#+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

 # :PROPERTIES:

 # :HTML_CONTAINER_CLASS: ideas

 # :END:

 

 This is a list of *Every* idea I've written down

 

 #+begin_quote

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

 getting credit.

 #+end_quote

 

  - I just had sex spinal tap <<2016-07-12 Tue>> :: measure signals

       coming from your spinal cord to detect orgasm w/ machine

       learning. Then your fucking app can post to facebook

       automatically saying "I just had sex".

 

  - a billion years of suffering, finally quieted by a noble oil spill <<2016-07-11 Mon>> ::

 

  - pig egg extraction  <<2016-07-10 Sun>> :: put human stem cells into

       a pig embryo, get the pig to grow human eggs / human

       reproductive systems, use the pig as an artificial womb. Also

       can get high quality <5 year old eggs from post memopausal women

       bu making their stem cells grow new eggs. In general, we should

       do a lot more transgenic xenobiologu!

 

  - cortex-doubling <<2016-06-26 Sun>> :: could we do something like

       the cortex-transplanting experiments except with an aim to

       greatly increase the size of the brain's cortex-- take a whole

       cortex from one embryo and just "shove it in" to the other

       animal? 

 

  - use optical methods to scan in a vynl recored <<2016-06-26 Sun>> ::

 

  - chilled cubes of quartz instead of ice to cool down a drink

       <<2016-06-22 Wed>> :: or troll people with lukewarm "ice"

    water. Aristotle said that quartz was permementaly frozen ice, why

    not take advantage. And why didn't Aristotle invent child

    psychology? 

 

  - seedless fruits <<2016-06-22 Wed>> :: could we make sedless fruits

       by breeding for increasingly /asymettric/ seed distribution?

       That way, we could breed until the seeds are on the surface of

       the fruit, then untill they're at the stem, then until they're

       off on their own branch near the fruit. could be cool!

 

  - can dogs hear our muscles contracting? <<2016-06-22 Wed>> ::

       muscles make an infrasonice sound when they contarct. In

       general, might this be an unintended side channel when it comes

       to animal experiments.

 

  - authenticity and responsibility display similar mental glitches

       <<2016-06-21 Tue>> :: oh, you mirdered someone by presing a

    button-- then you're not repossible. If you print out an artwork,

    then it's not "authentic". In both cases we take the requirement

    for hands to be involved too far and cant't see through a layer of

    indirection 

 

  - better fixatives with aldehyde dehydrogenaze inhibitors?

       <<2016-06-20 Mon>> :: the idea is to disable the aldehyde

    dehydrogenaze enzymes that might react with aldehydes and retart

    progress. This might be irrelevant given how many fixative

    molucules might be used during fixation, but these systems might be

    coupled with negative downstream effects? See

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldehyde_dehydrogenase for more details.

 

  - batch multiple credit card transactions for a coffee shop

       <<2016-06-19 Sun>> :: if you get a foffee, then get another

    thing later on the same credit card, then the coffee shop should

    batch these transactions together at the end of the day to avoid

    multiple fees.

 

  - a man has to have balls to cut off his own balls <<2016-06-17 Fri>> ::

 

  - kerning art <<2016-06-16 Thu>> :: an extention to LaTeX that puts

       really subtle smiley facse and shit into the whitespacing of a document

 

  - glare analysis <<2016-06-15 Wed>> :: take a computer model of a

       building, use ray-tracing to simulate there light goes during

       different times of the day, and see if the light will bother

       anyone in "standard" positions, such as desks, counters, etc.

 

  - almost-silent whispers in the brain  <<2016-06-14 Tue>> :: a set of

       silent synapses are triggered in such a way to create a wealth

       of important memories, none of which are accessable to the person!

 

  - jumping forward in time, by changing your brain

       <<2016-06-11 Sat>> :: and also, the state-space evolution of a

    brain has loops, etc

 

  - "draw your own computer" -- an MIT IAP class <<2016-06-11 Sat>> ::

       you take an 8.5x11 sheet of paper and draw out a simple CPU on

       it (with connections for a decent RAM chip, and two serial

       ports). You'd use a fine pen and a magnifying glass, draw from a

       template, and the class would go over the circuits you're

       drawing as you draw them. Then you do some VERY BASIC

       photolithography to make it real! Then you write in a nice game

       of ZORK or something! Possibly this could be a two-three day

       class depending on how complicated the drawing has to be. 

 

  - knife with gallium core and M&M resin on the outside

       <<2016-06-10 Fri>> :: "melts in your enemies' guts, not your

    scabbard" 

 

  - pizza lathe printer <<2016-06-09 Thu>> :: spin pizza, apply

       toppings. make it be intriciate. like a tomato sauce

       spirograph. "spirograph pizza"

 

  - "conception" of memory <<2016-06-09 Thu>> :: this is almost a

       kabbalistic mystery, that the molecules used in conception might

       be the same used to conceive a memory: from Kadell: In Xenopus oocytes, maternal RNA is silent until activated by the

 cytoplas- mic polyadenylation element binding protein (CPEB) (Richter

 1999). In Aplysia a new iso- form of CPEB (ApCPEB) with novel

 properties was found in neurons. Blocking this isoform at a marked

 (active) synapse prevented the main- tenance but not the initiation of

 long-term syn- aptic facilitation (Si et al. 2003a,b).

 

  - mind erasure, all cells live <<2016-06-09 Thu>> :: trypsin in the

       brain -- dissociate neurons without killing them. 

 

  - delicate flavors pumped through your blood and into your tounge and

       organs <<2016-06-08 Wed>> :: the infinite snack pump

 

  - imagemagick converter for ffmpeg <<2016-06-07 Tue>> :: make it so

       that you can execute any imagemagick command on every frame of a

       video by using ffmpeg.

 

  - dyln duel decks -- elbows vs. NO <<2016-06-04 Sat>> ::

 

  - knife garnish <<2016-06-04 Sat>> ::

 

  - the "easy" and "hard" problems of mathematics <<2016-06-02 Thu>> ::

       the "easy" problem is to jsut do things like prove the rieman

       hypothesis. The "hard" problem is to show why 2 /is/ 2 and not

       some other number, and what makes /this/ 2 different form

       /that/ 2. You know, to really /explain/ it.

 

  - naming convention for marriage <<2016-05-25 Wed>> :: hyphenate your

       names with a new family last name, then the kids just get the

       family name. Then other people can call you "Mr. family-name",

       etc. By Dylan Holmes.

 

  - light of the mind <<2016-05-23 Mon>> :: a researcher is

       experimenting with transgenic viruses to do optogenetic

       experiments, accidentally infects himself. Then from then on,

       his neurons actually glow with light inside his skull. 

