#+title: Big List O' Ideas

 #+author: Robert McIntyre

 #+email: rlm@mit.edu

 #+description: list of ideas from the last ~ 7 years

 #+keywords: aurellem ideas half-baked random

 #+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org

 #+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org

 #+babel: :mkdirp yes :noweb yes :exports both

 

 * Ideas

 

 This is a list of all the ideas I've had that I felt like writing down

 for the past ~ 8 years. Some of them could be practical inventions and

 are "just" waiting the that 95% perspiration to bring them to

 fruition, some are ideas for science fiction, and some are simple

 observations. Some are really only for my own personal notes and are

 not meant to be comprehensible. They are arranged roughly in reverse

 chronological order, with the most recent ideas at the top of the

 list. The ones at the bottom of the list are heavily influenced by my

 time at MIT.

 

 If you find some of these interesting and would like to collaborate on

 them with me or discuss them in more detail, I'd love to hear from

 you. You can email me at ideas@aurellem.org.

 

 If you want to use one of these ideas as your own and run with it,

 please feel free. I'd love to hear about it if you do.

 

 #+begin_quote

 There's no end to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care about

 getting credit.

 #+end_quote

 

 - mars life :: we could engineer life that could survive on mars

                (probably some non-vascular photosynthetic

                poikilohydric creature like a lichen) by taking an

                extremophile from Antarctica and evolving it in

                increasingly Martian conditions. This could be an easy

                start to a terraforming process. 

 

 - problem with Aubrey de Grey's ideas :: Aubrey de Grey says that we

      might be able to live forever by continually repairing our bodies

      at the cellular level -- he details 7 different mechanisms of

      damage and says that if all of them are dealt with /together/

      that it would stop aging. (You can't miss even one because

      they're all fatal.)  However, it doesn't take into account that

      we are also beings of information and that there is a very real

      software component to our existence. Even if our biological

      chassies can be maintained forever, I think it is unlikely that

      our minds will operate well far outside of the design constraints

      that we've evolved to handle. Say I programmed a webserver with

      the express goal of it being able to serve webpages for month on

      some stock server. I'll do fairly rigorous testing to make sure

      that it can handle the expected load then then some. Now say that

      you want to keep a particular instance of this webserver running

      indefinitely. (The program instance is like your mind and the

      computer it's running on is like your body). You might very well

      be able to keep the physical computer infrastructure running for

      forever by replacing hard drives / ram / CPUs, etc. However,

      since I designed the webserver to work for a month, it probably

      has memory leaks, rare stochastic bugs, or other built in limits

      / constraints (think log files or some date rollover shenanigans)

      that will ultimately kill the webserver even with eternally

      perfect hardware. Do you really expect that a webserver

      engineered to work for 1 month will run for 10 years without

      catastrophically crashing? Not even Apache can do this! In fact,

      if I put in the extreme effort to make it that robust, I've

      wasted time that I could have spent on other projects by pursuing

      an unnecessary engineering goal. Likewise, human minds have only

      ever run for at most 122 years before they are destroyed due to

      hardware degradation. Fixing the hardware doesn't change any

      software bugs that are almost certainly present in the human

      mind. Think of all the pathological things that can go wrong with

      a webserver, multiply it by a million, and that likely how

      evolution has designed our minds. For example, consider memory :

      why should you expect that we have evolved the ability to

      coherently organize memories past say 150 years? There's been

      absolutely no selective pressure for this ability, so you can bet

      that if there's any fitness to be gained from not having

      unlimited memory potential (such as better metabolic efficiency),

      we have it! You might think that maybe we would just forget

      things the same way that we sort of forget things that happen

      earlier in our lives, but complicated information processing

      systems don't have to fail gracefully when they're pushed far

      past their design constraints. A 150 year old person is just as

      likely to suffer a catastrophic psychosis due to software

      limitations associated with memory as he is to do something with

      all those memories we might consider reasonable. More likely, in

      fact, since there are so very many ways for a complicated

      software system to break and so few ways for it to run

      successfully. Therefore, I think Aubrey de Grey's "hardware-only"

      approach is missing a very important component of longevity

      science, and any successful effort to make people live orders of

      magnitude longer than they do naturally will need to deal with

      people's software as well as their hardware.

 

 - validating neurocryopreservation :: Problem : you want to test

      whether a brain is functionally preserved through vitrification,

      but you don't want to figure out how to preserve all the other

      organs in the animal. It might be possible to keep the rest of

      the body at almost 0C and vitrify just the head for only a few

      minutes. Induce hypothermia, then separate out the head's blood

      supply from the rest of the body, then just cryoptotect and

      vitrify the head. Might need some sort of thermal guard to keep

      the outer head / neck from becoming too cold. You leave the

      spinal cord intact! Then you devitrify to 0C, remove

      cryoprotectant, and then reattach the blood supply. You can

      determine brain preservation using behavioral assays!

 

 - freezing water purifier :: you slowly freeze water, but also run

      liquid water over the frozen mass. This takes away basically all

      impurities and creates "washed ice" then you melt the ice. Maybe

      you could re-use the heat from creating the ice to melt the ice?

