first
133 growing; maybe it can be "retrained" to accept new things, or the
134 mechanism of immune cell death be co-opted for these purposes.
136 ** Fuck-you Tetris
137 Tetris that actively gives you the worst possible piece.
139 ** Pockets
140 More things should have them! Chairs, tables, cups, hats,
141 trashcans, basically anything is better with a pocket.
143 ** Colored Shower Head
144 A shower head add-on that measures the temp of the water and
145 changes the color of the water streams w/ an LED to show you the
146 temperature. That way you can align to the color you want and see
147 the temperature without feeling it.
149 ** Giant Dragonflies
150 We could rapidly MAKE giant dragonflies by evolving modern
151 dragonflies in an very oxygen rich environment!
153 ** Whirlpool of Light
154 Shine a laser out into space. But the planet is spinning! What you
155 get is a spiral of light! And as this signal expands, does it
156 eventually reveal it's quantized nature?
158 ** Perfusion Cooking
159 You do cardiac bypass on an animal like a pig, then pump in tasty,
160 tasty perfusate (like marinade) into the animal's
161 vasculature. Then, you switch out to saline and increase the
162 temperature of the saline to rapidly and uniformly cook the
163 animal. It could be the tastiest meat ever!
165 ** Timestamp Verification
166 You sign your message, and it has a timestamp at the top, with a +-
167 percision number. Then you send it over to the public timestamp
168 server, which only signs the message if it gets the message within
169 the timestamp window. Or the computer just signs the message but
170 puts a timestamp at the beginning. So if everyone trusts the
171 timestamp server, you can get reliable timestamps, and prove
172 priority on ideas, etc.
174 ** The Great Computing Slow-Down
175 In general, our computers are getting faster and faster according
176 to Moore's law. However, eventually our brains will be made of the
177 same stuff our computers are made of! This has very interesting
178 consequences -- I can add 2+2 and get four in about a second. Since
179 my neurons actually work at around 10-60 hertz in parallel, this
180 means that it takes me around 10-30 operations to do this
181 addition. That's actually not bad in terms of computing time. If my
182 neurons were as fast as the latest transitors, then most
183 calculators (made with earlier transistors) would be SLOWER than me
184 at adding numbers. Only the newest, most optimized calculators
185 would be faster, and then only about 10 times faster! This means
186 that once we begin to think at the speed of our technology, that
187 technology will suddenly seem pitifully slow in comparison to how
188 it seems now. And no amount of technical progress will remedy it,
189 because that same progress will also make us all think
190 faster. We'll either have to settle with living in "slow time" to
191 do some computations, or learn to make smarter hardware with
192 special optimizations. But this is actually really hard, because
193 we'll be working with machines that will appear to us about as fast
194 as MECHANICAL computers. So, in the future, all the cool parties
195 will be in cyperspace at vastly accelerated speeds compared to how
196 we exist now. But at these parties, the computers will SUCK! Of
197 course, this is one of the few things that can save us from AI
198 risk, because those AI's won't seem so scary when the're build out
199 of rickety old mechanical parts form our perspective.
201 ** Unitary Reverse Evolution of Chaos+Minds
202 Chaotic systems diverge exponentially in state space. Do you get
203 anything interesting when part of the physical system associated
204 with the chaotic system is a object that performs some sort of
205 computation? Is it possible for the computational system to play a
206 percision-enabling role in determining the final/initial conditions
207 of the chaotic system, just by tracing out thoughts in its decision
208 paths? This is probably too vague of an idea right now, I just
209 wanted to write it down.
211 ** Microwave-Time
212 The cooking time you enter on most microwaves is insane. It's
213 expressed in what I call a "hybrid base", a combination of base 10
214 and base 60. You can get absurd things like 100 < 61, and 120 ==
215 80! I wonder if these hybrid base systems could be very useful for
216 some purposes!
218 ** Three Eyes
219 If you had three eyes, would you still draw cubes like we currently
220 draw them? Or would all 2D-representations of 3D space always look
221 hopelessly fake?
223 ** Digital Taste/Smell Assay
224 Get a grid of bacteria, each expressing a human taste/smell
225 receptor linked to some sort of fluorscent activity or ion
226 pump. Use a camera / electrical grid to transduce the smell / taste
227 signal into bits! Inspired by gel-sight from MIT.
229 ** Childrens' Tool Shop
230 I think that kids should be provided with tool shops -- these would
231 be nice sheds with a good collection of tools to do various things
232 -- circuit components and soldering irons, wires, a small lathe,
233 drill press, belt sander, a centrifuge, microscope, and telescope,
234 etc. The idea is that the kid can now think, "I could use X to do
235 this thing that I'm thinking about" -- the building becomes an
236 extension of the kid's body & mind.
238 ** Fluid Display
239 Like the previous idea about matching refractances between glass
240 and liquid, except you make a lot of switchable glass tubes in
241 various patterns in the glass, and actively pump colored liquid
242 through the tubes (the tubes have glass-like fluid in them by
243 default.) The result is that you can cause the tubes to appear and
244 dissappear, and vary their colors as well!
246 ** Immunoincompatibility
247 Take the human genome, and refactor it so that it doesn't use a
248 particular codon at all. Then remove the support from our ribosomes
249 for that codon. What does this do for us? It makes us immune to
250 almost all viruses! There is at least one bacteria that already
251 does this to great effect.
253 ** Life Cycle
254 It's called a cycle, right? So, the thing that repeats itself over
255 and over, right? Not much of a cycle if you don't come back after
256 you die, if you ask me!
