view org/ideas.org @ 155:9bf4f0d5af68

more ideas
author Robert McIntyre <rlm@mit.edu>
date Tue, 26 Jan 2016 23:32:36 -0800
parents 4fe52d2a28e5
children 42290f1f7f12
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1 #+title: Big List O' Ideas
2 #+author: Robert McIntyre
3 #+email: rlm@mit.edu
4 #+description: list of ideas from the last ~ 7 years
5 #+keywords: aurellem ideas half-baked random
6 #+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org
7 #+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org
8 #+babel: :mkdirp yes :noweb yes :exports both
10 * Ideas
11 # :PROPERTIES:
12 # :HTML_CONTAINER_CLASS: ideas
13 # :END:
15 This is a list of *Every* idea I've written down
17 #+begin_quote
18 There's no end to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care about
19 getting credit.
20 #+end_quote
22 - auto book ::handwritten by machine; illuminated. Like old medieval
23 books. Use a model of handwriting so the letters are different.
25 - url resolver :: pick the longest vaid url that's a rooted substring
26 of the requested URL. unambigupously corrects for links that
27 have things like periods and ending parens at the end of a link.
29 - soul black marble :: for existential threats, what if solu magic
30 was true, and undertale whatever, destroy the world
32 - heart preservation + heart bypass to allow time for healing :: you
33 cryopreserve a heart, then "recondition" it inside the patient
34 while under bypass to allow time for it to heal.
36 - intelligent microwave osmium perfusion w/ CAT scan ::
38 - assembling new word-sounding words by concatenation and random deletion ::
40 - amber brain preservation? :: would this work, without having to do
41 the heavy metal bits? Maybe chemical fixation with aldehydes
42 followed by hot amber and then high pressure for several months?
44 - zappy fat ::
46 - electrocaloric effect :: see
47 https://dx.doi.org/10.1146%2Fannurev-matsci-062910-100341,
48 [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocaloric_effect][wikipedia article]]
50 - albino fruit ::
52 - cryoprotectant that increases the nutritional value fo food ::
54 - faucet enerty :: how much power do you get from an average faucet
55 compared to the wall socket?
57 - high pressure fixation :: could this defeat the "myelin unraveling"
58 problem? Maybe -- if the "unraveling" is actually BUBBLES like
59 you might get during the bends, caused by the fixation reaction!
61 - eat fixed tissue :: can you EAT glutaraldehyde preserved tissue, if
62 you wash away all the free aldehydes and make sure that the
63 reaction is complete? Can you also cook the tissue? Maybe it
64 would be good!
66 - intelligence sorting ::
68 - hyperbaric fixation :: apparently with divers with the "bends", you
69 get bubbles in the myelin in particular. Maybe hyperbaric
70 fixation would be able to eliminate these bubbles!
72 - blood + cryoprotectant :: might be more gentle than normal things?
73 Why not use it? (b/c you might need extracellular ion
74 concentrations), also zeta potentials! But you could filter the
75 blood, and get a lot from a slaughterhouse perhaps.
77 - the matrix has a "lord of space" and a "muse of time" ::
79 - ultra fast fluorocarbon cooling :: perfuse brain w/ cryoprotectant,
80 cool to -20°C. Then clear out everything w/ fluorocarbon (or
81 something else that doesn't interact w/ cells and has very low
82 viscosoty at low temperatures), and then immediately switch to
83 fluorocarbon at around -135°C. Should very quickly cool the
84 brain (even faster than persufflation!) and would also avoid the
85 dehydration problems associated w/ persufflation. Even better,
86 you have a mechanism for rapidly warming the brain --
87 immediately switch to warm fluorocarbon. Everything is always
88 still liquid and pressurized. Should buy you a couple % decrease
89 in CPA toxicity.
91 - gameboy IR link over wifi through emilation ::
93 - living memory is the start of history :: the natural dividing line
94 is between living and dead history, and is created retroactively
95 with the advent of brain preservation technology and then
96 realized by mind uploading. It can still creep forward from
97 death of individuals. We're still living in pre-history!
99 - the memory of God is the soul :: mind-uploading + christian
100 theology ==> the soul falls out nicely from omniscience.
102 - alternating stir plate :: a magnetic stir bar that alternates back
103 and forth. Is it more efficient?
105 - rsync with md5 (or whatever) database :: Now if you're rsync'ing
106 something over to the server, if the file matches something
107 already on the server, then it gets copied over from wherever it
108 is on the server (then each block's signature is checked like
109 with normal rsync, so that you get exactly the same behaviour).
111 - mvln :: uses a backing database to gaurantee that when you move a
112 folder, that all the links that point to it can remain
113 consistent across your system.
115 - centrifugal drinking :: spin the bottle around and tubes from the
116 bottom convey drink up to the top. (don't know why I came up
117 with this one...)
119 - DRACOS at single cell stage :: you splice the genes for DRACOS into
120 a single human cell at the first stage of development. Then all
121 the cells of the person that cell will eventually become will
122 automatically produce DRACOS (and the DRACOS will be recognized
123 as "self" by the immune system. This creates a powerful
124 secondary immune system which will make the person immune to
125 almost all viruses.
127 - toilet + fume hood :: because it's dumb to have the entire bathroom
128 be a sort of fume hood.
130 - wind speed force :: two wind socks one weighted. The angle between
131 them tells you the force of the wind.
133 - sshfs to mount root :: you can mount your own root filesystem
134 somewhere else using sshfs. Sort of "normalizes" file
135 permissions without having to use root, and is weird. Could also
136 bypass rm =--preserve-root= restrictions and delete entire
137 filesystem.
139 #+BEGIN_SRC sh
140 sshfs root@localhost:/ my-root
141 #+END_SRC
143 - not even a nop of damage :: nop == no-op
145 - twittwe vibratoe ::
147 - value of cancer :: what of value is lost with an easy cancer-cure?
149 - blood :: blood is the "wires" that connect organs to each other and
150 impedance match the services that organs provide to other
151 organs. A heart, per se, does not need blood but instead access
152 to the filtering powers of a kidney; blood just connects the
153 kidney cells to the heart cells. That's why "perfusing w/ blood"
154 is entirely missing the point.
156 - armored helmet :: use fiber-optics to re-route vision and get better
157 shield for eyes. curved plates, kozilek style.
159 - open source contributions :: way to make them public on your website easily.
161 - active opto-glove :: for ENHANCED touch! It's a magnyfing glass for
162 your fingers!
164 - glove screen :: for driving directions, etc. Better than a watch!
166 - osmium + sugar as a histo stain :: the suger interacts with the
167 osmium and retards its progress. you can see details on slices in
168 a light microscope without any more staining, and the EMs are not
169 adversely affected.
171 - encryption camera :: use public key on memory card. The camera
172 writes files encrypted with this public key.
174 - immaculate AIDS acquisition ::
176 - minds and lightspeed :: fastern minds have to deal with lightspeed
177 limitations in their own cognitive architectures.