 

 - ultra strength :: allow a person to visualize their muscle

                     recruitment patterns. Give them adrenaline and let

                     them feel what it's like to have the normal limits

                     removed. See if they can replicate the effects.

 

 - phone names :: make a PX record for domain names that's like the MX

                  record, except that it is a phone number instead of

                  an IP address. That way, you can use the domain name

                  registration system to provide names for phone

                  numbers. Then, as long as you control the domain, you

                  can point people to your current phone number by

                  updating that record. 

 

 - edible flowers :: Edible white flowers that you put in a colored

                     solution with flavor. When the flower turns the

                     right color, it is also flavored and ready to eat! 

 

 - suicide cryonics :: according to [[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06suicide-t.html][this]], people who commit impulsive

      suicides have a newfound sense of the importance of life. Perhaps

      they are good cryonics targets.

 

 - lead bone :: Could you fill in all the empty spaces in a bone with

                lead? Might be cool.

 

 - the quest for life  :: Every stupid story has the "immortal who

      wants to become mortal" or some other such idea. I want to story

      where the protagonist loses their immortality and feels /angry/

      and ashamed about losing something that's so absolutely crucial

      to their identity. A reverse of "death makes life worth living",

      they feel that living forever is what makes life worth

      living. Now they've "lost their sunrise" or their "connection to

      the timeless universe" or something. So they go on a quest to get

      it back, learning about themselves along the way, and regaining

      the precious thing they lost in the beginning.

 

 - world-map :: take a small table and paint the continents in

                toothpaste on the table. Make a slightly raised barrier

                around the table. Slowly pour water onto the table, and

                it will form the oceans!

 

 - stage magic rituals :: rituals should incorporate elements of stage

      magic. Foe example in Teller's tempest, they have a scene where

      they levitate a crown in front of someone, then put it on his

      head. They also have a wedding ceremony where they levitated the

      bride as well. Actual weddings and other ceremonies should

      incorporate stage magic as an enhancement. 

 

 - isotope time dilation :: use a cyclotron to speed up rare isotopes

      developed in nuclear fusion experiments. The relativistic time

      dilation will stop the isotopes from decaying, and allow time to

      study them. This is based on radioactive isotopes that fall

      through the earth's atmosphere that take hundreds of times

      longer to decay than normal.

 

 - marsupial stimulation :: You take a freshly pouched marsupial baby,

      and show it videos and other interactive things while it matures

      in the pouch. What mental effects would this have?

 

 - dynamic re-keying :: Some older ways of tuning instruments sound

      better, but we use the even-tempered scale today because it makes

      it easier to switch keys. With electronic music, why not make

      key-annotations and dynamically re-tune the piece to sound good

      in the current key? Could be done as a midi+annotation -> midi

      compiler for experimentation.

 

 - death always implies damage :: is is possible for a corpse to differ

      from a living person only in the fact that one is dead and the

      other is alive? NO! A corpse must always have some sort of

      molecular damage which causes the loss of function!

 

 - inner eye :: Surgically install a bunch of tiny cameras inside a

                person. Then, you can activate them all and get a

                picture of your internal organs for diagnostic

                purposes. 

 

 - chaos rails :: should make a visualization of the homoclinic tangle,

                  it's truly beautiful.

 

 - context gobbler :: this would be in "inside-out macro" that takes

      the context (like you use for things like error, continuations,

      and friends) and transforms it to something else. Maybe useful?

 

 - cryonics middle ages :: some people say that cryonics is an

      experiment and that it is foolish to wait until we have revived a

      human. There is a middle ground where the procedure has a dismal

      success rate on humans, say 1 in 20, so that you'd be a fool to

      try revival. Nonetheless, this very risky procedure could be the

      legal proof of concept needed to create a new class of life

      between "living" and "dead": "stasis".

 

 - philosophy of the mirror :: neat thought experiment -- if you take a

      mirror of someone by actually reversing a person's chirality

      molecule by molecule, then will the only be able to read mirror

      writing? The answer is yes, by analogy to a purely mechanical

      scan-tron device. This is one of the only interesting transforms I

      know that can take a human brain and change it in subtle,

      non-destructive ways. It's also an argument against dualism.

 

 - biosphere in a bottle :: There are around 15 million species. 15

      million stem cells will fill only a tiny size, far less than a cubic

      inch. Preserve a single cell from every species on earth in this

      small space, and you will have a record of our current biosphere

      that can be protected. "Hold the genetic data of all species in

      your hand!"

 

 - chaos lock :: The "arrow of time" points in the direction of

                 increasing entropy. The time evolution of chaotic

                 systems depend exquisitely on their initial state. If

                 you take a measurement of a chaotic system at any

                 given point of time, you can evolve that system

                 backwards or forwards based on your measurement. So

                 let's say you start the chaotic system in a VERY low

                 entropy state, then let it run for a while, then take

                 a measurement with some uncertainty. Your

                 measurement is pretty good, but obviously not

                 PERFECT. If you evolve the chaotic system back in

                 time, then you will see that you don't really reach

                 a state with low entropy an hour before (the entropy

                 is easy to measure with surrogates like alignment,

                 etc). So use this technique to SEARCH for a more

                 accurate measurement! This potentially can give you

                 many more orders of magnitude than you could get alone

                 just using an instrument. Sometimes it will give you

                 bad results, the the odds of it doing that are

                 infinitesimal, and you can just measure a couple of

                 times. 