 

  - microwaves to accelerate cryoprotectant uptake

   <<2016-05-21 Sat>> :: works for osmium during embedding, so why not

   for cryoprotectants?

 

  - breed very small dogs, bats, mice, etc <<2016-05-21 Sat>> :: for

       neuroscience research. I wonder how many generations it would

       take to surpass the 2g limit of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitti's_hog-nosed_bat][bumblebe bats]]? Then the

       reduced species would be ideal for whole-brain scanning.

       Depending on the tech curves, it may indeed be more feasible to

       start with something like an [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_shrew][Etruscan shrew]], bred it for 100

       generations to be a quarter of the size, and then proceed with

       brain scanning, rather than starting directly!

 

  - sun dogs at the final stand <<2016-05-21 Sat>> :: "It was always a

       one way trip," said the Hero of the Sun. The rest of the heros

       could only watch as he made his final stand. Amidst the dark,

       icy gloom, he summoned one last powerful bit of sun-magic,

       sacrificing himself to hold back the forces of darkness. From

       hundreds of miles away, the sky brightened with an artificial

       dawn, and the sky shown with the hero's name:

       [[../images/star-artic.jpg]].

  

       With [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g53zcpaXT8o&t=21m23s][this]] playing in the background.

 

  - space elevator based on string <<2016-05-20 Fri>> :: You have a

       small dumb robot that walks up and down strings while carrying

       something. You launch a "spider" robot from a satelite with a

       bunch of string, tethering one end on earth and one end in

       grosynchronus orbit. Then you successively make the string

       bigger. 

 

  - lavender oats -- oatmeal w/ tea -- turns out it doesn't work all that well <<2016-05-17 Tue>> ::

 

  - all the atoms in a head, all the stories that can be <<2016-05-17 Tue>> ::

 

  - boltzman brain april fools <<2016-05-17 Tue>> ::

 

  - exochemotherapy <<2016-05-16 Mon>> :: let's say you have lung

       cancer, or some other cancer you might need to treat with

       radiation. Perhaps it could be good to remove the organ from the

       body (while still having it attached), and apply radiatio, etc.

 

  - glutaraldehyde as biological glue to bind implants <<2016-04-28 Thu>> ::

 

  - the blank lonliness of singularity <<2016-04-28 Thu>> :: I think

       that at least for me, I've always been missing the important

       spiritual aspect of /duality/. /Duality/ here means that you

       exist as two or more copies at the same time. There so much I

       want to focus on, especilly the orthogonal worlds of science and

       society, that my natural state of orginazation would be to

       /both/ hole myself up in a lab and work on discovering truth,

       AND work on talking with peopls and making a great network of

       friends. I want to be able to really talk with myself!

 

  - low voltage em imaging + fib sem directly of ASC brains <<2016-04-25 Mon>> ::

 

  - dildo-shaped earplugs <<2016-04-25 Mon>> :: just put dicks in both

       your ears. Make them double ended. In general, use earplugs as a

       platform for making neat things mounted to your ears, like foam

       flowers or ribbons or whatever. 

 

  - ASC as a police evidence preservation technique <<2016-04-18 Mon>> ::

 

  - multi metal fixation w/ formamide <<2016-04-18 Mon>> :: osmium

       copper zinc uranium formamide

 

  - blood like cars that knows where to go <<2016-04-18 Mon>> :: maybe

       with flagellas

 

  - post antibiotic recolonization from preserved blood <<2016-04-18 Mon>> ::

 

  - application of poly magnet for perfusion connections <<2016-04-18 Mon>> ::

 

  - explicit lobbying and influences from companies --- helps make behaviour more predictable and can help to paradoxcically make the lobbying money stronger <<2016-04-18 Mon>> ::

 

  - glutaraldehyde as a callous hardener <<2016-04-18 Mon>> ::

 

  - twit-shank-select <<2016-04-17 Sun>> :: and if you actually had a

       really cool day, then you request that you become the

       trunk. Gaurantees that you have much more statistically

       interesting days, every day!

 

  - twit-shank <<2016-04-17 Sun>> :: much easer, ""minimum viable

       product"-style mind-merge. Just tweet any significant shit you

       did that day, then kill yourself. Trunk-you reads the tweet and

       continues with his day.

 

  - names that sound stupid today but would be good ancient Greek names <<2016-04-16 Sat>> :: "telethon",

       "mentos", "mentor". Behold TELETHON, he was a great warrior and

       runner!

 

  - <<2016-04-12 Tue>> if only we had gold much more abundant than lead ::

 

  - <<2016-04-12 Tue>> wood engineered to contain a lot of gold sequestered in the tissues ::

 

  - <<2016-04-12 Tue>> mtg life counter app that's more like paper ::

 

  - <<2016-04-11 Mon>> good word for a prostitute : conslutant ::

 

  - <<2016-04-11 Mon>> old paper book on acid paper preserved in SPURS resin ::

 

  - <<2016-04-11 Mon>> blood ink :: you can just buy a bottle of

       hemoglobin and make ink. maybe linseed oil and hemoglobin would

       work? throw in some sort of crosslinker or something to keep the

       hemoglobin red? 

 

  - <<2016-04-08 Fri>> trash horse ::

 

  - <<2016-04-08 Fri>> soul of the day :: a full life recording

 

  - <<2016-04-07 Thu>> omega the forsaken :: grade so bad you fail that

       class and all its prerequisites

 

  - <<2016-04-05 Tue>> eye ring right angle mirror :: creatures with

       say six eyes shaped in a ring on their head. They mentallly

       shift their attention from one pair of eyes to another to really

       preceive 3D shapes. However, if you pit a right angle mirrr in

       the back of their head, they can sudetnly incorporate two pairs

       of eyes simultaneously, perceiving the world in 3.XD, where they

       see what they call "true depth", where 2D representations of 3D

       space look hopelessly fake and the coeld has a sort of profound

       depth to it.

 

  - <<2016-04-05 Tue>> antibiotic multiplicity :: we shouldn't use use

       one antibiotic, or cycle them or any of that nonsense. If

       someone has a problem, give them ALL the antibiotics at once,

       getting exponentially better chances of killing everything. Say

       you have two antibiotics with a 0.1 chance of becomming useless

       everytime you use it to cure someone. The antibiotics are

       independent molecular mechanisms so it takes two chance

       mutations to confer immunity. If you use one till it's useless,

       then the other one, then it takes around 20 times before you're

       out of antibiotics. If you use both its more like 200 times!