258 ** Car with no Blind Spots
259 Use some cameras in the back of the car to augment the rear-view
260 mirror so that you never have to turn around in order to lane
261 change.
263 ** Metabolic Windows and Freezing
264 You freeze a set of cells using some cryo protocol and 60%
265 survive. How can this be explained? It seems to me that if the
266 cells are the same, and the conditions homogoneous, then all the
267 cells should either die or live. However, suppose that there is a
268 metabolic cycle that needs to be in a certain phase for the cell to
269 survive. If the cells are asynchronous, then you might end up with
270 some cells dying because there were in the wrong part of their
271 cycle. This implies that you might be able to cryoprotect cells by
272 causing them to enter a certain metabolic mode before freezing.
274 ** Cryonics Color Appeal
275 Perfusate used by cryonics companies could have red food coloring
276 in it. It's just a nice touch so that the cryonics patient looks
277 more life-like than with clear CPAs, and hopefully might get
278 treated with more respect.
280 ** Paramagnetic CPA
281 you take a CPA that can be influenced by magnetic fields so that
282 its degrees of freedom are limited. Then, you release the field,
283 instantaly increasing the size of the state space of the system and
284 dramatically decreasing the temperature enough to plunge the system
285 past homogenous nucleation temperature and directly to the glass
286 transition temperature, creating a doubly unstable glass at much
287 lower CPA concentrations than possible at conventional CPA
288 concentrations. A major technical limitation facing this technique
289 is that it's a very minor effect -- you can only get about 0.1C
290 with most systems that have been studied so far.
292 ** Room Temp Ramen
293 How does the physics of cooking noodles work? Could you use a
294 vacuum instead of heat to force water into the noodle?
296 ** Personal Carbon Offset
297 Feel bad about contribuiting to global warming by using electricity
298 / driving a car? Forget trying to "conserve" or "minimize your
299 carbon footprint". Follow the Platinum rule -- make the world
300 BETTER off than you found it! This would be a small, self
301 contained system that sucks C02 out of the air. It uses
302 electricity, but it's so efficient at removing CO2 that it more
303 than offsets the CO2 produced by even a coal plant to produce that
304 electricity. This way, you can still drive even a gas guzzler, but
305 have a net negative carbon footprint! Maybe something cool could be
306 done with the carbon as well. Use as much electricity as you want,
307 but negate the damage to the enviroment with more technology.
309 ** Undoing Spermogenesis
310 With enough sperm, you can derive the donor's entire genome. You
311 gain more confidence in the alleles for a particular gene the more
312 sperm you have. Each additional sperm gives you the same sort of
313 information you'd get flipping a coin and trying to decide whether
314 the coin is H/T of H/H. Is there enough sperm in the the average
315 load for you to be as confident as mitosis?
317 ** Mars Life
318 We could engineer life that could survive on mars (probably some
319 non-vascular photosynthetic poikilohydric creature like a lichen)
320 by taking an extremophile from Antarctica and evolving it in
321 increasingly Martian conditions. This could be an easy start to a
322 terraforming process.
324 ** Problem with Aubrey de Grey's Ideas
325 Aubrey de Grey says that we might be able to live forever by
326 continually repairing our bodies at the cellular level -- he
327 details 7 different mechanisms of damage and says that if all of
328 them are dealt with /together/ that it would stop aging. (You can't
329 miss even one because they're all fatal.) However, it doesn't take
330 into account that we are also beings of information and that there
331 is a very real software component to our existence. Even if our
332 biological chassies can be maintained forever, I think it is
333 unlikely that our minds will operate well far outside of the design
334 constraints that we've evolved to handle. Say I programmed a
335 webserver with the express goal of it being able to serve webpages
336 for month on some stock server. I'll do fairly rigorous testing to
337 make sure that it can handle the expected load then then some. Now
338 say that you want to keep a particular instance of this webserver
339 running indefinitely. (The program instance is like your mind and
340 the computer it's running on is like your body). You might very
341 well be able to keep the physical computer infrastructure running
342 for forever by replacing hard drives / ram / CPUs, etc. However,
343 since I designed the webserver to work for a month, it probably has
344 memory leaks, rare stochastic bugs, or other built in limits /
345 constraints (think log files or some date rollover shenanigans)
346 that will ultimately kill the webserver even with eternally perfect
347 hardware. Do you really expect that a webserver engineered to work
348 for 1 month will run for 10 years without catastrophically
349 crashing? Not even Apache can do this! In fact, if I put in the
350 extreme effort to make it that robust, I've wasted time that I
351 could have spent on other projects by pursuing an unnecessary
352 engineering goal. Likewise, human minds have only ever run for at
353 most 122 years before they are destroyed due to hardware
354 degradation. Fixing the hardware doesn't change any software bugs
355 that are almost certainly present in the human mind. Think of all
356 the pathological things that can go wrong with a webserver,
357 multiply it by a million, and that likely how evolution has
358 designed our minds. For example, consider memory : why should you
359 expect that we have evolved the ability to coherently organize
360 memories past say 150 years? There's been absolutely no selective
361 pressure for this ability, so you can bet that if there's any
362 fitness to be gained from not having unlimited memory potential
363 (such as better metabolic efficiency), we have it! You might think
364 that maybe we would just forget things the same way that we sort of
365 forget things that happen earlier in our lives, but complicated
366 information processing systems don't have to fail gracefully when
367 they're pushed far past their design constraints. A 150 year old
368 person is just as likely to suffer a catastrophic psychosis due to
369 software limitations associated with memory as he is to do
370 something with all those memories we might consider
371 reasonable. More likely, in fact, since there are so very many ways
372 for a complicated software system to break and so few ways for it
373 to run successfully. Therefore, I think Aubrey de Grey's
374 "hardware-only" approach is missing a very important component of
375 longevity science, and any successful effort to make people live
376 orders of magnitude longer than they do naturally will need to deal
377 with people's software as well as their hardware.