179 - kill with fire :: guy A fires fire blast, with a spell circle to
180 maintain the magic. Opponent B just GRABS the magic and pulls MORE
181 fire. Guy A's circle goes out of control and all his life force
182 gets sucked out to supply more fire. B grabs the magic, crushes
183 it, fires a concentrated red lightning bolt, and eats the
184 rest. "You think that you can kill me, WITH FIRE!?"
186 - magic ekiga ::
188 - edible crayons ::
190 - library chaining ::
192 - hypnosis + that drug that makes you loose continuity :: can the
193 hypnosos plant things during this time?
195 - forgotten services :: use "ovbilion" somehow. Some sleeping drugs
196 make you forget the hour or so before you go to bed. Use this to
197 create forgotten services.
199 - dibenzelene -- mike darwin ::
201 - sleepy perfusion :: if brains naturally expand / contract depending
202 on resting / awake state, we should investigate the EMs of brains
203 fixed during "sleep" mode and those fixed during "awake"
204 mode. (while still using anesthetic of course).
206 - shit flavored dog treats :: because dogs would probably like them.
208 - fume hood incense :: so make sure the fume hood is working
210 - infinity coin :: s.f. concept -- billions are uploaded by using
211 osmium as a "mind uploading catalyst". osmium is put ino the
212 brain, they brain is scanned, and the osmium is recycled. Then
213 you make coins out of the osmium that has gone through billions
214 of these cycles.
216 - mamilian dive reflex as a method of preparing organs for cryopreservation ::
218 - spinal encryption :: like an X server, except your body parts each
219 run these servers. You all have clocks, and you have to sign your
220 muscle commands with your private key in order to control your
221 body.
223 - suicide note as a mental excercise :: from NPR, ted talk, teenagers, etc.
225 - microscope clamp magnet ring thing ::
227 - cup that fills from the bottom ::
229 - pronouncaeble liscense plates ::
231 - instant-awake vs natural awakening :: cognitive behavioural
232 difference tells you important things about the waking process.
234 - asethetics and personal identity :: if you go to germany, you're not
235 the same person anymore.
237 - arch linux diff cache :: should only download differences between
238 the new package and the most rcent archive file. Can
239 precalculate. Would make mirrors/upgrading so much faster.
241 - low gravity perfusion :: then you can use cappaliary action. From
242 this: http://www.wired.com/2015/01/coffee-cup-designed-let-astronauts-sip-espresso-space/
244 - rational advertiting :: a new criteria for advertisting -- given
245 same ad structure for two different produces, what structure
246 leads to the most people picking the "optimal" choice.
248 - autoclone bootstrapping :: to breed male with self: you make a clone
249 of the male that's broken, male and female, the bootstrap with
250 those gametes
252 - position independent numbers :: like latin for numbers. You'd use
253 color, endings, relative size, etc to determine what place the
254 number has. Very convientnt for order or magnitude calculations.
256 - dead man switch activated linux user account ::
258 - embowlement :: condencending reference to embodiment
260 - water staff :: drinksy walking staff w/ water
262 - melanin transfection ::
264 - retention of neurotransmitters / other small molecules during fixation by use of an extracellular polymer such as PVP ::
266 - machines :: Knowing we are machines does not diminish us; instead it
267 opens our minds to the awe-inspiring complexity that is the human
268 mind. Those who prefer to attribute consciousness to a "soul" or
269 other metaphysical process are the ones who diminish man to a
270 mere cartoon caricature.
272 - why does glut change osmotic setpoints in cells :: perhaps either 1)
273 It makes the membrane permeable to small molecules or 2)
274 crosslinking proteins means less colagative effects.
276 - Hemocyanin based blood washout solution :: for artificial blood, it
277 can be hard to carry enough oxygen because haemoglobin needs to
278 be in RBCs in order to effectively carry oxygen. However,
279 hemocyanin, a copper based oxygen carrying protein, doesn't have
280 this restriction, so it might make particurally good artificial
281 blood. Might also be great for making oxygenated fixative
282 solutions! In fact, hemocyanin is more efficient than hemoglobin
283 for carrying oxygen at low temperatures, perfect for
284 cooling/blood washout! Hemocyanin could also serve to establish
285 oncotic pressure in a blood washout solution since it weighs 75
286 kilodaltons.
288 - osmotic buffer :: polymer which polymerizes / splits apart in order
289 to maintain the osmolality of a solution.
291 - shoes w/ embedded computers :: and have little clickey things you
292 operate with your big toe.
294 - gb codec ::
296 - ultrasonic cell disruptor to make foor ::
298 - particle accelarator asd an awesome electron microscop ::
300 - tolouadine blue pen :: use biological stains as dyes for ink pens?
302 - clock stop explination :: you have a "visual buffer" which needs to
303 fill up whenever you switch out from one scene to another. This
304 is the clock stop illusion.
306 - coffee ad space :: Your coffee stock was brought to you by google,
307 the only company that brings you comfort and love in your harsh
308 and heartless corporate world. This is majestic guerrila
309 marketing.
311 - geo-synchro browsing :: you get a bunch of proxy servers, and then
312 you visit websites and synchronize the views from each of these
313 proxies into one view. Then you can see the differences by
314 conutry/region. This is a way to experience the "neutral"
315 internet by averging the effects of ip-tracing.
317 - periodic table of genders :: arrange people by bahaviour, particular
318 what sort of bonds they can form with other people.
320 - ice cream protein synthesis ::
322 - colored EM :: different heavy metals might possibly have different
323 intensities for different electron acceleration voltages. So this
324 could be the basis for colored EM images!
326 - expansion microscopy dual :: this would be a process where you
327 define a molecular scale object using larger microscopic
328 components. Then nanotechnology goes through and replaces each
329 "atomic macro block" with the appropriate atomic construct. That
330 way you can use microscopic 3D printing and a special purpose
331 form of nanotechnolical assembler to create any molecular
332 arrangement.
334 - anoxic glut :: what happens when you try to fix tissues in an
335 environment completely devoid of oxygen?
337 - copper+EG :: if RBCs are rendered impermeabale to EG when Cu is
338 present, then maybe you can destroy RBCs by a mixture of EG and
339 Cu?
341 - qualia intuition explained :: let's say that you lacked the sense of
342 smell. How could you learn what "acrid" means without it. How
343 could you explain it to someone, without analogy to other
344 smells. We mind-project this real linguistic separation into
345 reality and get qualia.
347 - spinal relay :: you have a small air-gapped repeater built into your
348 spine in order to help with spinal injury, connect with
349 prosthetics, and to monitor/control your body. Also, you could
350 add the ability to save "macros"!
352 - human cysts :: there should be communities of people with varying
353 enforced separations from the rest of society in order to gaurd
354 against various catastrophies.
356 - bioelectric synthesis :: have a device which stores a lot of energy,
357 and processes blood by creating sugar from waste produces over
358 the day. You still need water, vitamins, minerals, etc, but this
359 can handle the bulk of your energy demands and be recharged from
360 the wall.