 

 - cryo-evolution :: perhaps there would be a way to rapidly evolve a

                     symbiotic bacterial organism that could protect

                     human tissues from freezing damage.

 

 - suicide parasite :: sometimes, people kill themselves for no good

      reason. We often explain this with things like "hidden

      depression" or we say that they had something like chronic jaw or

      back pain. I think that smells of rationalization. I don't buy

      it. I propose that in many suicide cases there is a disease that

      causes the suicidal behavior. We already know that certain

      parasites have mind-bending properties in other animals, even

      mammals like mice. It's not much of a stretch to imagine a

      parasite that causes suicides in humans. Some problems:

      - What does the suicide parasite get out of it? :: This might be

           answered by the whole thing being a glitch caused by

           cross-species contamination. Toxoplasma works this way.

      - What predictions does a disease model make :: suicide should

           be more common among people who share a contagion

           vector. There should be suicides that don't make any

           sense : people who weren't really depressed, who had no

           reason to kill themselves. People who have killed themselves

           should have a higher incidence of some unknown parasite in

           their brains. 

 

 - domestic insects :: People should eat more bugs because they're much

      more efficient, so why not do some major domestication research

      to make very appealing bugs? Beetles, in particular, seem to be

      excellent targets for domestication because they have extreme

      levels of genetic malleability.

 

 - birth-clones :: What if each person was intentionally split at birth

                   into a normal embryo and a few "backup" cells which

                   is then frozen. The backup cells are created just

                   the same way as natural identical twins. The backups

                   can be used to regenerate organs. etc. Also, it

                   would be a good sci fi concept, because you could

                   have a culture where people reward people who were

                   especially awesome are "reborn" from their

                   backups. Imagine having a young Bach every

                   generation, etc.

 

 - pronunciation guide :: a simple webpage where you type in a word and

      it returns a simple, English sentence describing exactly how to

      pronounce the word. For people who don't want to learn IPA. 

 

 - cortex-search :: use the repertoire of actions learned to limit the

                    search space of possible actions.

 

 - learning to teleport :: scifi idea, this is a story about a person

      who is struggling with his/her society's ideas about

      teleportation. It's considered a fundamental part of being a

      member of that society (after all, the difference between animals

      and humans is that humans are creatures of pure information while

      animals are burdened with base matter, "that's how you travel the

      stars, etc") Humans are born normally, grow up, and then

      eventually transcend via destructive upload. Analogies to jumping

      off a diving board into a pool (which I simply /could not do/ for

      a long time), etc.     

 

 - no-float-ice :: cup that has cross beams at the bottom where ice

                   forms. Then when you drink liquid from the glass,

                   the ice stays at the bottom and doesn't hit your

                   lips. For bars and fancy things.

 

 - bitcoins for immigrants :: A common case with Mexican immigrants

      (illegal or not) is that they want to send money they've earned

      in the US back to their families in Mexico. They currently do this

      through things like Money Gram or Western Union, and they get

      fleeced in the process with fees. Bitcoin could greatly reduce

      the cost of sending money from America to Mexico, but I don't

      believe that it's currently used for that among Mexican

      immigrants currently due to lack of knowledge. I bet you could

      set up physical locations like those obnoxious Western Union huts

      in places like Texas, Arizona, etc, and greatly undercut

      them. Or, perhaps some educational seminars about bitcoin might

      be in order. There's some money to be made there because there is

      great demand, and it's a good thing to boot!

 

 - reverse eye-tracking :: A painting that is actually a digital screen

      with a camera. It records people's eye tracks permanently. It's

      "artistic" because paintings are normally these things that you

      look at without changing, but this one is changed the second you

      look at it, recording where /you/ looked forever for others to

      see. Make it be a painting of a woman and see the trolling as the

      breasts and groin area light up with interest from all the males

      passing by.

 

 - smart toilets :: Instead of using indirect measures like infrared

                    detectors of the presence of a person, use computer

                    vision to directly measure whether the toilet needs

                    to be flushed. I think a lot of things will end up

                    going this way as we get better computer vision.

 

 - validate chemopreservation :: chemopreservation is difficult to

      validate because it destroys the functionality of a brain, and

      brain simulation will take a long time to mature as a

      technology. However, one very powerful way to validate

      chemopreservation would be to have a person/animal learn

      something with high complexity such as a number or the solution

      to a maze, or a flashbulb memory. Then you preserve their brain

      chemically, slice it up, and read /that specific memory/ from the

      detailed brain scan. Much more difficult, but much more doable.

 

 - candy screw :: edible candy screw with candy nuts that you can screw

                  as well. 