379 ** Validating Neurocryopreservation
380 Problem : you want to test whether a brain is functionally
381 preserved through vitrification, but you don't want to figure out
382 how to preserve all the other organs in the animal. It might be
383 possible to keep the rest of the body at almost 0C and vitrify just
384 the head for only a few minutes. Induce hypothermia, then separate
385 out the head's blood supply from the rest of the body, then just
386 cryoptotect and vitrify the head. Might need some sort of thermal
387 guard to keep the outer head / neck from becoming too cold. You
388 leave the spinal cord intact! Then you devitrify to 0C, remove
389 cryoprotectant, and then reattach the blood supply. You can
390 determine brain preservation using behavioral assays!
392 ** Freezing Water Purifier
393 You slowly freeze water, but also run liquid water over the frozen
394 mass. This takes away basically all impurities and creates "washed
395 ice" then you melt the ice. Maybe you could re-use the heat from
396 creating the ice to melt the ice?
398 ** Ultra Strength
399 Allow a person to visualize their muscle recruitment patterns. Give
400 them adrenaline and let them feel what it's like to have the normal
401 limits removed. See if they can replicate the effects.
403 ** Phone Names
404 Make a PX record for domain names that's like the MX record, except
405 that it is a phone number instead of an IP address. That way, you
406 can use the domain name registration system to provide names for
407 phone numbers. Then, as long as you control the domain, you can
408 point people to your current phone number by updating that record.
410 ** Edible Flowers
411 Edible white flowers that you put in a colored solution with
412 flavor. When the flower turns the right color, it is also flavored
413 and ready to eat!
415 ** Lead Bone
416 Could you fill in all the empty spaces in a bone with lead? Might
417 be cool!
419 ** The Quest for Life
420 Many stories that have immortal characters have the "immortal who
421 wants to become mortal" trope. I want to story where the
422 protagonist loses their immortality and feels /angry/ and ashamed
423 about losing something that's so absolutely crucial to their
424 identity. A reverse of "death makes life worth living", they feel
425 that living forever is what makes life worth living. Now they've
426 "lost their sunrise" or their "connection to the timeless universe"
427 or something. So they go on a quest to get it back, learning about
428 themselves along the way, and regaining the precious thing they
429 lost in the beginning. Which, it they can actually gain their
430 immortality back, means that they never lost it in the first place!
432 ** World Map
433 Take a small table and paint the continents in toothpaste on the
434 table. Make a slightly raised barrier around the table. Slowly pour
435 water onto the table, and it will form the oceans!
437 ** Stage Magic Rituals
438 Rituals should incorporate elements of stage magic. For example in
439 Teller's rendition of Shakespeare's Tempest, they have a scene
440 where they levitate a crown in front of someone, then put it on his
441 head. They also have a wedding ceremony where they levitated the
442 bride as well. Actual weddings and other ceremonies should
443 incorporate stage magic as an enhancement to the gravitas!
445 ** Isotope Time Dilation
446 Use a cyclotron to speed up rare isotopes developed in nuclear
447 fusion experiments. The relativistic time dilation will stop the
448 isotopes from decaying, and allow time to study them. This is based
449 on radioactive isotopes that fall through the earth's atmosphere
450 that take hundreds of times longer to decay than normal.
452 ** Marsupial Stimulation
453 You take a freshly pouched marsupial baby, and show it videos and
454 other interactive things while it matures in the pouch. What mental
455 effects would this have?
457 ** The Dynamically Well-Tempered Clavier
458 Some older ways of tuning instruments sound better, but we use the
459 even-tempered scale today because it makes it easier to switch
460 keys. With electronic music, why not make key-annotations and
461 dynamically re-tune the piece to sound good in the current key?
462 Could be done as a midi+annotation -> midi compiler for initial
463 experimentation.
465 ** Death Always Implies Damage
466 is is possible for a corpse to differ from a living person only in
467 the fact that one is dead and the other is alive? NO! A corpse must
468 always have some sort of molecular damage which causes the loss of
469 function!
471 ** Inner Eye
472 Surgically install a bunch of tiny cameras inside a person. Then,
473 you can activate them all and get a picture of your internal organs
474 for diagnostic purposes.
476 ** Chaos Rails
477 The homoclinic tangle (which I call the "rails of chaos") is very
478 beautiful. We couldn't even visualize it before computers because
479 it's so complicated! Someone should make a visualization of
480 it. Here's my inital stab at it: [[../images/rails-of-chaos.png][The Rails of Chaos]]
482 ** Cryonics Middle Ages
483 Some people say that cryonics is an experiment and that it is
484 foolish to wait until we have revived a human. There is a middle
485 ground where the procedure has a dismal success rate on humans, say
486 1 in 20, so that you'd be a fool to try revival. Nonetheless, this
487 very risky procedure could be the legal proof of concept needed to
488 create a new class of life between "living" and "dead": "stasis".
490 ** Minds and Mirrors
491 Neat thought experiment -- if you take a mirror of someone by
492 actually reversing a person's chirality molecule by molecule, then
493 will the only be able to read mirror writing? The answer is yes, by
494 analogy to a purely mechanical scan-tron device. This is one of the
495 only interesting transforms I know that can take a human brain and
496 change it in subtle, non-destructive ways. It's also an argument
497 against dualism.