362 - chelation as a method to improve cryoprotectant permeability ::
364 - transgender fruit analogy :: like tomatoes
366 - video game controllers as actual controllers :: console controlers
367 like the n64 trident are excellent, durable tools for fine
368 control. We should use them to control all sorts of things like
369 robots by default. You should use it for your projects, since
370 it's unlikely you'll be able to come up with something
371 better. Compared to console controllers, the ones we use for
372 robots/RC stuff are hopelessly clunky.
374 - bubble computers :: bubble duality, bubble computing
376 - dark blood bag :: blood bags in hospitals should be dark colored to
377 protect the blood from damage from light.
379 - chimeric homozygous sex chromosomes :: chimeric organism with XX and
380 XX patterns from two males and two females. On average, it has
381 the correct methylation pattern. Would it work?
383 - horseshoe blood fixative :: would it work as a washout?
385 - fixed protein packets :: group of fixed proteins in a network which
386 is used as medicine. Hemoglovin, maybe?
388 - prove hauntings :: website where you enter your pgp signed encrypted
389 file and swear by all the gods that you'll haunt me with the
390 password when you die, along with whatever other messages you
391 have. protocol -- I video, throw rock, get password.
393 - earth air water :: species name their planet "dirt" in their
394 language, unless the're aquatic or flying, then they'd name it
395 "water" and "air" respectively.
397 - ethylene glycol alt name :: icebane
399 - overflow hiaku :: a hiku about buffer overflos, with garbage C code
400 inside.
402 - white knight :: his sword is named "Privledge" (an inherited family
403 sword) he rides along the land, defending the code of
404 chivralirary and keeping the orthodozy of society from fading
405 from the realm.
407 - technological deflation :: even the richest robber baron from the
408 1920's could not afford a cardiac bypass surgery, even with
409 literally all the money they had. As technology advances, the
410 price of bread may go up, but the capabilities which money gives
411 you also dramatically increase.
413 - cure for color blindness :: could it be possible to administer some
414 retroviruses via direct injection to the retina, to cause some of
415 the cells in the retina to begin expressing different color
416 pigments? The brain ought to easily sort out the rest and enable
417 color vision. Furthremore, could we add some more colors to
418 baesline human eyes? Theory -- people who are color blind have
419 better color spatial accuity for the colors they can see, because
420 this it the tradeoff here involved with the retrovirus
421 therapy. Re-purposing color detectors to see new colors at the
422 expense of spatial acuity for the old set of colors.
424 - mental integrity test :: if your brain starts to decay, you might
425 not notice the damage until it's too late. This would be a mental
426 integrity test that you take every few weeks that measures your
427 performance and compares it to a baseline. The tests are all
428 designed to catch the early signs of degenerative brain
429 diseases. For example, you might use performamce on a
430 smell-memory assoaction test to detect early-onset Alzheimer's.
432 - mind bank :: (in contrast to "brain bank")
434 - Passion of the Christ missed opportunity :: in the Passion of the
435 Christ, they do the entire show using Latin, Aramaic, etc, with
436 subtitles. They should have had a part where Jesus does the
437 sermon on the mount, he turns to the camera, and starts speaking
438 in English, with no subtitles. It would have been 1.) biblically
439 accurate and 2.) awesome. It would have been such a powerful
440 example of Jesus' divinity, and it felt like they were setting up
441 for it the entire movie, and they missed it!
443 - scientist online paper reviews ::
445 - binary feedback ::
447 - xenobiotic methalation rewriting ::
449 - trolley cryonics :: change the cryonics protocol around so that the
450 death occurs in a non-primary action loop.
452 - binary metric :: you make up new unit names for "2 centimeters", "4
453 centimeters", "16 centimeters", etc. Then no one will be happy!
454 BUT, it helps solve metric's problem of intermediate units. (a
455 centimeter is too small, a meter is too large!)
457 - physical pgp signatures :: someone should put together the
458 technologies so that you can digitally sign actual pieces of
459 paper -- some combination of signing a photograph of the
460 contract using pgp, printing a barcode or OR code on the page
461 which links to a website with the signed image, and a web of
462 trust model so that people can authenticate as themselves. All
463 this totally exists already, it's just not convienent.
465 - meta eye :: you wire in a third optical input to the human brain,
466 but it doesn't tranduce light form the real world, bus instead is
467 connected to the "internet of things" and shows you metadata
468 about things you are looking at // serves as an interface to your
469 own mind and body. Then eventually simply real things without
470 metadata seem flat and fake compared to the objects in cities and
471 other annotated areas. This third eye doesn't occupy any of your
472 normal visual field but actually EXPANDS your visual field.
474 - do it once -- upload ::
476 - a simple merge procedure for uploads ::
478 - limits of monogamy ::
480 - dream rewinding :: how to record a complete dream without disturbing
481 it or modifying your brain? you need to be an upload: split
482 yourself, and one of you stays awake whike the other sleeps. then
483 you detect a dream in progress by monotoring rapid eye movememt
484 in your sleeping self, and you wake yourself up every few minutes
485 and tell yoursef about the dream. Then sleeping-your restarts the
486 dream, continuation passing style, forgetting everything that was
487 just said, and you repeat this process until the dream is
488 over. Then awake-you and sleeping-you merge each other by taking
489 sleeping-you and replaying the memories of awake-you, and you
490 write a final report on the dream using the "saccade" reports to
491 jog your memory.
493 - denser than osmium :: do the "misicibility" thing with an osmium
494 alloy to get something even more dense.
496 - AI hypnosis :: hypnosis might be good for studying AI, becuse it
497 might probide a "debugger" for ananlyzing the human mind. I
498 briefly tried this while at MIT, but it needs MUCH more work to
499 be properly evaulated.
501 - becomming alive :: upload faces challenges to grow into they type of
502 person that can join the greater society -- a god. They have to
503 go though quests that replicate all the things that humanity had
504 to accomplish, like going to the moon, by themselves, in a
505 virtual world where they cannot die and never get tired.
507 - population distorted map of USA :: to see states sizes in terms of #
508 of people. (already exists!
509 http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cart/doc/)
511 - butterfly drone :: if big butterflies used to exist, then maybe we
512 could make butterfly-inspired drones!
514 - methylation sex symmetry breaking :: So, human cells have
515 methylation patterns that encode male/female origin. If you
516 combine two male patterns, the fetus grows "too fast" and
517 dies. Two female patterns causes the fetus to enter a "vegatable"
518 state and fail to develop. Evolutionary biologists will say that
519 this reflects the asymmetry of energy investement for creating
520 offspring. If that's true, then species that cast-spawn will lack
521 this symmetry, and give clues about how to remove it in
522 humans. If even cast spawners like sea urchins have it, then that
523 means there's something deeper going on!
525 - reverse cannulation perfusion :: you put the organ you want to
526 perfuse in an airtight chamber with a pool of the stuff you want
527 to perfuse. You cannulate some veins and lead tubes form to
528 outside of the chamber. You pump in air and perfusate, and the
529 increasing air pressure in the chamber forces perfusate through
530 the organ. For times when you don't want to cannulate the inputs
531 -- they can be ragged, or there can be many of them. You still
532 have to guide the veins to the outside of the chamber, but
533 depending on the use case this might be far easier than
534 tradational cannulation.