 

 - better bibliography :: when writing a thesis or paper, have the

      bibliography not just be an opaque list of resources, but have it

      be a list of /summaries/ and /qualities/ that each paper has in

      the context of the paper being written. When examining a

      bibliography, I want to know if reading the papers in the

      bibliography are worth my time, and I also am probably also

      interested in exactly the things that are being discussed in the

      paper I'm reading. The bibliography is the perfect place to

      provide information about the referenced papers from the

      author's perspective. I will use this biographic form in my own

      thesis. 

 

 - digital inter-library loan :: libraries at universities already do

      inter-library loans for books, so why not do the same for access

      to stupid paywalled digital papers? All the universities could

      allow access to articles for registered students to all the files

      available through any participating university. This could be

      achieved by sending requests through proxies at participating

      universities. Each university would decide who at the university

      can access the proxy network. Access to the proxy network could

      be made easy using something like http://libx.org/.

 

 - chess visual :: to show the vast size of the game trees considered

                   by computers, show two people playing chess in a

                   void. They are floating in space, and there is a

                   simple chess board between them. Then, as they play,

                   the game tree's they are considering are drawn

                   behind him. The root of the tree starts centered in

                   their heads or whatever they use to think, and the

                   tree grows out from behind, never crossing the

                   dividing plane between the two players. Each

                   player's tree is a different color. As they grow,

                   there are animations for pruning, etc. Eventually,

                   they look like the hemispheres of a brain, wings,

                   etc. A human's tree might occasionally have a long

                   chain, while the computer tree would be more

                   uniform. You could compare deep blue and a modern

                   laptop. Use actual data when fighting two computers! 

 

 - time verification :: some standard way to verify that some piece of

      data was recorded at a specific time. Might involve a time

      server, a key for each time period, something like that.

 

 - tamper proof gold bars :: [[http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/gold-plated-tungsten-alloy-bar.html][this site]] offers gold plated tungsten bars

      as "novelty" items. One reason to prefer coins is because they

      are much harder to counterfeit because there is less surface area

      to mass ratio. However, gold bars are still a great design

      because they can hold a lot of value in a small space. A gold bar

      could be given the same protections (and more) that gold coins

      have to offer by changing it into a "gold book", which would have

      hundreds of "pages" of gold bound together. This could be

      implemented with multiple steel rods going through the book which

      can be removed, or some more classier mechanism for holding the

      pages. The point is that the bar can be EASILY subdivided (and

      people would perform this test before buying), thus guaranteeing

      it's authenticity.

 

 - aurellem shirt :: I should make an aurellem star symbol tee-shirt. 

 

 - touch vision :: inspired by GelSight, I want to reexamine cortex and

                   see if I could implement touch as a very low range

                   form of vision.

 

 - high school science :: this is a lesson in scientific ethics. The

      goal is to calculate /g/, the local gravitational

      acceleration. The students are told that the textbook says it's

      /exactly/ 9.81 before they start the experiment. See how they

      doctor their results to get closer to the textbook value. It's

      neat because for any given school, /g/ is probably *not* exactly

      equal to 9.81, because that is just an average!

 

 - opencourseware subtitles :: there are ladies who type up lectures

      while they are being given. These recordings should be kept and

      given to OCW for subtitles. If the timestamps of keys are

      recorded, then it is easy to make subtitles.

 

 - screen locking timing :: you use your computer camera to see if you

      are sitting in front of the computer. If you are, then the screen

      will never lock. If you are, then the screen will lock with a

      30-40 second timeout. It's an extension of using inactivity to

      initiate the countdown, just with more information.

 

 - mirror toilet :: a toilet with a square basin made or mirror instead

                    or porcelain. That way, you can see how good of a

                    wipe job you have done / watch how your excretion

                    system works.

 

 - test dummies :: why don't we clone anencephalic humans and use then to

                   test /in vivo/ human organ systems and drugs? It

                   would be ethical as long as there are women who are

                   willing to host the clones, and it would be a

                   tremendous resource for studying the human body. I

                   see nothing wrong with it morally, since no one is

                   suffering, and it stands to save many lives throughout

                   more advanced technology.

 

 - X-ray telepresence :: given that a doctor is operating on a patient

      via telepresence, one cool things you can do is shine X-rays into

      the patient to view the insides during real time. If the system

      was coupled with a Bayesian model of the layout of the structure,

      and the x-rays were only fired whenever the uncertainty of the

      model reached a certain threshold, then the radiation damage

      and surgery risk could be minimized.

 

 - superfluid vascular system :: I wonder what would happen if you

      replaced the blood in a human with a superfluid. What would the

      physical dynamics be? Would the superfluid flow through the

      vasculature, or would it ignore it and travel through the cells,

      or something else entirely. Since superfluids need to be cold to

      retain their superfluidity, how would the dynamics change during

      perfusion of a superfluid, where the fluid gains and looses

      superfluidity as it goes deeper into the body and is cooled by

      superfluid from upstream. In summary there are two things to

      simulate 1.) replace all blood in human with superfluid

      instantly. 2.) perfuse superfluid into human.