499 ** Biosphere in a Bottle
500 There are around 15 million species. 15 million stem cells will
501 fill only a tiny size, far less than a cubic inch. Preserve a
502 single cell from every species on earth in this small space, and
503 you will have a record of our current biosphere that can be
504 protected. "Hold the genetic data of all species in your hand!"
506 ** Chaos Lock
507 The "arrow of time" points in the direction of increasing
508 entropy. The time evolution of chaotic systems depend exquisitely
509 on their initial state. If you take a measurement of a chaotic
510 system at any given point of time, you can evolve that system
511 backwards or forwards based on your measurement. So let's say you
512 start the chaotic system in a VERY low entropy state, then let it
513 run for a while, then take a measurement with some
514 uncertainty. Your measurement is pretty good, but obviously not
515 PERFECT. If you evolve the chaotic system back in time, then you
516 will see that you don't really reach a state with low entropy an
517 hour before (the entropy is easy to measure with surrogates like
518 alignment, etc). So use this technique to SEARCH for a more
519 accurate measurement! This potentially can give you many more
520 orders of magnitude than you could get alone just using an
521 instrument. Sometimes it will give you bad results, the the odds of
522 it doing that are infinitesimal, and you can just measure a couple
523 of times.
525 ** Cryo Evolution
526 Perhaps there would be a way to rapidly evolve a symbiotic
527 bacterial organism that could protect human tissues from freezing
528 damage.
530 ** Suicide Parasite
531 Sometimes, people kill themselves for no good reason. We often
532 explain this with things like "hidden depression" or we say that
533 they had something like chronic jaw or back pain. I think that
534 smells of rationalization. I don't buy it. I propose that in many
535 suicide cases there is a disease that causes the suicidal
536 behavior. We already know that certain parasites have mind-bending
537 properties in other animals, even mammals like mice. It's not much
538 of a stretch to imagine a parasite that causes suicides in
539 humans. Some problems:
541 *What does the suicide parasite get out of it?* : This might be
542 answered by the whole thing being a glitch caused by cross-species
543 contamination. Toxoplasma works this way.
545 *What predictions does a disease model make* : suicide should be
546 more common among people who share a contagion vector. There should
547 be suicides that don't make any sense : people who weren't really
548 depressed, who had no reason to kill themselves. People who have
549 killed themselves should have a higher incidence of some unknown
550 parasite in their brains.
552 ** Domestic Insects
553 People should eat more bugs because they're much more efficient, so
554 why not do some major domestication research to make very appealing
555 bugs? Beetles, in particular, seem to be excellent targets for
556 domestication because they have extreme levels of genetic
557 malleability. Remember that lobster was once seen as an animal only
558 fit for prisoners to consume!
560 ** Birth-Clones
561 What if each person was intentionally split at birth into a normal
562 embryo and a few "backup" cells which are then frozen. The backup
563 cells are created just the same way as natural identical twins. The
564 backups can be used to regenerate organs. etc. Also, it would be a
565 good sci-fi concept, because you could have a culture where people
566 reward people who were especially awesome are "reborn" from their
567 backups. Imagine having a young Bach every generation, etc.
569 ** Pronunciation Guide
570 A simple webpage where you type in a word and it returns a simple,
571 English sentence describing exactly how to pronounce the word. For
572 people who don't want to learn IPA.
574 ** Learning to Teleport
575 This is a story about a person who is struggling with his/her
576 society's ideas about teleportation. It's considered a fundamental
577 part of being a member of that society (after all, the difference
578 between animals and humans is that humans are creatures of pure
579 information while animals are burdened with base matter, "that's
580 how you travel the stars, etc") Humans are born normally, grow up,
581 and then eventually transcend via destructive upload. Analogies to
582 jumping off a diving board into a pool (which I simply /could not
583 do/ for a long time), etc.
585 ** No-Float-Ice
586 Cup that has cross beams at the bottom where ice forms. Then when
587 you drink liquid from the glass, the ice stays at the bottom and
588 doesn't hit your lips. For bars and fancy things.
590 ** Bitcoins for Immigrants
591 A common case with Mexican immigrants (illegal or not) is that they
592 want to send money they've earned in the US back to their families
593 in Mexico. They currently do this through things like Money Gram or
594 Western Union, and they get fleeced in the process with
595 fees. Bitcoin could greatly reduce the cost of sending money from
596 America to Mexico, but I don't believe that it's currently used for
597 that among Mexican immigrants currently due to lack of knowledge. I
598 bet you could set up physical locations like those obnoxious
599 Western Union huts in places like Texas, Arizona, etc, and greatly
600 undercut them. Or, perhaps some educational seminars about bitcoin
601 might be in order. There's some money to be made there because
602 there is great demand, and it's a good thing to boot!
604 ** Reverse Eye-Tracking
605 A painting that is actually a digital screen with a camera. It
606 records people's eye tracks permanently. It's "artistic" because
607 paintings are normally these things that you look at without
608 changing, but this one is changed the second you look at it,
609 recording where /you/ looked forever for others to see. Make it be
610 a painting of a woman and see the trolling as the breasts and groin
611 area light up with interest from all the males passing by. Then
612 watch as the painting turns into a commentary on perception and
613 popularity -- a sort of eigenvector of perception! Will all
614 paintings turn into the same thing eventually?
616 ** Smart Toilets
617 Instead of using indirect measures like infrared detectors of the
618 presence of a person, use computer vision to directly measure
619 whether the toilet needs to be flushed. I think a lot of things
620 will end up going this way as we get better computer vision.