536 - very slow physiological pressure perfusion :: less extreme example
537 of the "pausing" trick -- just keep the perfusion running and
538 don't put the perfusion target into the liquid as deep.
540 - whole brain perfusion embedding :: Do the standard EM embedding
541 protocol, but skip the osmium step, and use the "perfusion
542 pausing" method to prevent overextraction during the dehydration
543 and embedding steps. I think that you CAN perfuse resins into the
544 brain, simply because you CAN perfuse viscous rubber when doing
545 vascular casts.
547 - perfusion pausing :: (Turns out this won't actually work!) One
548 problem with doing perfusion is that if you STOP the perfusion,
549 you rapidly loose pressure in the organ as your perfusate leaks
550 out. You can prevent this by submerging the organ/head/rat
551 whatever in FLUID at the appropriate level. Use something inert
552 like flurocarbon to avoid problems. You would have to slowly
553 decrease the flow rate while simultaneously lowering the
554 perfusing object into the fluid. To start again, reverse the
555 process -- reengage the peristaltic pump slowly while removing
556 the organ from the fluid.
558 - evoultionary textbook mimiricy :: as surgery becomes more common,
559 there develops a distinct selective pressure for individuals
560 organ layout to look more like the medical textbooks! :P
562 - transparent skin :: temporary / permament transparent skin. Allows
563 for examination of organs / muscles and visual prevention of
564 disease and detection or abnormalities / good things
565 eg. excercise.
567 - sweet information :: candy with a whole book written in it. Eat a
568 book!
570 - targeted immunosuppressant :: just kill off the B-cells and friends
571 that would cause problems in a organ-transplant / other
572 situation. AIDS is good at killing these cells -- maybe make it
573 just target the ones that will cause problems. Then you can
574 premptively kill off that part of someone's immune system before
575 a transplant. ALSO, you can kill off everyone's defenses against
576 other blood types and make people effectively type AB+ w.r.t
577 blood transfusions. Actually, why not give babies this treatment
578 so that they're automatically compatable with all blood types?
579 The immune system has this already when it's first growing; maybe
580 it can be "retrained" to accept new things, or the mechanism of
581 immune cell death be co-opted for these purposes.
583 - fuck you tetris :: tetris that actively gives you the worst possible piece.
585 - pockets :: more things should have them!
587 - colored shower head :: a shower head add on that measures the temp
588 of the water and changes the color of the water streams w/ an LED
589 to show you the temperature. That way you can align to the color
590 you want and see the temperature without feeling it.
592 - giant dragonflies :: we could rapidly MAKE giant dragonflies by
593 evolving modern dragonflies in an very oxygen rich environment!
595 - anesthetic surgery courtesty video :: as a matter of courtesy,
596 whenever you go under anesthetic, the doctors should provide you
597 with a video of the surgery / recovery after you are concious
598 again. The recording should begin about 3 minutes before
599 anesthetic, and continue until both you and the docor agree to
600 stop recording, or you leave the hospital.
602 - whirlpool of light :: shine a laser out into space. But the planet
603 is spinning! What you get is a spiral or light! And as this
604 signal expands, does it eventually reveal it's wuantized nature?
606 - perfusion coking :: EOM
608 - timestamp verification :: you sign your message, and it has a
609 timestamp at the top, with a +- percision number. Then you send
610 it over to the public timestamp server, which only signs the
611 message if it gets the message within the timestamp window. Or
612 the computer just signs the message but puts a timestamp at the
613 beginning. So if everyone trusts the timestamp server, you can
614 get reliable timestamps, and prove priority on ideas, etc.
616 - the great computing slow-down :: in general, our computers are
617 getting faster and faster. However, eventually our brains will be
618 made of the same stuff our computers are made of! This has very
619 interesting consequences -- I can add 2+2 and get four in about a
620 second. Since my neurons actually work at around 10-60 hertz in
621 parallel, this means that it takes me around 10-30 operations to
622 do this addition. That's actually not bad in terms of computing
623 time. If my neurons were as fast as the latest transitors, then
624 most calculators would be SLOWER than me at adding numbers. Only
625 the newest, most optimized calculators would be faster, and then
626 only about 10 times faster! This means that once we begin to
627 think at the speed of our technology, that technology will
628 suddenly seem pitifully slow in comparison to how it seems
629 now. And no amount of technical progress will remedy it, because
630 that same progress will also make us all think faster. We'll
631 either have to settle with living in "slow time" to do some
632 computations, or learn to make smarter hardware with special
633 optimizations. But this is actually really hard, because we'll be
634 working with machines that will appear to us about as fast as
635 MECHANICAL computers. So, in the future, all the cool parties
636 will be in cyperspace at vastly accelerated speeds compared to
637 how we exist now. But at these parties, the computers will SUCK!
638 Of course, this is one of the few things that can save us from AI
639 risk, because those AI's won't seem so scary when the're build
640 out of rickety mechanical parts form our perspective.
642 - unitary reverse evolution of chaos+minds :: Chaotic systems diverge
643 exponentially in state space. Do you get anything interesting
644 when part of the physical system associated with the chaotic
645 system is a object that performs some sort of computation? Is it
646 possible for the computational system to play a
647 percision-enabling role in determining the final/initial
648 conditions of the chaotic system, just by tracing out thoughts in
649 its decision paths? This is probably too vague of an idea right
650 now, I just wanted to write it down.
652 - microwave time :: the cooking time you enter on most microwaves is
653 insane. It's expressed in what I call a "hybrid base", a
654 combination of base 10 and base 60. You can get absurd things
655 like 100 < 61, and 120 == 80! I wonder if these hybrid base
656 systems could be very useful for some purposes!
658 - three-eyes :: if you had three eyes, would you still draw cubes like
659 we currently draw them? Or would all 2D-representations of 3D
660 space always look hopelessly fake?
662 - visual taste/smell assay :: get a grid of bacteria, each expressing
663 a human taste/smell receptor linked to some sort of fluorscent
664 activity or ion pump. Use a camera / electrical grid to transduce
665 the smell / taste signal into bits!
667 - carabiner mushroom lock :: you can take a trapazodial carabiner and
668 make it so that a chain link is caught between the wide end of
669 the carabiner and another chain attached to the carabiner.
671 - children's tool shop :: I think that kids should be provided with
672 tool shops -- these would be nice sheds with a good collection of
673 tools to do various things -- circuit components and soldering
674 irons, wires, a small lathe, drill press, belt sander, a
675 centrifuge, microscope, and telescope, etc. The idea is that the
676 kid can now think, "I could use X to do this thing that I'm
677 thinking about" -- the building becomes an extension of the kid's
678 body & mind.
680 - fluid display :: like the previous idea about matching refractances
681 between glass and liquid, except you make a lot of
682 switchable glass tubes in various patterns in the
683 glass, and actively pump colored liquid through the
684 tubes (the tubes have glass-like fluid in them by
685 default.) The result is that you can cause the
686 tubes to appear and dissappear, and vary their
687 colors as well!