 

 - projective guessing :: I think that we read and see things by

      making a really good guess about what we're expecting to see,

      and then searching for our guess in what we see. If it really

      doesn't match, then we start to make more guesses / analyze the

      image from first principles, but most stuff is projective

      guessing.

 

 - Intestinal flora maintenance :: why not inoculate babies at birth

      with "ideal" gut flora instead of whatever bullshit they

      naturally get, thus giving them optimal digestive/nutrient

      extraction capabilities. Might also be able to make their farts

      not stink for life, too. MORE IMPORTANTLY, might help to

      preventatively stop some forms of /colic/, which affects 1 in 5

      babies and causes constant screaming and pain for about 5 weeks.

 

 - server culture : mirrors :: make a distributed system where people

      can mirror the websites of people they like -- essentially cover

      the server costs of favored websites. This could make popular

      websites run at no cost. The system would require that the

      mirrored content be the same as the official source. Sort of like

      bit-torrent for websites.

 

 - map programming :: one problem with functional programming is that

      in order to remain functional, you have to pass up arguments up

      into each calling function to get the full range of behavior

      from the lower level functions. Normally people come to a

      compromise involving abstraction and sparing use of dynamic

      variables to configure runtime behavior. What would be the

      advantages of making a programming language where every function

      receives one argument, a map, which contains all the symbol

      bindings it would ever need? This map is passed on to all

      subordinate functions. This way, you could replace functions on

      the fly, and arrange for there to be sensible defaults,

      etc. Might cause more harm than good but is an interesting idea.

 

 - rest nest :: a small EEG device you would attach to your head when

                you go to sleep at night. ML algorithms would determine

                your particular sleep cycles. This would mostly be an

                alarm clock that you could give a time range, say

                7:00AM - 7:15AM, and it would wake you up during an

                ideal time corresponding to then end of one of your 90

                min sleep cycles. You would feel much more rested upon

                waking up, and would wake up faster. There might be

                some other uses for the EEG data as well.

 

 - image compression :: use a library like gimp or opencv to process an

      image to make it have less entropy, then store the reverse of

      those operations along with the compressed simpler image as a

      super-compressed image file (possibly accepting some

      losses). Trades file size for decompression time, and allows one

      to cheat by using information in gimp/opencv to compress the

      image. 

 

 - fixed cryopreservation :: why not use a fixative to buy enough time

      to ramp up cryoprotectants to an acceptable level at room

      temperature? Then, the whole system can be rapidly cooled and

      vitrified. This method "severs the biological link" in that the

      fixatives are highly toxic, but current vitrification procedures

      do this anyway since there can be a lot of freezing damage.

 

 - dilated security camera :: a security camera that would capture

      full video footage of everything at 60fps but then decide to keep

      only every 1 frame every 5 seconds unless there's something

      "interesting" happening.

 

 - bitcoin wallet :: Part of "server culture", this would be something

                     like "coin.your-domain.com" which would serve as

                     your personal trusted access to your own bitcoins

                     from anywhere.

 

 - libpay :: this would be a free library which would enable

             micro-donations to software projects and other projects,

             so that you could donate a penny to "emacs" and it would

             be automatically split up to every person who has ever

             contributed to emacs in proportion to the amount of

             community esteem, code quantity, bugs fixed, whatever the

             community decides. This might make it possible for

             programmers to live entirely off of free programming.

 

 - distributed graphics :: Browser based graphics-card accelerated

      distributed computing API.

 

 - pronouns :: use capital letters A-Z instead of pronouns. They solve

               pronoun referents and gender neutrality, are short to

               say, and you can encode useful information into the

               choice of letter. For example, instead of "Meetings

               shall be presided over by the president, unless she is

               absent." USE "Meetings shall be presided over by the

               president, unless P is absent." We already use this a

               little, since I and U are reserved for the subject and

               object respectively.

 

 - phone DSP :: software app that inserts an audio DSP between the

                input to a phone and the output. The DSP is delicious

                and configurable, and can allow men to make their

                voices deeper, etc. The app would allow you to hear

                your own voice as others hear it. Most people hate how

                their own voice sounds. The app would also allow one to

                immediately change the parameters of the DSP using good

                presets.

 

 - predestined body learning :: a good example of predestined learning

      might be the mirror neurons.

 

 - restaurant receipt :: use a carbon copy receipt instead of two stupid

      copies. 

 

 - anti google glass :: glasses with mounted lasers and computer vision

      that targets the cameras in google glass and destroy them.

 

 - wearable towel :: towel with clasp, velcro, whatever, that allows

                     one to wear the towel more securely than just

                     wrapping it tightly and hoping for the best.

 

 - crossdressing :: Easiest way to disguise oneself as a woman is to

                    wear a burka.

 

 - book-mode :: intelligent color highlighting for books and

                articles. It would disambiguate pronouns and involved

                references. For example, if "Rachael" was assigned the

                color red, and "the blonde haired girl" refers to

                "Rachael", then "the blonde haired girl" would be

                colored red. Also, you could disambiguate multi part

                run-on sentences by highlighting each

                subcomponent. Maybe would also have applications to

                scientific reading.