622 ** Validate Chemopreservation
623 Chemopreservation is difficult to validate because it destroys the
624 functionality of a brain, and brain simulation will take a long
625 time to mature as a technology. However, one very powerful way to
626 validate chemopreservation would be to have a person/animal learn
627 something with high complexity such as a number or the solution to
628 a maze, or a flashbulb memory. Then you preserve their brain
629 chemically, slice it up, and read /that specific memory/ from the
630 detailed brain scan. Much more difficult, but much more doable.
632 ** Candy Screw
633 Edible candy screw with candy nuts that you can screw as well.
635 ** Better Bibliography
636 When writing a thesis or paper, have the bibliography not just be
637 an opaque list of resources, but have it be a list of /summaries/
638 and /qualities/ that each paper has in the context of the paper
639 being written. When examining a bibliography, I want to know if
640 reading the papers in the bibliography are worth my time, and I
641 also am probably also interested in exactly the things that are
642 being discussed in the paper I'm reading. The bibliography is the
643 perfect place to provide information about the referenced papers
644 from the author's perspective. I will use this biographic form in
645 my own thesis!
647 ** Chess Visual
648 To show the vast size of the game trees considered by computers,
649 show two people playing chess in a void. They are floating in
650 space, and there is a simple chess board between them. Then, as
651 they play, the game tree's they are considering are drawn behind
652 him. The root of the tree starts centered in their heads or
653 whatever they use to think, and the tree grows out from behind,
654 never crossing the dividing plane between the two players. Each
655 player's tree is a different color. As they grow, there are
656 animations for pruning, etc. Eventually, they look like the
657 hemispheres of a brain, wings, etc. A human's tree might
658 occasionally have a long chain, while the computer tree would be
659 more uniform. You could compare deep blue and a modern laptop. Use
660 actual data when fighting two computers!
662 ** Tamper Proof Gold Bars
663 [[Http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/gold-plated-tungsten-alloy-bar.html][This site]] offers gold plated tungsten bars as "novelty" items. One
664 reason to prefer coins is because they are much harder to
665 counterfeit because there is less surface area to mass
666 ratio. However, gold bars are still a great design because they can
667 hold a lot of value in a small space. A gold bar could be given the
668 same protections (and more) that gold coins have to offer by
669 changing it into a "gold book", which would have hundreds of
670 "pages" of gold bound together. This could be implemented with
671 multiple steel rods going through the book which can be removed, or
672 some more classier mechanism for holding the pages. The point is
673 that the bar can be EASILY subdivided (and people would perform
674 this test before buying), thus guaranteeing it's authenticity.
676 ** High School Science
677 This is a lesson in scientific ethics. The goal is to calculate
678 /g/, the local gravitational acceleration. The students are told
679 that the textbook says it's /exactly/ 9.81 before they start the
680 experiment. See how they doctor their results to get closer to the
681 textbook value. It's neat because for any given school, /g/ is
682 probably *not* exactly equal to 9.81, because that is just an
683 average!
685 ** Opencourseware Subtitles
686 There are people who type up lectures at MIT while they are being
687 given, so that hearing impared students can follow along. These
688 recordings should be kept and given to OCW for subtitles. If the
689 timestamps of keys are recorded, then it is easy to make subtitles.
691 ** Screen Locking Timing
692 You use your computer camera to see if you are sitting in front of
693 the computer. If you are, then the screen will never lock. If you
694 are, then the screen will lock with a 30-40 second timeout. It's an
695 extension of using inactivity to initiate the countdown, just with
696 more information.
698 ** Mirror Toilet
699 A toilet with a square basin made of mirror instead of
700 porcelain. That way, you can see how good of a wipe job you have
701 done / watch how your excretion system works.
703 ** X-ray telepresence
704 given that a doctor is operating on a patient via telepresence, one
705 cool things you can do is shine X-rays into the patient to view the
706 insides during real time. (This doesn't expose either the doctor or
707 patient to chronically damaging amounts of X-rays) If the system
708 was coupled with a Bayesian model of the layout of the structure,
709 and the x-rays were only fired whenever the uncertainty of the
710 model reached a certain threshold, then the radiation damage and
711 surgery risk could be minimized.
713 ** Superfluid Vascular System
714 I wonder what would happen if you replaced the blood in a human
715 with a superfluid. What would the physical dynamics be? Would the
716 superfluid flow through the vasculature, or would it ignore it and
717 travel through the cells, or something else entirely. Since
718 superfluids need to be cold to retain their superfluidity, how
719 would the dynamics change during perfusion of a superfluid, where
720 the fluid gains and looses superfluidity as it goes deeper into the
721 body and is cooled by superfluid from upstream. In summary there
722 are two things to simulate 1.) replace all blood in human with
723 superfluid instantly. 2.) perfuse superfluid into human.
725 ** Projective Guessing
726 I think that we read and see things by making a really good guess
727 about what we're expecting to see, and then searching for our guess
728 in what we see. If it really doesn't match, then we start to make
729 more guesses / analyze the image from first principles, but most
730 stuff is projective guessing.
732 ** Intestinal Flora Maintenance
733 Why not inoculate babies at birth with "ideal" gut flora instead of
734 whatever bullshit they naturally get, thus giving them optimal
735 digestive/nutrient extraction capabilities. Might also be able to
736 make their farts not stink for life, too. MORE IMPORTANTLY, might
737 help to preventatively stop some forms of /colic/, which affects 1
738 in 5 babies and causes constant screaming and pain for about 5
739 weeks.
741 ** Server Culture -- Mirrors
742 Make a distributed system where people can mirror the websites of
743 people they like -- essentially cover the server costs of favored
744 websites. This could make popular websites run at no cost. The
745 system would require that the mirrored content be the same as the
746 official source. Sort of like bit-torrent for websites.