689 - immunoincompatibility :: take the human genome, and refactor it so
690 that it doesn't use a particular codon at all. Then remove the
691 support from our ribosomes for that codon. What does this do for
692 us? It makes us immune to almost all viruses!
694 - life cycle :: it's called a cycle, right? So, the thing that repeats
695 itself over and over, right? Not much of a cycle if
696 you don't come back after you die, if you ask me!
698 - car with no blind spots :: use some cameras in the back of the car
699 to augment the rear-view mirror so that you never have to turn
700 around in order to lane change.
702 - partial cell death :: you freeze a set of cells using some cryo
703 protocol and 60% survive. How can this be explained? It seems to
704 me that if the cells are the same, and the conditions
705 homogoneous, then all the cells should either die or
706 live. However, suppose that there is a metabolic cycle that needs
707 to be in a certain phase for the cell to survive. If the cells
708 are asynchronous, then you might end up with some cells dying
709 because there were in the wrong part of their cycle. This implies
710 that you might be able to cryoprotect cells by causing them to
711 enter a certain metabolic mode before freezing.
713 - cryonics color appeal :: perfusate used by cryonics companies should
714 have red food coloring in it. It's just a nice touch so that the
715 cryonics patient looks more life-like than with clear CPAs, and
716 hopefully might get treated with more respect.
718 - paramagnetic CPA :: you take a CPA that can be influenced by
719 magnetic fields so that its degrees of freedom are limited. Then,
720 you release the field, instantaly increasing the size of the
721 state space of the system and dramatically decreasing the
722 temperature enough to plunge the system past homogenous
723 nucleation temperature and directly to the glass transition
724 temperature, creating a doubly unstable glass at much lower CPA
725 concentrations than possible at conventional CPA concentrations.
727 - room temp noodles :: how does the physics of cooking noodles work?
728 Could you use a vacuum instead of heat to force water into the
729 noodle?
731 - personal carbon offset :: feel bad about contribuiting to global
732 warming by using electricity / driving a car? Forget trying to
733 "conserve" or "minimize your carbon footprint". Follow the
734 Platinum rule -- make the world BETTER off than you found it!
735 This would be a small, self contained system that sucks C02 out
736 of the air. It uses electricity, but it's so efficient at
737 removing CO2 that it more than offsets the CO2 produced by even a
738 coal plant to produce that electricity. This way, you can still
739 drive even a gas guzzler, but have a net negative carbon
740 footprint! Maybe something cool could be done with the carbon as
741 well. Use as much electricity as you want, but negate the damage
742 to the enviroment with more technology.
744 - undoing spermogenesis :: with enough sperm, you can derive the
745 donor's entire genome. You gain more confidence in the alleles
746 for a particular gene the more sperm you have. Each additional
747 sperm gives you the same sort of information you'd get flipping a
748 coin and trying to decide whether the coin is H/T of H/H. Is
749 there enough sperm in the the average load for you to be as
750 confident as mitosis?
752 - mars life :: we could engineer life that could survive on mars
753 (probably some non-vascular photosynthetic
754 poikilohydric creature like a lichen) by taking an
755 extremophile from Antarctica and evolving it in
756 increasingly Martian conditions. This could be an easy
757 start to a terraforming process.
759 - problem with Aubrey de Grey's ideas :: Aubrey de Grey says that we
760 might be able to live forever by continually repairing our bodies
761 at the cellular level -- he details 7 different mechanisms of
762 damage and says that if all of them are dealt with /together/
763 that it would stop aging. (You can't miss even one because
764 they're all fatal.) However, it doesn't take into account that
765 we are also beings of information and that there is a very real
766 software component to our existence. Even if our biological
767 chassies can be maintained forever, I think it is unlikely that
768 our minds will operate well far outside of the design constraints
769 that we've evolved to handle. Say I programmed a webserver with
770 the express goal of it being able to serve webpages for month on
771 some stock server. I'll do fairly rigorous testing to make sure
772 that it can handle the expected load then then some. Now say that
773 you want to keep a particular instance of this webserver running
774 indefinitely. (The program instance is like your mind and the
775 computer it's running on is like your body). You might very well
776 be able to keep the physical computer infrastructure running for
777 forever by replacing hard drives / ram / CPUs, etc. However,
778 since I designed the webserver to work for a month, it probably
779 has memory leaks, rare stochastic bugs, or other built in limits
780 / constraints (think log files or some date rollover shenanigans)
781 that will ultimately kill the webserver even with eternally
782 perfect hardware. Do you really expect that a webserver
783 engineered to work for 1 month will run for 10 years without
784 catastrophically crashing? Not even Apache can do this! In fact,
785 if I put in the extreme effort to make it that robust, I've
786 wasted time that I could have spent on other projects by pursuing
787 an unnecessary engineering goal. Likewise, human minds have only
788 ever run for at most 122 years before they are destroyed due to
789 hardware degradation. Fixing the hardware doesn't change any
790 software bugs that are almost certainly present in the human
791 mind. Think of all the pathological things that can go wrong with
792 a webserver, multiply it by a million, and that likely how
793 evolution has designed our minds. For example, consider memory :
794 why should you expect that we have evolved the ability to
795 coherently organize memories past say 150 years? There's been
796 absolutely no selective pressure for this ability, so you can bet
797 that if there's any fitness to be gained from not having
798 unlimited memory potential (such as better metabolic efficiency),
799 we have it! You might think that maybe we would just forget
800 things the same way that we sort of forget things that happen
801 earlier in our lives, but complicated information processing
802 systems don't have to fail gracefully when they're pushed far
803 past their design constraints. A 150 year old person is just as
804 likely to suffer a catastrophic psychosis due to software
805 limitations associated with memory as he is to do something with
806 all those memories we might consider reasonable. More likely, in
807 fact, since there are so very many ways for a complicated
808 software system to break and so few ways for it to run
809 successfully. Therefore, I think Aubrey de Grey's "hardware-only"
810 approach is missing a very important component of longevity
811 science, and any successful effort to make people live orders of
812 magnitude longer than they do naturally will need to deal with
813 people's software as well as their hardware.
815 - validating neurocryopreservation :: Problem : you want to test
816 whether a brain is functionally preserved through vitrification,
817 but you don't want to figure out how to preserve all the other
818 organs in the animal. It might be possible to keep the rest of
819 the body at almost 0C and vitrify just the head for only a few
820 minutes. Induce hypothermia, then separate out the head's blood
821 supply from the rest of the body, then just cryoptotect and
822 vitrify the head. Might need some sort of thermal guard to keep
823 the outer head / neck from becoming too cold. You leave the
824 spinal cord intact! Then you devitrify to 0C, remove
825 cryoprotectant, and then reattach the blood supply. You can
826 determine brain preservation using behavioral assays!
828 - freezing water purifier :: you slowly freeze water, but also run
829 liquid water over the frozen mass. This takes away basically all
830 impurities and creates "washed ice" then you melt the ice. Maybe
831 you could re-use the heat from creating the ice to melt the ice?