 

 - Handheld light Rain measurement :: this would be a clear, teflon

      coated plastic disk with a camera underneath the disk. You would

      be able to hold the device out and it would measure the rate of

      accumulation of water droplets from fine mists and light rain by

      using computer vision to measure the diameters of the drops.

 

 - Big Brother Farming :: This would be a vision system that would

      individually monitor each plant and turn on water, etc to ensure

      maximum/uniform growth for each plant. 

 

 - Discrete Faucet :: A faucet with discrete ticks instead of

      continuous. 

 

 - Laser Circle :: take a glass microfiliment and shine a laser at one

                   end at an oblique angle. It will make a perfect,

                   large circle on the wall, converting a laser beam

                   into a laser cone, preserving most of the energy of

                   the laser.

 

 - Invisible Glass :: Take a container of liquid and embed a

      glass sculpture made out of glass that has exactly the same index

      of refraction and color of the liquid. Then the sculpture will be

      totally invisible in the container, and will only be revealed

      when the liquid is drained. The container might be a fancy

      wine/spirit bottle or an hourglass.

 

 - Caterpillar people :: A race of caterpillar like creatures gains

      intelligence after eons of predation by birds, etc. These

      caterpillar creatures still undergo metamorphosis into a large

      butterfly-like creature. The metamorphosis process turns the

      caterpillar's brain into mush and reforms it into a minimal,

      dumb, truly insect-like mind, completely destroying the person

      the caterpillar was. The society develops all sorts of customs and

      religious interpretations of the metamorphosis. It is viewed as

      good and natural by some since it is part of their life cycle and

      necessary to propagate the species, as only the butterflies can

      mate. Some think that the butterflies are still the same person

      because they have the same soul, even they no longer posses the

      memories or personality of the original caterpillar. Some see the

      butterfly form as the "true form" of the species, since the

      butterflies can fly, mate, and are beautiful. Many make a big

      deal out of the fact that 1-2% of the caterpillar's mind is

      actually preserved in the butterfly. Some see it as a terrible

      tragedy and argue that the caterpillars should try to stop the

      metamorphosis by technology. Practically, some very important

      members of society undergo hormone therapy and/or surgery to

      prevent metamorphosis so that they can live longer as themselves.

 

      This is a continuation of Marvin Minsky's ideas about pain being

      something that preserves our bodies while destroying our minds,

      something that is a remnant from our too harsh animal days that

      hasn't caught up to the fact that we have very complex brains

      now. It's a worst-case scenario about a maladaptive genetic

      legacy. Also, it's inspired by "There She Is!!!", which makes a

      compelling point about homosexuality by introducing a second

      gender characteristic (bunny/cat, male/female), which makes

      homophobia look very silly. Here, our own biological legacy of

      pain and death is made to look like the tragedy it is through the

      lens of the the caterpillar people.

 

 - relationships as a business :: [[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx][Turnover-Crisis]] is an excellent talk

      about the "culture of quitting," which is about better business

      by letting people go instead of keeping them around past their

      "apex". Focuses on information transfer. Cool idea of an alumni

      network, which for relationships would be a group of satisfied

      ex-lovers, who would recommend new people your way, and who might

      consider coming to you again, refreshed from their time away with

      new stories/experiences. I should look for examples of this and

      how they worked out.

 

 - coffee with tea :: /rlm-tea/ contains 2% sugar, 10% cream, and 20%

                     dylan coffee. /dylan coffee/ contains 5% sugar,

                     20% cream, and 10% rlm-tea. Start your mornings

                     with recursion!

 

 - psychic crystal :: in a science fiction story, this would be an

      object that is very easy to move physically but is extremely

      difficult to move with telekinesis.

 

 - http://betsofbitco.in/ :: what a great place for an AI/person to

      prove themselves as a good predictor. I wish this could be

      automated. 

 

 - true reflection :: don't forget about that mirror in the student

      center!, it's two mirrors at right angles, like staring at a

      corner of a room. The light reflects so that it shows you what

      you actually look like, instead of your mirror image.

 

 - remote control wasp :: use computer to drive wings with remote

   power/logic.

 

 - encrypted email phone book :: public (distributed?) database of

      email->private-key pairs, to enable automatic encryption.

 

 - universal eye color :: every equivalent creature will see each

      others' eyes as black -- it's universal. Even if the creatures

      see in radio waves, and their eyes are 2m long pieces of jagged

      metal, when those creatures look at each other, they will see

      black, the absence of light and color (since it's being absorbed

      by the sensor array).

 

 - intelligent microwave :: it learns where the hot nodes of its fields

   are, and uses them to evenly heat any food item. It has an infrared

   camera or something to keep track of how hot the food is. That way,

   you don't get bowls where the edges are boiling, while the center is

   still frozen. Requires a little bit of intelligence/vision, since

   the exact pattern of heating totally depends on the exact shape of

   the food.  Wouldn't need a carousel, and wouldn't need a timer,

   just a desired temperature. Could also detect ice, and automatically

   defrost the parts which are frozen. Might be able to work much

   faster since it can avoid overheating; might have problems with

   heating the insides of thick things, might need a weight sensor too.