 

  - <<2016-04-05 Tue>> are animals chronically tired :: I wonder if

       animals get enough sleep? Maybe not -- after all, they wouldn't

       necesairly be able to go for 8 hours even if they needed it. And

       the quality of sleep would be very bad if you're always on

       edge. I think that a lot of animals look tired a lot of the

       time. Perhaps in addition to our ability to cook food as a

       surrogate for our digestive system, our ability to sleep in a

       confortable, safe place for 8+ hours enabled similar economies

       for our mental systems! The "comfy" theory of human

       intelligence/evolution.

 

  - <<2016-04-02 Sat>> live to a billion seconds :: it's 31 years, 251

       days, 13 hours, 34 minutes, 54.7843 seconds or something

 

  - <<2016-04-02 Sat>> hyperlinked physical writing :: you scan in some

       (handwritten) text and make some of the words hyperlinks. looks

       incongrous. or an old newspaper clipping from like the 1930's as

       a pdf, and it has a random hyperlink in it!

 

  - <<2016-04-01 Fri>> super emulsified transparent manyonase ::

 

  - <<2016-04-01 Fri>> osmium as a EM catalyst :: cause you can recover

       it see 1978

 

  - <<2016-04-01 Fri>> the mind sword of osmium :: uploading, use

       osmium as a catalyst, make cool sword that's processed a billion

       human minds

 

  - <<2016-03-27 Sun>> hay fever straws :: normally you call them

       "sneezes" but if you have hay fever then you should call them

       "straws." :P

 

  - <<2016-03-27 Sun>> the same blue sky :: when I look at the sky, and

       there's no clouds, then I'm connected the eternity of all the

       creatures who looked up and saw the same sky. I wonder if you

       could look up at the sky, then look back down and be in a

       different time, a different place. 

 

  - <<2016-03-25 Fri>> fear of number quantity :: people can be scared

       of one thing, two things, etc, but what about 51 things. this

       might reveal the limits of object counting. How do there numbers

       distribute around the population? Is there a spike at numbers

       like 13?

 

  - <<2016-03-24 Thu>> water-resistant suit and CPA tube :: so classy,

       to pop out of a cryo chamber and have the water fall off your

       suit like in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Udw0RriGrI

 

  - <<2016-03-24 Thu>> perfuse cryoprotectants into hibernating ground squirrell ::

 

  - <<2016-03-24 Thu>> active biological camaflogue :: inspired by the

       mormyrid electric fish paper by *mumble*. What if you were an

       octopus that could change skin color, and then you combine your

       vision, skin, and motor outputs to compute what the skin should

       look like as you move your arms around; you could be perfectaly

       invisible, and wouldn't have to have the skin be "dumb". Very

       fast changes in light with no pattern would reveal this

       "bio-computed camaflogue", though, because the skin wouldn't be

       able to predict things as well.

 

  - <<2016-03-24 Thu>> vitrified lab :: imagine a lab contained

       entirely in the glass from which fibre optic cables are

       made. It's be neat! there'd be no air!

 

  - <<2016-03-20 Sun>> curare in a fixative :: might stop fixation

       tremors. 

 

  - <<2016-03-20 Sun>> hidden eyes of god :: it's the year 2020 and the

       first human brains are beginning to be preserved and scanned as

       part of the human connectome project. As scientists look at

       electron micrographs of preserved human brain tissue, they see

       all the expected brain structures: neurons, synapses,

       mitochnodria, myelin.... and something that's never been seen

       before: an intiricate filigree of strutures like the neural

       weaves from Banks' culture series. Human brain tissue from even

       50 years ago like Einsteins' does not have the weave, and he

       weave is only in around 30% of the population. Obviously

       computational in nature and way advanced beyond anything

       humanity can build, these secret structures reveal an unsettling

       truth: something is watching us, from within our own minds...

 

  - <<2016-03-20 Sun>> encrypted priority server ::

 

  - <<2016-03-19 Sat>> neuro-speakers  :: speakers are the ultimate

       insturment, most like the human voice. submime. attach to brain

       and then we can finally sing. 

 

  - <<2016-03-19 Sat>> book with meanings to onlky one person at one time :: like

       adam kraft's thing about neural nets with images that look

       nothing like the object but get classified as that object

       anyway. You could possibly do the same with a human visual

       system -- imagine a book that looks nothing like static. You

       look at the pages, and they seem like nonsense, but you also get

       a /strong/ impression of a scene and meaning, possibly stronger

       and more direct than a really good painting. And no one else can

       see it, and you sleep a night, and can't see it yourself in the

       morning. Like the "communicating with LSD people" thing as well.

 

  - <<2016-03-17 Thu>> ligand nonpolar osmium lipid stain for perfuse EM ::

 

  - <<2016-03-15 Tue>> classified documents and mind uploading :: an

       important value for forgetting!

 

  - <<2016-03-15 Tue>> furnace random number generator ::

 

  - <<2016-03-14 Mon>> how does a lobotomy not cause fatal brain embolisms!? ::

 

  - spinal cord made of light; moon :: transit time of light from moon to

       earth is same as transit time of signals through spinal cord. So

       you could have your mind on the moon and your body on earth and

       it would feel the same!

 

  - semantic darkmode browser extension :: some websites are naturally

       dark themed (like aurellem.org) while others are light themed

       (like google). At night I like dark themes and during daylight I

       like light themes. You can just invert your screen to convert

       light to dark, but when tabbing through multiple browser tabs

       you end up occasionally spraying your screen with bright

       colors. So, have a little button that inverts a single web page

       for firefox! Or, you can have a tiny bit of preprocessing (you

       just measure the overall white vs dark pixels) and then invert

       the page depending on that.

 

  - optogenetic readout during cruoprotection :: basically a "lightbulb

       above the head" to measure activity of selected neurons.

 

  - carbon dating and immortality :: if you've been /alive/ for a

       million years, you'll carbon-dat as being as old as yesterday. 

 

  - gas tenderization :: use high pressure and gas diffusion to both

       denature proteins and infiltrate lots of gas into a piece of

       meat. Then rapidly decrease the pressure, and the meat will

       experience air bubbles similarly to bread rising, and might

       become tender and tasty!

 

  - learning damage from mind uploading :: a person might be uploaded

       so that they can answer every question about their life and be

       able to perform actions they had previously learned, but due to

       incomplete simulation of long term chemical and structural

       dynamics, they might have a severe learning disability!

 

  - holy "spirit" :: most blasphemous liquor

 

  - truck blindspot lights :: lights that shine on the road and show

       where your vehicle's blind spots are.