833 - ultra strength :: allow a person to visualize their muscle
834 recruitment patterns. Give them adrenaline and let
835 them feel what it's like to have the normal limits
836 removed. See if they can replicate the effects.
838 - phone names :: make a PX record for domain names that's like the MX
839 record, except that it is a phone number instead of
840 an IP address. That way, you can use the domain name
841 registration system to provide names for phone
842 numbers. Then, as long as you control the domain, you
843 can point people to your current phone number by
844 updating that record.
846 - edible flowers :: Edible white flowers that you put in a colored
847 solution with flavor. When the flower turns the
848 right color, it is also flavored and ready to eat!
850 - suicide cryonics :: according to [[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06suicide-t.html][this]], people who commit impulsive
851 suicides have a newfound sense of the importance of life. Perhaps
852 they are good cryonics targets.
854 - lead bone :: Could you fill in all the empty spaces in a bone with
855 lead? Might be cool.
857 - the quest for life :: Every stupid story has the "immortal who
858 wants to become mortal" or some other such idea. I want to story
859 where the protagonist loses their immortality and feels /angry/
860 and ashamed about losing something that's so absolutely crucial
861 to their identity. A reverse of "death makes life worth living",
862 they feel that living forever is what makes life worth
863 living. Now they've "lost their sunrise" or their "connection to
864 the timeless universe" or something. So they go on a quest to get
865 it back, learning about themselves along the way, and regaining
866 the precious thing they lost in the beginning.
868 - world-map :: take a small table and paint the continents in
869 toothpaste on the table. Make a slightly raised barrier
870 around the table. Slowly pour water onto the table, and
871 it will form the oceans!
873 - stage magic rituals :: rituals should incorporate elements of stage
874 magic. Foe example in Teller's tempest, they have a scene where
875 they levitate a crown in front of someone, then put it on his
876 head. They also have a wedding ceremony where they levitated the
877 bride as well. Actual weddings and other ceremonies should
878 incorporate stage magic as an enhancement.
880 - isotope time dilation :: use a cyclotron to speed up rare isotopes
881 developed in nuclear fusion experiments. The relativistic time
882 dilation will stop the isotopes from decaying, and allow time to
883 study them. This is based on radioactive isotopes that fall
884 through the earth's atmosphere that take hundreds of times
885 longer to decay than normal.
887 - marsupial stimulation :: You take a freshly pouched marsupial baby,
888 and show it videos and other interactive things while it matures
889 in the pouch. What mental effects would this have?
891 - dynamic re-keying :: Some older ways of tuning instruments sound
892 better, but we use the even-tempered scale today because it makes
893 it easier to switch keys. With electronic music, why not make
894 key-annotations and dynamically re-tune the piece to sound good
895 in the current key? Could be done as a midi+annotation -> midi
896 compiler for experimentation.
898 - death always implies damage :: is is possible for a corpse to differ
899 from a living person only in the fact that one is dead and the
900 other is alive? NO! A corpse must always have some sort of
901 molecular damage which causes the loss of function!
903 - inner eye :: Surgically install a bunch of tiny cameras inside a
904 person. Then, you can activate them all and get a
905 picture of your internal organs for diagnostic
906 purposes.
908 - chaos rails :: should make a visualization of the homoclinic tangle,
909 it's truly beautiful.
911 - context gobbler :: this would be in "inside-out macro" that takes
912 the context (like you use for things like error, continuations,
913 and friends) and transforms it to something else. Maybe useful?
915 - cryonics middle ages :: some people say that cryonics is an
916 experiment and that it is foolish to wait until we have revived a
917 human. There is a middle ground where the procedure has a dismal
918 success rate on humans, say 1 in 20, so that you'd be a fool to
919 try revival. Nonetheless, this very risky procedure could be the
920 legal proof of concept needed to create a new class of life
921 between "living" and "dead": "stasis".
923 - philosophy of the mirror :: neat thought experiment -- if you take a
924 mirror of someone by actually reversing a person's chirality
925 molecule by molecule, then will the only be able to read mirror
926 writing? The answer is yes, by analogy to a purely mechanical
927 scan-tron device. This is one of the only interesting transforms I
928 know that can take a human brain and change it in subtle,
929 non-destructive ways. It's also an argument against dualism.
931 - biosphere in a bottle :: There are around 15 million species. 15
932 million stem cells will fill only a tiny size, far less than a cubic
933 inch. Preserve a single cell from every species on earth in this
934 small space, and you will have a record of our current biosphere
935 that can be protected. "Hold the genetic data of all species in
936 your hand!"
938 - chaos lock :: The "arrow of time" points in the direction of
939 increasing entropy. The time evolution of chaotic
940 systems depend exquisitely on their initial state. If
941 you take a measurement of a chaotic system at any
942 given point of time, you can evolve that system
943 backwards or forwards based on your measurement. So
944 let's say you start the chaotic system in a VERY low
945 entropy state, then let it run for a while, then take
946 a measurement with some uncertainty. Your
947 measurement is pretty good, but obviously not
948 PERFECT. If you evolve the chaotic system back in
949 time, then you will see that you don't really reach
950 a state with low entropy an hour before (the entropy
951 is easy to measure with surrogates like alignment,
952 etc). So use this technique to SEARCH for a more
953 accurate measurement! This potentially can give you
954 many more orders of magnitude than you could get alone
955 just using an instrument. Sometimes it will give you
956 bad results, the the odds of it doing that are
957 infinitesimal, and you can just measure a couple of
958 times.
960 - cryo-evolution :: perhaps there would be a way to rapidly evolve a
961 symbiotic bacterial organism that could protect
962 human tissues from freezing damage.
964 - suicide parasite :: sometimes, people kill themselves for no good
965 reason. We often explain this with things like "hidden
966 depression" or we say that they had something like chronic jaw or
967 back pain. I think that smells of rationalization. I don't buy
968 it. I propose that in many suicide cases there is a disease that
969 causes the suicidal behavior. We already know that certain
970 parasites have mind-bending properties in other animals, even
971 mammals like mice. It's not much of a stretch to imagine a
972 parasite that causes suicides in humans. Some problems:
973 - What does the suicide parasite get out of it? :: This might be
974 answered by the whole thing being a glitch caused by
975 cross-species contamination. Toxoplasma works this way.
976 - What predictions does a disease model make :: suicide should
977 be more common among people who share a contagion
978 vector. There should be suicides that don't make any
979 sense : people who weren't really depressed, who had no
980 reason to kill themselves. People who have killed themselves
981 should have a higher incidence of some unknown parasite in
982 their brains.
984 - domestic insects :: People should eat more bugs because they're much
985 more efficient, so why not do some major domestication research
986 to make very appealing bugs? Beetles, in particular, seem to be
987 excellent targets for domestication because they have extreme
988 levels of genetic malleability.
990 - birth-clones :: What if each person was intentionally split at birth
991 into a normal embryo and a few "backup" cells which
992 is then frozen. The backup cells are created just
993 the same way as natural identical twins. The backups
994 can be used to regenerate organs. etc. Also, it
995 would be a good sci fi concept, because you could
996 have a culture where people reward people who were
997 especially awesome are "reborn" from their
998 backups. Imagine having a young Bach every
999 generation, etc.