748 ** Map Programming
749 One problem with functional programming is that in order to remain
750 functional, you have to pass up arguments up into each calling
751 function to get the full range of behavior from the lower level
752 functions. Normally people come to a compromise involving
753 abstraction and sparing use of dynamic variables to configure
754 runtime behavior. What would be the advantages of making a
755 programming language where every function receives one argument, a
756 map, which contains all the symbol bindings it would ever need?
757 This map is passed on to all subordinate functions. This way, you
758 could replace functions on the fly, and arrange for there to be
759 sensible defaults, etc. Might cause more harm than good but is an
760 interesting idea.
762 ** Rest Nest
763 A small EEG device you would attach to your head when you go to
764 sleep at night. ML algorithms would determine your particular sleep
765 cycles. This would mostly be an alarm clock that you could give a
766 time range, say 7:00AM - 7:15AM, and it would wake you up during an
767 ideal time corresponding to then end of one of your 90 min sleep
768 cycles. You would feel much more rested upon waking up, and would
769 wake up faster. There might be some other uses for the EEG data as
770 well.
772 ** Image Compression
773 Use a library like gimp or opencv to process an image to make it
774 have less entropy, then store the reverse of those operations along
775 with the compressed simpler image as a super-compressed image file
776 (possibly accepting some losses). Trades file size for
777 decompression time, and allows one to cheat by using information in
778 gimp/opencv to compress the image.
780 ** Aldehyde-Stabalized Cryopreservation
781 Why not use a fixative to buy enough time to ramp up
782 cryoprotectants to an acceptable level at room temperature? Then,
783 the whole system can be rapidly cooled and vitrified. This method
784 "severs the biological link" in that the fixatives are highly
785 toxic, but current vitrification procedures do this anyway since
786 there can be a lot of freezing damage.
788 ** Dilated Security Camera
789 A security camera that would capture full video footage of
790 everything at 60fps but then decide to keep only every 1 frame
791 every 5 seconds unless there's something "interesting" happening.
793 ** Bitcoin Wallet
794 Part of "server culture", this would be something like
795 "coin.your-domain.com" which would serve as your personal trusted
796 access to your own bitcoins from anywhere.
798 ** Libpay
799 This would be a free library which would enable micro-donations to
800 software projects and other projects, so that you could donate a
801 penny to "emacs" and it would be automatically split up to every
802 person who has ever contributed to emacs in proportion to the
803 amount of community esteem, code quantity, bugs fixed, whatever the
804 community decides. This might make it possible for programmers to
805 live entirely off of free programming.
807 ** Pronouns
808 Use capital letters A-Z instead of pronouns. They solve pronoun
809 referents and gender neutrality, are short to say, and you can
810 encode useful information into the choice of letter. For example,
811 instead of "Meetings shall be presided over by the president,
812 unless she is absent." USE "Meetings shall be presided over by the
813 president, unless P is absent." We already use this a little, since
814 I and U are reserved for the subject and object respectively.
816 ** Phone DSP
817 Software app that inserts an audio DSP between the input to a phone
818 and the output. The DSP is delicious and configurable, and can
819 allow men to make their voices deeper, etc. The app would allow you
820 to hear your own voice as others hear it. Most people hate how
821 their own voice sounds. The app would also allow one to immediately
822 change the parameters of the DSP using good presets.
824 ** Restaurant Receipts
825 Use a carbon copy receipt instead of two stupid copies.
827 ** Crossdressing
828 Easiest way to disguise oneself as a woman is to wear a burka.
830 ** Book-Mode
831 Intelligent color highlighting for books and articles. It would
832 disambiguate pronouns and involved references. For example, if
833 "Rachael" was assigned the color red, and "the blonde haired girl"
834 refers to "Rachael", then "the blonde haired girl" would be colored
835 red. Also, you could disambiguate multi part run-on sentences by
836 highlighting each subcomponent. Maybe would also have applications
837 to scientific reading.
839 ** Handheld Light Rain Measurement
840 This would be a clear, teflon coated plastic disk with a camera
841 underneath the disk. You would be able to hold the device out and
842 it would measure the rate of accumulation of water droplets from
843 fine mists and light rain by using computer vision to measure the
844 diameters of the drops.
846 ** Big Brother Farming
847 This would be a vision system that would individually monitor each
848 plant and turn on water, etc to ensure maximum/uniform growth for
849 each plant.
851 ** Discrete Faucet
852 A faucet with discrete ticks instead of continuous.
854 ** Laser Circle
855 Take a glass microfiliment and shine a laser at one end at an
856 oblique angle. It will make a perfect, large circle on the wall,
857 converting a laser beam into a laser cone, preserving most of the
858 energy of the laser.
860 ** Invisible Glass
861 Take a container of liquid and embed a glass sculpture made out of
862 glass that has exactly the same index of refraction and color of
863 the liquid. Then the sculpture will be totally invisible in the
864 container, and will only be revealed when the liquid is
865 drained. The container might be a fancy wine/spirit bottle or an
866 hourglass.