 

  - eyelid screen :: you can just close you eyes, but you're reading a

       book. it would be really cool and look like rapid eye

       movement. In this tech, the screen would replace your eyelid

       entirely. The other really neat thing about this concept is that

       your eyelid screen is a part of you. You might have some

       smooth muscles in it that works like a selection or cursor, and

       the scren can feel your eye rolling underneath and tell where

       you're looking, allowing for a very immersive experience. It's

       like an "all-in" virtual mode, still cleanly separating the real

       from the digital, telling others you're in your "virtual space",

       and still looking entirely human. 

 

  - blockchain based experential memory ::

 

  - a hidden world of early life :: I imagine that the bridge form the

       first life forms to even very simple single celled organisms was

       probably very interesting and a lot more diverse than we give it

       credit for. Unfortunately, I doubt that we're going to find any

       good evidence for such creatures, since they don't seem like the

       type of organisms that would preserve well. All sorts of really

       neat delf replicating molecules and assemblies of molecules, and

       we'd have no record of any of them. The only way to get an idea

       of these types of life will be to make them again in the lab.

 

  - brain insurance :: for the preserved brain

 

  - remote control ants / pidgeons :: train/evolve them to want to

       follow an EM gradient or magnetic field. put a camera on.

 

  - musical neural inversion :: get a simple model of emotional and

       auditory circuits, "invert" the model based on sound input, and

       generate music with constrating satisfaction. Might find some

       music that's simultaneously "alien" (lacking a top-down design)

       yet still deeply emotionally coherent and satisfying.

 

  - simulated fire :: for those who say that simulated water can't get

       you wet, just see what happens if you attach your nerves to

       simulated output of FIRE. I gaurantee you're going to have a bad

       time. 

 

  - use lasers to cut large plasticized brains ::

 

  - gravity telescope the size of the solar system ::

 

  - information bearing layer :: to find the spatial / logical scale of

       the main information containing layer of an information storage

       device, look at where correlated change happens, and then to see

       if it's digital, look beyond that and see if the changes are

       uncorrelated. 

 

  - sperm fitness correlation :: it's evolutionary advantageous for a

       species' sperm to fail to function exactly when the fetus they

       would create would fail. But it's really hard to make this

       functoinal correlation happen because the sperm cell only

       expresses a small subset of the genome. To the extent that thei

       correlation effect exists, we can reverse it to find

       "interesting" genes. My guess --- look for genes physiccally

       next to sperm coding genes.

 

  - spinal repeater/relay :: a VERY fine mesh of directional paths,

       much finer than the width of a spinal axon, which can connect a

       bundle of nerves that has been cut together.

 

  - auto book ::handwritten by machine; illuminated. Like old medieval

    books. Use a model of handwriting so the letters are different. 

 

  - url resolver :: pick the longest vaid url that's a rooted substring

       of the requested URL. unambigupously corrects for links that

       have things like periods and ending parens at the end of a link.

 

  - soul black marble :: for existential threats, what if solu magic

       was true, and undertale whatever, destroy the world

 

  - heart preservation + heart bypass to allow time for healing :: you

       cryopreserve a heart, then "recondition" it inside the patient

       while under bypass to allow time for it to heal. 

 

  - intelligent microwave osmium perfusion w/ CAT scan ::

 

  - assembling new word-sounding words by concatenation and random deletion ::

 

  - amber brain preservation? :: would this work, without having to do

       the heavy metal bits? Maybe chemical fixation with aldehydes

       followed by hot amber and then high pressure for several months?

 

  - zappy fat ::

 

  - electrocaloric effect :: see

       https://dx.doi.org/10.1146%2Fannurev-matsci-062910-100341,

       [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocaloric_effect][wikipedia article]]

 

  - albino fruit ::

 

  - cryoprotectant that increases the nutritional value of food ::

 

  - faucet enerty :: how much power do you get from an average faucet

       compared to the wall socket?

 

  - high pressure fixation :: could this defeat the "myelin unraveling"

       problem? Maybe -- if the "unraveling" is actually BUBBLES like

       you might get during the bends, caused by the fixation reaction!

 

  - eat fixed tissue :: can you EAT glutaraldehyde preserved tissue, if

       you wash away all the free aldehydes and make sure that the

       reaction is complete? Can you also cook the tissue? Maybe it

       would be good! it would certainly be a very powerful

       preservative! maybe see

       http://www.aapd.org/assets/1/25/Karp-09-04.pdf

 

  - intelligence sorting ::

 

  - hyperbaric fixation :: apparently with divers with the "bends", you

       get bubbles in the myelin in particular. Maybe hyperbaric

       fixation would be able to eliminate these bubbles!

 

  - blood + cryoprotectant :: might be more gentle than normal things?

       Why not use it? (b/c you might need extracellular ion

       concentrations), also zeta potentials! But you could filter the

       blood, and get a lot from a slaughterhouse perhaps.

 

  - the matrix has a "lord of space" and a "muse of time" ::

 

  - ultra fast fluorocarbon cooling :: perfuse brain w/ cryoprotectant,

       cool to -20°C. Then clear out everything w/ fluorocarbon (or

       something else that doesn't interact w/ cells and has very low

       viscosoty at low temperatures), and then immediately switch to

       fluorocarbon at around -135°C. Should very quickly cool the

       brain (even faster than persufflation!) and would also avoid the

       dehydration problems associated w/ persufflation. Even better,

       you have a mechanism for rapidly warming the brain --

       immediately switch to warm fluorocarbon. Everything is always

       still liquid and pressurized. Should buy you a couple % decrease

       in CPA toxicity.

 

  - gameboy IR link over wifi through emilation ::

 

  - living memory is the start of history :: the natural dividing line

       is between living and dead history, and is created retroactively

       with the advent of brain preservation technology and then

       realized by mind uploading. It can still creep forward from

       death of individuals. We're still living in pre-history!

 

  - the memory of God is the soul :: mind-uploading + christian

       theology ==> the soul falls out nicely from omniscience. 

 

  - alternating stir plate :: a magnetic stir bar that alternates back

       and forth. Is it more efficient?

 

  - rsync with md5 (or whatever) database :: Now if you're rsync'ing

       something over to the server, if the file matches something

       already on the server, then it gets copied over from wherever it

       is on the server (then each block's signature is checked like

       with normal rsync, so that you get exactly the same behaviour).

 

  - mvln :: uses a backing database to gaurantee that when you move a

       folder, that all the links that point to it can remain

       consistent across your system.

 

  - centrifugal drinking :: spin the bottle around and tubes from the

       bottom convey drink up to the top. (don't know why I came up

       with this one...)