1001 - pronunciation guide :: a simple webpage where you type in a word and
1002 it returns a simple, English sentence describing exactly how to
1003 pronounce the word. For people who don't want to learn IPA.
1005 - cortex-search :: use the repertoire of actions learned to limit the
1006 search space of possible actions.
1008 - learning to teleport :: scifi idea, this is a story about a person
1009 who is struggling with his/her society's ideas about
1010 teleportation. It's considered a fundamental part of being a
1011 member of that society (after all, the difference between animals
1012 and humans is that humans are creatures of pure information while
1013 animals are burdened with base matter, "that's how you travel the
1014 stars, etc") Humans are born normally, grow up, and then
1015 eventually transcend via destructive upload. Analogies to jumping
1016 off a diving board into a pool (which I simply /could not do/ for
1017 a long time), etc.
1019 - no-float-ice :: cup that has cross beams at the bottom where ice
1020 forms. Then when you drink liquid from the glass,
1021 the ice stays at the bottom and doesn't hit your
1022 lips. For bars and fancy things.
1024 - bitcoins for immigrants :: A common case with Mexican immigrants
1025 (illegal or not) is that they want to send money they've earned
1026 in the US back to their families in Mexico. They currently do this
1027 through things like Money Gram or Western Union, and they get
1028 fleeced in the process with fees. Bitcoin could greatly reduce
1029 the cost of sending money from America to Mexico, but I don't
1030 believe that it's currently used for that among Mexican
1031 immigrants currently due to lack of knowledge. I bet you could
1032 set up physical locations like those obnoxious Western Union huts
1033 in places like Texas, Arizona, etc, and greatly undercut
1034 them. Or, perhaps some educational seminars about bitcoin might
1035 be in order. There's some money to be made there because there is
1036 great demand, and it's a good thing to boot!
1038 - reverse eye-tracking :: A painting that is actually a digital screen
1039 with a camera. It records people's eye tracks permanently. It's
1040 "artistic" because paintings are normally these things that you
1041 look at without changing, but this one is changed the second you
1042 look at it, recording where /you/ looked forever for others to
1043 see. Make it be a painting of a woman and see the trolling as the
1044 breasts and groin area light up with interest from all the males
1045 passing by.
1047 - smart toilets :: Instead of using indirect measures like infrared
1048 detectors of the presence of a person, use computer
1049 vision to directly measure whether the toilet needs
1050 to be flushed. I think a lot of things will end up
1051 going this way as we get better computer vision.
1053 - validate chemopreservation :: chemopreservation is difficult to
1054 validate because it destroys the functionality of a brain, and
1055 brain simulation will take a long time to mature as a
1056 technology. However, one very powerful way to validate
1057 chemopreservation would be to have a person/animal learn
1058 something with high complexity such as a number or the solution
1059 to a maze, or a flashbulb memory. Then you preserve their brain
1060 chemically, slice it up, and read /that specific memory/ from the
1061 detailed brain scan. Much more difficult, but much more doable.
1063 - candy screw :: edible candy screw with candy nuts that you can screw
1064 as well.
1066 - better bibliography :: when writing a thesis or paper, have the
1067 bibliography not just be an opaque list of resources, but have it
1068 be a list of /summaries/ and /qualities/ that each paper has in
1069 the context of the paper being written. When examining a
1070 bibliography, I want to know if reading the papers in the
1071 bibliography are worth my time, and I also am probably also
1072 interested in exactly the things that are being discussed in the
1073 paper I'm reading. The bibliography is the perfect place to
1074 provide information about the referenced papers from the
1075 author's perspective. I will use this biographic form in my own
1076 thesis.
1078 - digital inter-library loan :: libraries at universities already do
1079 inter-library loans for books, so why not do the same for access
1080 to stupid paywalled digital papers? All the universities could
1081 allow access to articles for registered students to all the files
1082 available through any participating university. This could be
1083 achieved by sending requests through proxies at participating
1084 universities. Each university would decide who at the university
1085 can access the proxy network. Access to the proxy network could
1086 be made easy using something like http://libx.org/.
1088 - chess visual :: to show the vast size of the game trees considered
1089 by computers, show two people playing chess in a
1090 void. They are floating in space, and there is a
1091 simple chess board between them. Then, as they play,
1092 the game tree's they are considering are drawn
1093 behind him. The root of the tree starts centered in
1094 their heads or whatever they use to think, and the
1095 tree grows out from behind, never crossing the
1096 dividing plane between the two players. Each
1097 player's tree is a different color. As they grow,
1098 there are animations for pruning, etc. Eventually,
1099 they look like the hemispheres of a brain, wings,
1100 etc. A human's tree might occasionally have a long
1101 chain, while the computer tree would be more
1102 uniform. You could compare deep blue and a modern
1103 laptop. Use actual data when fighting two computers!
1105 - time verification :: some standard way to verify that some piece of
1106 data was recorded at a specific time. Might involve a time
1107 server, a key for each time period, something like that.
1109 - tamper proof gold bars :: [[http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/gold-plated-tungsten-alloy-bar.html][this site]] offers gold plated tungsten bars
1110 as "novelty" items. One reason to prefer coins is because they
1111 are much harder to counterfeit because there is less surface area
1112 to mass ratio. However, gold bars are still a great design
1113 because they can hold a lot of value in a small space. A gold bar
1114 could be given the same protections (and more) that gold coins
1115 have to offer by changing it into a "gold book", which would have
1116 hundreds of "pages" of gold bound together. This could be
1117 implemented with multiple steel rods going through the book which
1118 can be removed, or some more classier mechanism for holding the
1119 pages. The point is that the bar can be EASILY subdivided (and
1120 people would perform this test before buying), thus guaranteeing
1121 it's authenticity.
1123 - aurellem shirt :: I should make an aurellem star symbol tee-shirt.
1125 - touch vision :: inspired by GelSight, I want to reexamine cortex and
1126 see if I could implement touch as a very low range
1127 form of vision.
1129 - high school science :: this is a lesson in scientific ethics. The
1130 goal is to calculate /g/, the local gravitational
1131 acceleration. The students are told that the textbook says it's
1132 /exactly/ 9.81 before they start the experiment. See how they
1133 doctor their results to get closer to the textbook value. It's
1134 neat because for any given school, /g/ is probably *not* exactly
1135 equal to 9.81, because that is just an average!
1137 - opencourseware subtitles :: there are ladies who type up lectures
1138 while they are being given. These recordings should be kept and
1139 given to OCW for subtitles. If the timestamps of keys are
1140 recorded, then it is easy to make subtitles.
1142 - screen locking timing :: you use your computer camera to see if you
1143 are sitting in front of the computer. If you are, then the screen
1144 will never lock. If you are, then the screen will lock with a
1145 30-40 second timeout. It's an extension of using inactivity to
1146 initiate the countdown, just with more information.
1148 - mirror toilet :: a toilet with a square basin made or mirror instead
1149 or porcelain. That way, you can see how good of a
1150 wipe job you have done / watch how your excretion
1151 system works.