868 ** Caterpillar people
869 A race of caterpillar like creatures gains intelligence after eons
870 of predation by birds, etc. These caterpillar creatures still
871 undergo metamorphosis into a large butterfly-like creature. The
872 metamorphosis process turns the caterpillar's brain into mush and
873 reforms it into a minimal, dumb, truly insect-like mind, completely
874 destroying the person the caterpillar was. The society develops all
875 sorts of customs and religious interpretations of the
876 metamorphosis. It is viewed as good and natural by some since it is
877 part of their life cycle and necessary to propagate the species, as
878 only the butterflies can mate. Some think that the butterflies are
879 still the same person because they have the same soul, even they no
880 longer posses the memories or personality of the original
881 caterpillar. Some see the butterfly form as the "true form" of the
882 species, since the butterflies can fly, mate, and are
883 beautiful. Many make a big deal out of the fact that 1-2% of the
884 caterpillar's mind is actually preserved in the butterfly. Some see
885 it as a terrible tragedy and argue that the caterpillars should try
886 to stop the metamorphosis by technology. Practically, some very
887 important members of society undergo hormone therapy and/or surgery
888 to prevent metamorphosis so that they can live longer as
889 themselves.
891 This is a continuation of Marvin Minsky's ideas about pain being
892 something that preserves our bodies while destroying our minds,
893 something that is a remnant from our too harsh animal days that
894 hasn't caught up to the fact that we have very complex brains
895 now. It's a worst-case scenario about a maladaptive genetic
896 legacy. Also, it's inspired by "There She Is!!!", which makes a
897 compelling point about homosexuality by introducing a second gender
898 characteristic (bunny/cat, male/female), which makes homophobia
899 look very silly. Here, our own biological legacy of pain and death
900 is made to look like the tragedy it is through the lens of the the
901 caterpillar people.
903 ** Relationships as a Business
904 [[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx][Turnover-Crisis]] is an excellent talk about the "culture of
905 quitting," which is about better business by letting people go
906 instead of keeping them around past their "apex". Focuses on
907 information transfer. Cool idea of an alumni network, which for
908 relationships would be a group of satisfied ex-lovers, who would
909 recommend new people your way, and who might consider coming to you
910 again, refreshed from their time away with new
911 stories/experiences. I should look for examples of this and how
912 they worked out.
914 ** Psychic Crystal
915 In a science fiction story, this would be an object that is very
916 easy to move physically but is extremely difficult to move with
917 telekinesis.
919 ** True Reflection
920 There's a "true mirror" in the MIT student center -- it's two
921 normal mirrors at right angles, like staring at a corner of a
922 room. The light reflects so that it shows you what you actually
923 look like, instead of your mirror image.
925 ** Remote Control Wasp
926 Use computer to drive wings with remote power/logic.
928 ** Encrypted Email Phone Book
929 Public (distributed?) database of email->private-key pairs, to
930 enable automatic encryption.
932 ** Universal Eye Color
933 Every equivalent creature will see each others' eyes as black --
934 it's universal. Even if the creatures see in radio waves, and their
935 eyes are 2m long pieces of jagged metal, when those creatures look
936 at each other, they will see black, the absence of light and color
937 (since it's being absorbed by the sensor array).
939 ** Intelligent Microwave
940 It learns where the hot nodes of its fields are, and uses them to
941 evenly heat any food item. It has an infrared camera or something
942 to keep track of how hot the food is. That way, you don't get bowls
943 where the edges are boiling, while the center is still
944 frozen. Requires a little bit of intelligence/vision, since the
945 exact pattern of heating totally depends on the exact shape of the
946 food. Wouldn't need a carousel, and wouldn't need a timer, just a
947 desired temperature. Could also detect ice, and automatically
948 defrost the parts which are frozen. Might be able to work much
949 faster since it can avoid overheating; might have problems with
950 heating the insides of thick things, might need a weight sensor
951 too.
953 + Would be much cleaner than other microwaves, since food would
954 "sputter" and splash liquid much less.
956 + Throw in some SIFT+R processing to match previously cooked foods
957 and learn the exact heating profiles for things that have been
958 cooked before -- it can get faster the more it's used.
960 ** Flesh Pillow
961 A pillow like the arm or torso of a human, complete with simulated
962 temperature, bones, and heartbeat.
964 ** Light Filter
965 Works like light-tweezers to mechanically separate fluids with
966 different indexes of refraction.
968 ** Silver Socks
969 Socks laced with silver for the antimicrobial properties.
971 ** Rod of Moses
972 Device to distill urine through evaporation and easily dispose of
973 urea crystals for use in desert -- produce drinkable water and live
974 an extra few days!
976 ** Lottery Scraper
977 Web scraper which monitors various lotteries, looking for "special"
978 gimmick changes in the rules (like 4x winnings on Wednesdays) and
979 computes expected value...
981 ** Memristiors Novel Design
982 Make an evolutionary algorithm to make old stuff using all four
983 basic circuit elements.
985 ** Conductive Concrete
986 Concrete that has embedded metal fibers so that it can conduct
987 electricity.
989 ** Little Bitty Melting Pot
990 Might be useful for some types of manufacturing/3D printing -- how
991 small can an induction melter be made, for example.
993 ** True Pure Tones
994 Hear a true pure tone by direct stimulation of the nerves of the
995 ear. Like when Adelson "saw green".
997 ** Mechanical analogue to the electrical op-amp
998 would be an object with two levers -- you pull on one lever and the
999 other moves the same way, no matter what's in the way or what it is
1000 driving. This analogy could be useful to teach op amps to people.
1002 ** Light Capacitor
1003 Suspend some ball of material with a high index of refraction and
1004 shine light into it so it gets stuck -- would the light stay
1005 trapped forever? Could you build up unlimited quantities of light
1006 inside the sphere (which could then be released slowly by
1007 frustrated internal reflection?
1009 ** Reading Comprehension
1010 use the screen capture routine to make a quiz program that
1011 constructs questions about the content you seemed to gloss over
1012 while reading. could be easy if the pdf came with embedded
1013 questions. Dylan: automatically generate word-cloud about the
1014 parts you found most interesting; help others who read the same
1015 stuff by drawing attention to the interesting parts.