 

  - DRACOS at single cell stage :: you splice the genes for DRACOS into

       a single human cell at the first stage of development. Then all

       the cells of the person that cell will eventually become will

       automatically produce DRACOS (and the DRACOS will be recognized

       as "self" by the immune system. This creates a powerful

       secondary immune system which will make the person immune to

       almost all viruses. 

 

  - toilet + fume hood :: because it's dumb to have the entire bathroom

       be a sort of fume hood.

 

  - wind speed force :: two wind socks one weighted. The angle between

       them tells you the force of the wind.

 

  - sshfs to mount root :: you can mount your own root filesystem

       somewhere else using sshfs. Sort of "normalizes" file

       permissions without having to use root, and is weird. Could also

       bypass rm =--preserve-root= restrictions and delete entire

       filesystem.

       

       #+BEGIN_SRC sh

       sshfs root@localhost:/ my-root

       #+END_SRC

 

  - not even a nop of damage :: nop == no-op

 

  - twittwe vibratoe ::

 

  - value of cancer :: what of value is lost with an easy cancer-cure?

 

  - blood :: blood is the "wires" that connect organs to each other and

       impedance match the services that organs provide to other

       organs. A heart, per se, does not need blood but instead access

       to the filtering powers of a kidney; blood just connects the

       kidney cells to the heart cells. That's why "perfusing w/ blood"

       is entirely missing the point.

 

  - armored helmet :: use fiber-optics to re-route vision and get better

       shield for eyes. curved plates, kozilek style.

 

  - open source contributions :: way to make them public on your website easily.

 

  - active opto-glove :: for ENHANCED touch! It's a magnyfing glass for

       your fingers!

 

  - glove screen :: for driving directions, etc. Better than a watch!

 

  - osmium + sugar as a histo stain :: the suger interacts with the

       osmium and retards its progress. you can see details on slices in

       a light microscope without any more staining, and the EMs are not

       adversely affected. 

 

  - encryption camera :: use public key on memory card. The camera

       writes files encrypted with this public key.

 

  - immaculate AIDS acquisition ::

 

  - minds and lightspeed :: fastern minds have to deal with lightspeed

       limitations in their own cognitive architectures.

 

  - kill with fire :: guy A fires fire blast, with a spell circle to

       maintain the magic. Opponent B just GRABS the magic and pulls MORE

       fire. Guy A's circle goes out of control and all his life force

       gets sucked out to supply more fire. B grabs the magic, crushes

       it, fires a concentrated red lightning bolt, and eats the

       rest. "You think that you can kill me, WITH FIRE!?"

 

  - magic ekiga ::

 

  - edible crayons ::

 

  - library chaining ::

  

  - hypnosis + that drug that makes you loose continuity :: can the

       hypnosos plant things during this time?

 

  - forgotten services :: use "ovbilion" somehow. Some sleeping drugs

       make you forget the hour or so before you go to bed. Use this to

       create forgotten services. 

 

  - dibenzelene -- mike darwin ::

 

  - sleepy perfusion :: if brains naturally expand / contract depending

       on resting / awake state, we should investigate the EMs of brains

       fixed during "sleep" mode  and those fixed during "awake"

       mode. (while still using anesthetic of course).

 

  - shit flavored dog treats :: because dogs would probably like them. 

 

  - fume hood incense :: so make sure the fume hood is working

 

  - infinity coin :: s.f. concept -- billions are uploaded by using

       osmium as a "mind uploading catalyst". osmium is put ino the

       brain, they brain is scanned, and the osmium is recycled. Then

       you make coins out of the osmium that has gone through billions

       of these cycles.

 

  - mamilian dive reflex as a method of preparing organs for cryopreservation ::

 

  - spinal encryption :: like an X server, except your body parts each

       run these servers. You all have clocks, and you have to sign your

       muscle commands with your private key in order to control your

       body. 

 

  - suicide note as a mental excercise :: from NPR, ted talk, teenagers, etc.

 

  - microscope clamp magnet ring thing ::

 

  - cup that fills from the bottom :: (you put it on a thing and it starts filling

 

  - pronouncaeble liscense plates :: (just avoid certain unpronounceable combinations of letters/numbers. It doesn't even change the search space much!)

 

  - instant-awake vs natural awakening :: cognitive behavioural

       difference tells you important things about the waking process.

 

  - asethetics and personal identity :: if you go to germany, you're not

       the same person anymore.

 

  - arch linux diff cache :: should only download differences between

       the new package and the most rcent archive file. Can

       precalculate. Would make mirrors/upgrading so much faster.

 

  - low gravity perfusion :: then you can use cappaliary action. From

       this: http://www.wired.com/2015/01/coffee-cup-designed-let-astronauts-sip-espresso-space/

 

  - rational advertiting :: a new criteria for advertisting -- given

       same ad structure for two different produces, what structure

       leads to the most people picking the "optimal" choice.

 

  - autoclone bootstrapping :: to breed male with self: you make a clone

       of the male that's broken, male and female, the bootstrap with

       those gametes

 

  - position independent numbers :: like latin for numbers. You'd use

       color, endings, relative size, etc to determine what place the

       number has. Very convientnt for order or magnitude calculations.

 

  - dead man switch activated linux user account ::

 

  - embowlement :: condencending reference to embodiment

 

  - water staff  :: drinksy walking staff w/ water

 

  - melanin transfection ::

 

  - retention of neurotransmitters / other small molecules during fixation by use of an extracellular polymer such as PVP ::

 

  - machines :: Knowing we are machines does not diminish us; instead it

       opens our minds to the awe-inspiring complexity that is the human

       mind. Those who prefer to attribute consciousness to a "soul" or

       other metaphysical process are the ones who diminish man to a

       mere cartoon caricature.

 

  - why does glut change osmotic setpoints in cells :: perhaps either 1)

       It makes the membrane permeable to small molecules or 2)

       crosslinking proteins means less colagative effects.

 

  - Hemocyanin based blood washout solution :: for artificial blood, it

       can be hard to carry enough oxygen because haemoglobin needs to

       be in RBCs in order to effectively carry oxygen. However,

       hemocyanin, a copper based oxygen carrying protein, doesn't have

       this restriction, so it might make particurally good artificial

       blood. Might also be great for making oxygenated fixative

       solutions!  In fact, hemocyanin is more efficient than hemoglobin

       for carrying oxygen at low temperatures, perfect for

       cooling/blood washout! Hemocyanin could also serve to establish

       oncotic pressure in a blood washout solution since it weighs 75

       kilodaltons.