   

   + Would be much cleaner than other microwaves, since food would

     "sputter" and splash liquid much less.

 

   + Throw in some SIFT+R processing to match previously cooked foods

     and learn the exact heating profiles for things that have been

     cooked before -- it can get faster the more it's used.

 

 - compression :: brain-aware image compression algorithm

 

 - Credit card proxy :: would be a company which works like paypal

      except for real world transactions

 

 - Flesh pillow :: a pillow like the arm or torso of a human, complete

                   with simulated temperature, bones, and heartbeat.

 

 - super screw :: a screw which has only one or two threads and instead

                  uses compression to fit into a hole (the whole shank

                  of the screw is split into multiple pieces to

                  accomplish this; the tip is a point, then the middle

                  bulges out and gets compressed when screwed in.

 

 - light filter :: (like light tweezers) to mechanically separate

                   fluids with different index of refraction

 

 - chalk eraser project :: maybe make a directional eraser, for easy

      release of chalk dust, like fur, and how it likes to rest in a

      certain direction.

 

 - silver socks :: socks laced with silver for the antimicrobial

                   properties.

 

 - UROP :: magnet gear/metal teeth tape 

 

 - Rod of Moses :: device to distill urine through evaporation and

                   easily dispose of urea crystals for use in desert --

                   produce drinkable water.

 

 - UROP :: Make the LED in line with the flow for the micro injector, so

           that it may transmit maximum flow.  Motor that changes

           distance of internal magnet from windings depending on

           desired speed so as to obtain maximum power efficiency.

 

 - lottery scraper :: web scraper which monitors various lotteries,

      looking for "special" gimmick changes in the rules (like 4x

      winnings on Wednesdays) and computes expected value...

 

 - Memristiors novel design :: make an evolutionary algorithm to make

   old stuff using all four basic circuit elements.

 

 - Conductive concrete :: concrete that has embedded metal fibers so

      that it can conduct electricity.

 

 - little bitty melting pot :: might be useful for some types of

      manufacturing/3D printing -- how small can an induction melter be

      made, for example.

 

 - power strip/timer programmable combination :: meh

 

 - algorithms :: which learn what their inputs are and in what order,

                and can adapt to changing circumstances -- they

                remember previous arguments and adapt so as to respond

                to different connections.

 

 - true pure tones :: hear a true pure tone by direct stimulation of the

      nerves of the ear

   

 - mechanical analogue to the electrical op-amp ::  would be an object

      with two levers -- you pull on one lever and the other moves the

      same way, no matter what's in the way or what it is driving. This

      analogy could be useful to teach op amps to people.

 

 - paper folding device :: make it convenient to fold lots of papers in

      various ways.

 

 - concrete epoxy :: epoxy with sand/ some other solid material.

 

 - light capacitor :: suspend some ball of material with a high index

      of refraction and shine light into it so it gets stuck -- would

      the light stay trapped forever? Could you build up unlimited

      quantities of light inside the sphere (which could then be

      released slowly by frustrated internal reflection?

 

 - movie screening :: Movies always are too long at first. One way to

      shorten them ``scientifically" is to record blink rate during the

      move and then remove / shorten the frames of the parts in which

      there are a lot of blinking (average this over multiple people)

      better yet, put it online and do it across thousands of people. I

      got this from youtube in which there is an episode of kill bill

      which is composed entirely of the parts in which people had their

      eyes closed. slogan: want to make a movie people can't take their

      eyes off of? Just take those parts out!

 

 - optimize an article :: capture reading of a scientific article via

      screen capture while people read it, then use it to make the

      article better. like the movie-pruning idea.

 

 - super reading program :: teaches people the ideal mental mask to

      apply during reading so as to read very fast.

 

 - explosive thermite epoxy putty :: one part would contain the rust,

      one part the aluminum.

 

 - reading comprehension :: use the above screen capture routine to

      make a quiz program that constructs questions about the content

      you seemed to gloss over while reading. could be easy if the pdf

      came with embedded questions.  Dylan: automatically generate

      word-cloud about the parts you found most interesting; help

      others who read the same stuff by drawing attention to the

      interesting parts.

 

 - hard sword :: make a samurai sword, but use osmiridum instead of

                 martensite for the cutting part; it should be a better

                 sword.

 

 - close range wireless :: use the induction technology used to

      recharge electric toothbrushes with no metal links to send data

      without any metal at all!

 

 - reading :: is a form of synsethesia

 

 - DNA printer :: A machine which translates the text eg, "ACTGAC" into

                   actual DNA

 

 - black generator :: ferro-fluid magnetic field suspended micro

      generator to make electricity

 

 - alcohol battery :: alcohol/fluid flow powered battery

 

 - folding razor blade sword ::

 

 - perfect pitch :: learn perfect pitch using another sense in

                    combination (sight or touch)

 

 - kaleidoscope projector ::

 

 - razor blade de-sharpener :: for guilt free disposal

 

 - bricks :: filled with luminescent plant material

 

 - bio metallic structure :: metal grids with seeds inside, which grow

      together and form a durable biological matrix. The metal

      substrate delivers water. (maybe use plastic instead of metal?)