1017 ** Optimize an Article
1018 Capture reading of a scientific article via screen capture while
1019 people read it, then use it to make the article better. like the
1020 movie-pruning idea.
1022 ** Movie Pruning
1023 Movies always are too long at first. One way to shorten them
1024 ``scientifically" is to record blink rate during the move and then
1025 remove / shorten the frames of the parts in which there are a lot
1026 of blinking (average this over multiple people) better yet, put it
1027 online and do it across thousands of people. I got this from
1028 youtube in which there is an episode of kill bill which is composed
1029 entirely of the parts in which people had their eyes
1030 closed. slogan: want to make a movie people can't take their eyes
1031 off of? Just take those parts out!
1033 ** Explosive Thermite Epoxy Putty
1034 One part would contain the rust, one part the aluminum.
1036 ** Concrete Epoxy
1037 Epoxy with sand/ some other solid material.
1039 ** Hard Sword
1040 Make a samurai sword, but use osmiridum instead of martensite for
1041 the cutting part; it should be a better sword.
1043 ** Close Range Wireless
1044 use the induction technology used to recharge electric toothbrushes
1045 with no metal links to send data without any metal at all!
1047 ** Perfect Pitch
1048 Learn perfect pitch using another sense in combination (sight or
1049 touch).
1051 ** Bio Metallic Structure
1052 Metal grids with seeds inside, which grow together and form a
1053 durable biological matrix. The metal substrate delivers
1054 water. (maybe use plastic instead of metal?) Dylan: enrich plants
1055 with inorganic compounds; electrical interfaces in cellular plant
1056 matter => remote-controlled photosynthetic/bioluminescent
1057 structures.
1059 ** Conducting Extracellular Matrix
1060 To allow better control of organic systems and an enhanced nervous
1061 system.
1063 ** Cross-Modal Memory Hashing
1064 A way to retrieve memories more robustly.
1066 ** Greener than Green
1067 If you stare at a red light, then you get a green after-image. If
1068 you immediately look at something green while still seeing the
1069 green after-image, you will experience a Green like none you've
1070 ever seen before -- color so intense it's beyond the range of
1071 anything that exists in the world.
1073 ** Wooden Refrigerator
1074 To give food a better taste Dylan: like barrels for wine, or planks
1075 for salmon. Maybe just have "flavor planks" for your pre-existing
1076 fridge. Need to mitigate effect of temperature on volatility?
1078 ** Radioactive Transmutation Molecule by Molecule
1079 Create precious metals or something else economically
1080 advantageous. Best transmutation I can come up with is mercury into
1081 gold, but it's not economically viable.
1083 ** Preservation Via Crowding
1084 Inoculate food with tons of harmless bacteria so that there's no
1085 room for bad bacteria as a method of preservation
1087 ** Old-School Preservation
1088 Pasteur - style holding jar with siphon as a way to store
1089 sterilized liquids at room temperature indefinitely w/o
1090 refrigeration.
1092 ** Restaurant Policy
1093 Throw rude people out of restaurant as a matter of course -- make
1094 ambiance much better.
1096 ** Clean Windows
1097 Make something that mixes soap with fire hydrant water (and reduces
1098 the pressure a bit) and use it to clean windows of buildings.
1100 ** Ocarina
1101 Make an ocarina out of pure silver. Might have really good acoustic
1102 properties.
1104 ** Fire Pen
1105 Pen which burns words on to the page, thus never needing any
1106 ink. Is there a way to make it runnable from body heat?
1108 ** Website to Design Your Own Soda
1109 and label, and have it mailed to you / sell it from your own online
1110 store.
1112 ** Ocean Power
1113 Solar panels that float on the ocean.
1115 ** Handcuffs with More Than Two Cuffs (3?)
1116 Great for daisy chaining people, binding them to environment, etc.
1118 ** Vector Based SOUND Files
1119 Like the pictures but with SOUND. codify sound in a language with
1120 enough symbols so that it can describe everything and encode it in
1121 that. would be like going from speech to text or smtg. Could also
1122 store sound as an image of the wavefront encoded as a vector image.
1124 ** Genetically Engineered Glowing Fruit
1125 They have some animals that can glow, but glowing fruit that you
1126 eat would be AWESOME!
1128 ** The Body as a Key to Memory
1129 IF memories are encoded using particular sensory impressions, what
1130 happens if the sensory organ itself changes? those memories would
1131 become inaccessible. maybe this is why we can't remember much from
1132 our childhoods. also, could this happen throughout life as well?
1133 Could S remember stuff from his childhood?
1135 ** Lighter Flint on Spring
1136 Make hot, throw it at something, and it makes sparkles!
1138 ** Rare Bubbles
1139 Engineer a material which has both ductility and high surface
1140 tension to make the "third" minimal-surface-energy solution to a
1141 bubble suspended between two equal-diameter rings. (Solutions are
1142 cylindrical catenary curve, two separated half-bubbles, and a
1143 double-cone)
1145 ** Magic Textbook
1146 whose content can be varied continuously alter level of difficulty,
1147 rigor, diction, emphasize crossover with certain other discipline,
1148 etc. Content generated dynamically from knowledge base, along with
1149 questions that are moreover altered to guide knowledge
1150 acquisition. Motivation: One book of knowledge. /One./
1153 #+BEGIN_HTML
1154 <p class="end"> Still want more? Visit the <a href="./ideas.html">Raw
1155 Ideas</a> page, but prepare for extreme half-bakedness. </p>
1156 #+END_HTML