 

  - osmotic buffer :: polymer which polymerizes / splits apart in order

       to maintain the osmolality of a solution.

 

  - shoes w/ embedded computers :: and have little clickey things you

       operate with your big toe.

 

  - gb codec ::

 

  - ultrasonic cell disruptor to make foor ::

 

  - particle accelarator asd an awesome electron microscop ::

 

  - tolouadine blue pen :: use biological stains as dyes for ink pens?

 

  - clock stop explination :: you have a "visual buffer" which needs to

       fill up whenever you switch out from one scene to another. This

       is the clock stop illusion.

 

  - coffee ad space :: Your coffee stock was brought to you by google,

       the only company that brings you comfort and love in your harsh

       and heartless corporate world. This is majestic guerrila

       marketing. 

 

  - geo-synchro browsing :: you get a bunch of proxy servers, and then

       you visit websites and synchronize the views from each of these

       proxies into one view. Then you can see the differences by

       conutry/region. This is a way to experience the "neutral"

       internet by averging the effects of ip-tracing.

 

  - periodic table of genders :: arrange people by bahaviour, particular

       what sort of bonds they can form with other people.

 

  - ice cream protein synthesis ::

 

  - colored EM :: different heavy metals might possibly have different

       intensities for different electron acceleration voltages. So this

       could be the basis for colored EM images!

 

  - expansion microscopy dual :: this would be a process where you

       define a molecular scale object using larger microscopic

       components. Then nanotechnology goes through and replaces each

       "atomic macro block" with the appropriate atomic construct. That

       way you can use microscopic 3D printing and a special purpose

       form of nanotechnolical assembler to create any molecular

       arrangement. 

 

  - anoxic glut :: what happens when you try to fix tissues in an

       environment completely devoid of oxygen?

 

  - copper+EG :: if RBCs are rendered impermeabale to EG when Cu is

       present, then maybe you can destroy RBCs by a mixture of EG and

       Cu? 

 

  - *##### ENTRIES PAST THIS LINE HAVE BEEN PROCESSED FOR GOOD IDEAS #####*

 

  - qualia intuition explained :: let's say that you lacked the sense of

       smell. How could you learn what "acrid" means without it. How

       could you explain it to someone, without analogy to other

       smells. We mind-project this real linguistic separation into

       reality and get qualia.

 

  - spinal relay :: you have a small air-gapped repeater built into your

       spine in order to help with spinal injury, connect with

       prosthetics, and to monitor/control your body. Also, you could

       add the ability to save "macros"!

 

  - human cysts :: there should be communities of people with varying

       enforced separations from the rest of society in order to gaurd

       against various catastrophies.

 

  - bioelectric synthesis :: have a device which stores a lot of energy,

       and processes blood by creating sugar from waste produces over

       the day. You still need water, vitamins, minerals, etc, but this

       can handle the bulk of your energy demands and be recharged from

       the wall.

 

  - chelation as a method to improve cryoprotectant permeability ::

 

  - transgender fruit analogy :: like tomatoes

 

  - video game controllers as actual controllers :: console controlers

       like the n64 trident are excellent, durable tools for fine

       control. We should use them to control all sorts of things like

       robots by default. You should use it for your projects, since

       it's unlikely you'll be able to come up with something

       better. Compared to console controllers, the ones we use for

       robots/RC stuff are hopelessly clunky.

 

  - bubble computers :: bubble duality, bubble computing

 

  - dark blood bag :: blood bags in hospitals should be dark colored to

       protect the blood from damage from light.

 

  - chimeric homozygous sex chromosomes :: chimeric organism with XX and

       XX patterns from two males and two females. On average, it has

       the correct methylation pattern. Would it work?

 

  - horseshoe blood fixative :: would it work as a washout?

 

  - fixed protein packets :: group of fixed proteins in a network which

       is used as medicine. Hemoglovin, maybe?

 

  - prove hauntings :: website where you enter your pgp signed encrypted

       file and swear by all the gods that you'll haunt me with the

       password when you die, along with whatever other messages you

       have. protocol -- I video, throw rock, get password.

 

  - earth air water :: probably all intelligent species name their

       planet "dirt" in their language, unless the're aquatic or flying,

       then they'd name it "water" and "air" respectively.

 

  - ethylene glycol alt name :: icebane

 

  - overflow hiaku :: a hiku about buffer overflos, with garbage C code

       inside.

 

  - white knight :: his sword is named "Privledge" (an inherited family

       sword) he rides along the land, defending the code of

       chivralirary and keeping the orthodozy of society from fading

       from the realm.

 

  - technological deflation :: even the richest robber baron from the

       1920's could not afford a cardiac bypass surgery, even with

       literally all the money they had. As technology advances, the

       price of bread may go up, but the capabilities which money gives

       you also dramatically increase.

 

  - mental integrity test :: if your brain starts to decay, you might

       not notice the damage until it's too late. This would be a mental

       integrity test that you take every few weeks that measures your

       performance and compares it to a baseline. The tests are all

       designed to catch the early signs of degenerative brain

       diseases. For example, you might use performamce on a

       smell-memory assoaction test to detect early-onset Alzheimer's.

 

  - mind bank :: (in contrast to "brain bank")

 

  - scientist online paper reviews ::

 

  - binary feedback :: like with the soda machine

 

  - trolley cryonics :: change the cryonics protocol around so that the

       death occurs in a non-primary action loop.

 

  - binary metric :: you make up new unit names for "2 centimeters", "4

       centimeters", "16 centimeters", etc. Then no one will be happy!

       BUT, it helps solve metric's problem of intermediate units. (a

       centimeter is too small, a meter is too large!)

 

  - do it once -- upload ::

 

  - a simple merge procedure for uploads ::

 

  - cure for color blindness :: could it be possible to administer some

       retroviruses via direct injection to the retina, to cause some of

       the cells in the retina to begin expressing different color

       pigments? The brain ought to easily sort out the rest and enable

       color vision. Furthremore, could we add some more colors to

       baesline human eyes? Theory -- people who are color blind have

       better color spatial accuity for the colors they can see, because

       this it the tradeoff here involved with the retrovirus

       therapy. Re-purposing color detectors to see new colors at the

       expense of spatial acuity for the old set of colors.

 

  - Passion of the Christ missed opportunity :: in the Passion of the

       Christ, they do the entire show using Latin, Aramaic, etc, with

       subtitles. They should have had a part where Jesus does the

       sermon on the mount, he turns to the camera, and starts speaking

       in English, with no subtitles. It would have been 1.) biblically

       accurate and 2.) awesome. It would have been such a powerful

       example of Jesus' divinity, and it felt like they were setting up

       for it the entire movie, and they missed it!