      Dylan: enrich plants with inorganic compounds; electrical

      interfaces in cellular plant matter => remote-controlled

      photosynthetic/bioluminescent structures.

 

 - conducting extracellular matrix :: to allow better control of

      organic systems and an enhanced nervous system.

 

 - cross-modal memory hashing :: a way to retrieve memories more

      robustly. 

 

 - flossing thimble-guards :: (these actually exist)

 

 - rules + lattice learning :: integrate lattice learning with rules by

      generating hypothetical examples

 

 - wooden refrigerator :: to give food a better taste Dylan: like

      barrels for wine, or planks for salmon. Maybe just have "flavor

      planks" for your pre-existing fridge. Need to mitigate effect of

      temperature on volatility?

 

 - radioactive transmutation molecule by molecule :: create precious

      metals or something else economically advantageous.

 

 - crowd preservation :: inoculate food with tons of harmless

      bacteria so that there's no room for bad bacteria as a method of

      preservation

 

 - old school preservation :: Pasteur - style holding jar with siphon

      as a way to store liquids at room temperature indefinitely w/o

      refrigeration.

 

 - restaurant policy :: Throw rude people out of restaurant as a matter

      of course -- make ambiance much better.

 

 - clean windows :: make something that mixes soap with fire hydrant

                    water (and reduces the pressure a bit) and use it

                    to clean windows of buildings.

 

 - ocarina :: make an ocarina out of pure silver

 

 - fire pen :: pen which burns words on to the page, thus never needing

               any ink. Is there a way to make it runnable from the

               human's energy?

 

 - website to design your own soda :: and label, and have it mailed to

      you / sell it from your own online store.

 

 - solar panels :: that float on the ocean

 

 - handcuffs with more than two cuffs (3?) :: great for daisy chaining

      people, binding them to environment, etc.

 

 - vector based SOUND files :: like the pictures but with SOUND. codify

      sound in a language with enough symbols so that it can describe

      everything and encode it in that. would be like going from speech

      to text or smtg. Could also store sound as an image of the

      wavefront encoded as a vector image.

 

 - Mouse :: with a horizontal scroll wheel in addition to the vertical

            scroll wheel

 

 - logic maintenance system for big institutions :: to make sure the

      things they are thinking about doing are not retarded

 

 - http://www.regulations.gov/ :: cool site

 

 - genetically engineered glowing fruit :: sell seeds?

 

 - memory slide :: IF memories are encoded using particular sensory

                   impressions, what happens if the sensory organ

                   itself changes? those memories would become

                   inaccessible. maybe this is why we can't remember

                   much from our childhoods. also, could this happen

                   throughout life as well? Could S remember stuff from

                   his childhood?

 

 - make a completely indestructible phone :: no moving parts or display

      you should be able to slam it around all you want, and it will

      just work. brutally simple. aerogel around the battery, minimal

      interface - never gets too hot, and can be dropped into water. no

      holes -- uses field effects for everything from the buttons to

      inductive charging and data transfer.

 

 - midi to ocarina "tabs" program :: (online website? buy ocarinas from

      it too)

 

 - 3d printing with sound pulses (or just patterns) :: like the 8.03

      lecture

 

 - lighter flint on spring :: make hot, throw it at something, and it

      makes sparkles!

 

 - nuclear energy :: Rebranding New+Clear Energy with informational

                     campaign and public debate forum to enforce its

                     transparent and open nature. France needn't be the

                     world leader in nuclear energy. (Dylan)

 

 - bubbles :: Engineer a material which has both ductility and high

              surface tension to make the "third"

              minimal-surface-energy solution to a bubble suspended

              between two equal-diameter rings. (Solutions are

              cylindrical catenary curve, two separated half-bubbles,

              and a double-cone)

 

 - Textbook whose content can be varied continuously :: alter level of

      difficulty, rigor, diction, emphasize crossover with certain

      other discipline, etc. Content generated dynamically from

      knowledge base, along with questions that are moreover altered to

      guide knowledge acquisition. Motivation: One book of

      knowledge. /One./

 

 ** From Jacob's idea list

 

 - Roommate-canceling headphones: uses roommate's laptop mic to seed

   noise cancellation alg in your headphones (would this

   work?). -Update on sound canceling headphones that take feed from

   tv: how about ones that cancel people talking on the phone by

   receiving the phone signals and playing inverse sound

   waves. #signalprocessing ~jcole@mit.edu

 

 - ClackerAlert -- tells if you slam the keys too hard using sound data

   (and speed/jerkiness data)!.Prevents RSI ~jcole@mit.e

 

 - Panic Pin :: separate pin that you can tell someone if forced to

                identify your PIN (idea from idea about credit cards)