 

  - xenobiotic methalation rewriting ::

 

  - physical pgp signatures :: someone should put together the

       technologies so that you can digitally sign actual pieces of

       paper -- some combination of signing a photograph of the

       contract using pgp, printing a barcode or OR code on the page

       which links to a website with the signed image, and a web of

       trust model so that people can authenticate as themselves. All

       this totally exists already, it's just not convienent. 

 

  - meta eye :: you wire in a third optical input to the human brain,

       but it doesn't tranduce light form the real world, bus instead is

       connected to the "internet of things" and shows you metadata

       about things you are looking at // serves as an interface to your

       own mind and body. Then eventually simply real things without

       metadata seem flat and fake compared to the objects in cities and

       other annotated areas. This third eye doesn't occupy any of your

       normal visual field but actually EXPANDS your visual field.

 

  - limits of monogamy ::

 

  - dream rewinding :: how to record a complete dream without disturbing

       it or modifying your brain? you need to be an upload: split

       yourself, and one of you stays awake whike the other sleeps. then

       you detect a dream in progress by monotoring rapid eye movememt

       in your sleeping self, and you wake yourself up every few minutes

       and tell yoursef about the dream. Then sleeping-your restarts the

       dream, continuation passing style, forgetting everything that was

       just said, and you repeat this process until the dream is

       over. Then awake-you and sleeping-you merge each other by taking

       sleeping-you and replaying the memories of awake-you, and you

       write a final report on the dream using the "saccade" reports to

       jog your memory. 

 

  - denser than osmium :: do the "misicibility" thing with an osmium

       alloy to get something even more dense.

 

  - AI hypnosis :: hypnosis might be good for studying AI, becuse it

       might probide a "debugger" for ananlyzing the human mind. I

       briefly tried this while at MIT, but it needs MUCH more work to

       be properly evaulated.

 

  - becomming alive :: upload faces challenges to grow into they type of

       person that can join the greater society -- a god. They have to

       go though quests that replicate all the things that humanity had

       to accomplish, like going to the moon, by themselves, in a

       virtual world where they cannot die and never get tired.

 

  - population distorted map of USA :: to see states sizes in terms of #

       of people. (already exists!

       http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cart/doc/) 

 

  - butterfly drone :: if big butterflies used to exist, then maybe we

       could make butterfly-inspired drones!

 

  - methylation sex symmetry breaking :: So, human cells have

       methylation patterns that encode male/female origin. If you

       combine two male patterns, the fetus grows "too fast" and

       dies. Two female patterns causes the fetus to enter a "vegatable"

       state and fail to develop. Evolutionary biologists will say that

       this reflects the asymmetry of energy investement for creating

       offspring. If that's true, then species that cast-spawn will lack

       this symmetry, and give clues about how to remove it in

       humans. If even cast spawners like sea urchins have it, then that

       means there's something deeper going on!

 

  - reverse cannulation perfusion :: you put the organ you want to

       perfuse in an airtight chamber with a pool of the stuff you want

       to perfuse. You cannulate some veins and lead tubes form to

       outside of the chamber. You pump in air and perfusate, and the

       increasing air pressure in the chamber forces perfusate through

       the organ. For times when you don't want to cannulate the inputs

       -- they can be ragged, or there can be many of them. You still

       have to guide the veins to the outside of the chamber, but

       depending on the use case this might be far easier than

       tradational cannulation. 

 

  - very slow physiological pressure perfusion :: less extreme example

       of the "pausing" trick -- just keep the perfusion running and

       don't put the perfusion target into the liquid as deep.

 

  - whole brain perfusion embedding :: Do the standard EM embedding

       protocol, but skip the osmium step, and use the "perfusion

       pausing" method to prevent overextraction during the dehydration

       and embedding steps. I think that you CAN perfuse resins into the

       brain, simply because you CAN perfuse viscous rubber when doing

       vascular casts.

 

  - perfusion pausing :: (Turns out this won't actually work!) One

       problem with doing perfusion is that if you STOP the perfusion,

       you rapidly loose pressure in the organ as your perfusate leaks

       out. You can prevent this by submerging the organ/head/rat

       whatever in FLUID at the appropriate level. Use something inert

       like flurocarbon to avoid problems. You would have to slowly

       decrease the flow rate while simultaneously lowering the

       perfusing object into the fluid. To start again, reverse the

       process -- reengage the peristaltic pump slowly while removing

       the organ from the fluid.

 

  - evoultionary textbook mimiricy :: as surgery becomes more common,

       there develops a distinct selective pressure for individuals

       organ layout to look more like the medical textbooks! :P

 

  - transparent skin :: temporary / permament transparent skin. Allows

       for examination of organs / muscles and visual prevention of

       disease and detection or abnormalities / good things

       eg. excercise. 

 

  - sweet information :: candy with a whole book written in it. Eat a

       book! 

 

  - targeted immunosuppressant :: just kill off the B-cells and friends

       that would cause problems in a organ-transplant / other

       situation. AIDS is good at killing these cells -- maybe make it

       just target the ones that will cause problems. Then you can

       premptively kill off that part of someone's immune system before

       a transplant. ALSO, you can kill off everyone's defenses against

       other blood types and make people effectively type AB+ w.r.t

       blood transfusions. Actually, why not give babies this treatment

       so that they're automatically compatable with all blood types?

       The immune system has this already when it's first growing; maybe

       it can be "retrained" to accept new things, or the mechanism of

       immune cell death be co-opted for these purposes.

 

  - fuck you tetris :: tetris that actively gives you the worst possible piece.

 

  - pockets :: more things should have them!

 

  - colored shower head :: a shower head add on that measures the temp

       of the water and changes the color of the water streams w/ an LED

       to show you the temperature. That way you can align to the color

       you want and see the temperature without feeling it. 

 

  - giant dragonflies :: we could rapidly MAKE giant dragonflies by

       evolving modern dragonflies in an very oxygen rich environment! 

 

  - anesthetic surgery courtesty video :: as a matter of courtesy,

       whenever you go under anesthetic, the doctors should provide you

       with a video of the surgery / recovery after you are concious

       again. The recording should begin about 3 minutes before

       anesthetic, and continue until both you and the docor agree to

       stop recording, or you leave the hospital.

 

  - whirlpool of light :: shine a laser out into space. But the planet

       is spinning! What you get is a spiral or light! And as this

       signal expands, does it eventually reveal it's wuantized nature?

 

  - perfusion coking :: EOM

 

  - timestamp verification :: you sign your message, and it has a

       timestamp at the top, with a +- percision number.  Then you send

       it over to the public timestamp server, which only signs the

       message if it gets the message within the timestamp window. Or

       the computer just signs the message but puts a timestamp at the

       beginning. So if everyone trusts the timestamp server, you can

       get reliable timestamps, and prove priority on ideas, etc.

 

  - the great computing slow-down :: in general, our computers are

       getting faster and faster. However, eventually our brains will be

       made of the same stuff our computers are made of! This has very

       interesting consequences -- I can add 2+2 and get four in about a

       second. Since my neurons actually work at around 10-60 hertz in

       parallel, this means that it takes me around 10-30 operations to

       do this addition. That's actually not bad in terms of computing

       time. If my neurons were as fast as the latest transitors, then

       most calculators would be SLOWER than me at adding numbers. Only

       the newest, most optimized calculators would be faster, and then

       only about 10 times faster! This means that once we begin to

       think at the speed of our technology, that technology will

       suddenly seem pitifully slow in comparison to how it seems

       now. And no amount of technical progress will remedy it, because

       that same progress will also make us all think faster. We'll

       either have to settle with living in "slow time" to do some

       computations, or learn to make smarter hardware with special

       optimizations. But this is actually really hard, because we'll be

       working with machines that will appear to us about as fast as

       MECHANICAL computers. So, in the future, all the cool parties

       will be in cyperspace at vastly accelerated speeds compared to

       how we exist now. But at these parties, the computers will SUCK!

       Of course, this is one of the few things that can save us from AI

       risk, because those AI's won't seem so scary when the're build

       out of rickety mechanical parts form our perspective. 

 

  - unitary reverse evolution of chaos+minds :: Chaotic systems diverge

       exponentially in state space. Do you get anything interesting

       when part of the physical system associated with the chaotic

       system is a object that performs some sort of computation? Is it

       possible for the computational system to play a

       percision-enabling role in determining the final/initial

       conditions of the chaotic system, just by tracing out thoughts in

       its decision paths? This is probably too vague of an idea right

       now, I just wanted to write it down.

 

  - microwave time :: the cooking time you enter on most microwaves is

       insane. It's expressed in what I call a "hybrid base", a

       combination of base 10 and base 60. You can get absurd things

       like 100 < 61, and 120 == 80! I wonder if these hybrid base

       systems could be very useful for some purposes!

 

  - three-eyes :: if you had three eyes, would you still draw cubes like

       we currently draw them? Or would all 2D-representations of 3D

       space always look hopelessly fake?

 

  - visual taste/smell assay :: get a grid of bacteria, each expressing

       a human taste/smell receptor linked to some sort of fluorscent

       activity or ion pump. Use a camera / electrical grid to transduce

       the smell / taste signal into bits!

 

  - carabiner mushroom lock :: you can take a trapazodial carabiner and

       make it so that a chain link is caught between the wide end of

       the carabiner and another chain attached to the carabiner. 

 

  - children's tool shop :: I think that kids should be provided with

       tool shops -- these would be nice sheds with a good collection of

       tools to do various things -- circuit components and soldering

       irons, wires, a small lathe, drill press, belt sander, a

       centrifuge, microscope, and telescope, etc. The idea is that the

       kid can now think, "I could use X to do this thing that I'm

       thinking about" -- the building becomes an extension of the kid's

       body & mind.

 

  - fluid display :: like the previous idea about matching refractances

                     between glass and liquid, except you make a lot of

                     switchable glass tubes in various patterns in the

                     glass, and actively pump colored liquid through the

                     tubes (the tubes have glass-like fluid in them by

                     default.) The result is that you can cause the

                     tubes to appear and dissappear, and vary their

                     colors as well!

 

  - immunoincompatibility :: take the human genome, and refactor it so

       that it doesn't use a particular codon at all. Then remove the

       support from our ribosomes for that codon. What does this do for

       us? It makes us immune to almost all viruses!

 

  - life cycle :: it's called a cycle, right? So, the thing that repeats

                  itself over and over, right? Not much of a cycle if

                  you don't come back after you die, if you ask me!

 

  - car with no blind spots :: use some cameras in the back of the car

       to augment the rear-view mirror so that you never have to turn

       around in order to lane change.

 

  - partial cell death :: you freeze a set of cells using some cryo

       protocol and 60% survive. How can this be explained? It seems to

       me that if the cells are the same, and the conditions

       homogoneous, then all the cells should either die or

       live. However, suppose that there is a metabolic cycle that needs

       to be in a certain phase for the cell to survive. If the cells

       are asynchronous, then you might end up with some cells dying

       because there were in the wrong part of their cycle. This implies

       that you might be able to cryoprotect cells by causing them to

       enter a certain metabolic mode before freezing.

 

  - cryonics color appeal :: perfusate used by cryonics companies should

       have red food coloring in it. It's just a nice touch so that the

       cryonics patient looks more life-like than with clear CPAs, and

       hopefully might get treated with more respect.

 

  - paramagnetic CPA :: you take a CPA that can be influenced by

       magnetic fields so that its degrees of freedom are limited. Then,

       you release the field, instantaly increasing the size of the

       state space of the system and dramatically decreasing the

       temperature enough to plunge the system past homogenous

       nucleation temperature and directly to the glass transition

       temperature, creating a doubly unstable glass at much lower CPA

       concentrations than possible at conventional CPA concentrations. 

 

  - room temp noodles :: how does the physics of cooking noodles work?

       Could you use a vacuum instead of heat to force water into the

       noodle?

 

  - personal carbon offset :: feel bad about contribuiting to global

       warming by using electricity / driving a car? Forget trying to

       "conserve" or "minimize your carbon footprint". Follow the

       Platinum rule -- make the world BETTER off than you found it!

       This would be a small, self contained system that sucks C02 out

       of the air. It uses electricity, but it's so efficient at

       removing CO2 that it more than offsets the CO2 produced by even a

       coal plant to produce that electricity. This way, you can still

       drive even a gas guzzler, but have a net negative carbon

       footprint! Maybe something cool could be done with the carbon as

       well. Use as much electricity as you want, but negate the damage

       to the enviroment with more technology. 

 

  - undoing spermogenesis :: with enough sperm, you can derive the

       donor's entire genome. You gain more confidence in the alleles

       for a particular gene the more sperm you have. Each additional

       sperm gives you the same sort of information you'd get flipping a

       coin and trying to decide whether the coin is H/T of H/H. Is

       there enough sperm in the the average load for you to be as

       confident as mitosis?

 

  - 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. Evidence that this might be possible:

       http://science.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1413.long

 

  - 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)