1153 - test dummies :: why don't we clone anencephalic humans and use then to
1154 test /in vivo/ human organ systems and drugs? It
1155 would be ethical as long as there are women who are
1156 willing to host the clones, and it would be a
1157 tremendous resource for studying the human body. I
1158 see nothing wrong with it morally, since no one is
1159 suffering, and it stands to save many lives throughout
1160 more advanced technology.
1162 - X-ray telepresence :: given that a doctor is operating on a patient
1163 via telepresence, one cool things you can do is shine X-rays into
1164 the patient to view the insides during real time. If the system
1165 was coupled with a Bayesian model of the layout of the structure,
1166 and the x-rays were only fired whenever the uncertainty of the
1167 model reached a certain threshold, then the radiation damage
1168 and surgery risk could be minimized.
1170 - superfluid vascular system :: I wonder what would happen if you
1171 replaced the blood in a human with a superfluid. What would the
1172 physical dynamics be? Would the superfluid flow through the
1173 vasculature, or would it ignore it and travel through the cells,
1174 or something else entirely. Since superfluids need to be cold to
1175 retain their superfluidity, how would the dynamics change during
1176 perfusion of a superfluid, where the fluid gains and looses
1177 superfluidity as it goes deeper into the body and is cooled by
1178 superfluid from upstream. In summary there are two things to
1179 simulate 1.) replace all blood in human with superfluid
1180 instantly. 2.) perfuse superfluid into human.
1182 - projective guessing :: I think that we read and see things by
1183 making a really good guess about what we're expecting to see,
1184 and then searching for our guess in what we see. If it really
1185 doesn't match, then we start to make more guesses / analyze the
1186 image from first principles, but most stuff is projective
1187 guessing.
1189 - Intestinal flora maintenance :: why not inoculate babies at birth
1190 with "ideal" gut flora instead of whatever bullshit they
1191 naturally get, thus giving them optimal digestive/nutrient
1192 extraction capabilities. Might also be able to make their farts
1193 not stink for life, too. MORE IMPORTANTLY, might help to
1194 preventatively stop some forms of /colic/, which affects 1 in 5
1195 babies and causes constant screaming and pain for about 5 weeks.
1197 - server culture : mirrors :: make a distributed system where people
1198 can mirror the websites of people they like -- essentially cover
1199 the server costs of favored websites. This could make popular
1200 websites run at no cost. The system would require that the
1201 mirrored content be the same as the official source. Sort of like
1202 bit-torrent for websites.
1204 - map programming :: one problem with functional programming is that
1205 in order to remain functional, you have to pass up arguments up
1206 into each calling function to get the full range of behavior
1207 from the lower level functions. Normally people come to a
1208 compromise involving abstraction and sparing use of dynamic
1209 variables to configure runtime behavior. What would be the
1210 advantages of making a programming language where every function
1211 receives one argument, a map, which contains all the symbol
1212 bindings it would ever need? This map is passed on to all
1213 subordinate functions. This way, you could replace functions on
1214 the fly, and arrange for there to be sensible defaults,
1215 etc. Might cause more harm than good but is an interesting idea.
1217 - rest nest :: a small EEG device you would attach to your head when
1218 you go to sleep at night. ML algorithms would determine
1219 your particular sleep cycles. This would mostly be an
1220 alarm clock that you could give a time range, say
1221 7:00AM - 7:15AM, and it would wake you up during an
1222 ideal time corresponding to then end of one of your 90
1223 min sleep cycles. You would feel much more rested upon
1224 waking up, and would wake up faster. There might be
1225 some other uses for the EEG data as well.
1227 - image compression :: use a library like gimp or opencv to process an
1228 image to make it have less entropy, then store the reverse of
1229 those operations along with the compressed simpler image as a
1230 super-compressed image file (possibly accepting some
1231 losses). Trades file size for decompression time, and allows one
1232 to cheat by using information in gimp/opencv to compress the
1233 image.
1235 - fixed cryopreservation :: why not use a fixative to buy enough time
1236 to ramp up cryoprotectants to an acceptable level at room
1237 temperature? Then, the whole system can be rapidly cooled and
1238 vitrified. This method "severs the biological link" in that the
1239 fixatives are highly toxic, but current vitrification procedures
1240 do this anyway since there can be a lot of freezing damage.
1242 - dilated security camera :: a security camera that would capture
1243 full video footage of everything at 60fps but then decide to keep
1244 only every 1 frame every 5 seconds unless there's something
1245 "interesting" happening.
1247 - bitcoin wallet :: Part of "server culture", this would be something
1248 like "coin.your-domain.com" which would serve as
1249 your personal trusted access to your own bitcoins
1250 from anywhere.
1252 - libpay :: this would be a free library which would enable
1253 micro-donations to software projects and other projects,
1254 so that you could donate a penny to "emacs" and it would
1255 be automatically split up to every person who has ever
1256 contributed to emacs in proportion to the amount of
1257 community esteem, code quantity, bugs fixed, whatever the
1258 community decides. This might make it possible for
1259 programmers to live entirely off of free programming.
1261 - distributed graphics :: Browser based graphics-card accelerated
1262 distributed computing API.
1264 - pronouns :: use capital letters A-Z instead of pronouns. They solve
1265 pronoun referents and gender neutrality, are short to
1266 say, and you can encode useful information into the
1267 choice of letter. For example, instead of "Meetings
1268 shall be presided over by the president, unless she is
1269 absent." USE "Meetings shall be presided over by the
1270 president, unless P is absent." We already use this a
1271 little, since I and U are reserved for the subject and
1272 object respectively.
1274 - phone DSP :: software app that inserts an audio DSP between the
1275 input to a phone and the output. The DSP is delicious
1276 and configurable, and can allow men to make their
1277 voices deeper, etc. The app would allow you to hear
1278 your own voice as others hear it. Most people hate how
1279 their own voice sounds. The app would also allow one to
1280 immediately change the parameters of the DSP using good
1281 presets.
1283 - predestined body learning :: a good example of predestined learning
1284 might be the mirror neurons.
1286 - restaurant receipt :: use a carbon copy receipt instead of two stupid
1287 copies.
1289 - anti google glass :: glasses with mounted lasers and computer vision
1290 that targets the cameras in google glass and destroy them.
1292 - wearable towel :: towel with clasp, velcro, whatever, that allows
1293 one to wear the towel more securely than just
1294 wrapping it tightly and hoping for the best.
1296 - crossdressing :: Easiest way to disguise oneself as a woman is to
1297 wear a burka.
1299 - book-mode :: intelligent color highlighting for books and
1300 articles. It would disambiguate pronouns and involved
1301 references. For example, if "Rachael" was assigned the
1302 color red, and "the blonde haired girl" refers to
1303 "Rachael", then "the blonde haired girl" would be
1304 colored red. Also, you could disambiguate multi part
1305 run-on sentences by highlighting each
1306 subcomponent. Maybe would also have applications to
1307 scientific reading.
1309 - Handheld light Rain measurement :: this would be a clear, teflon
1310 coated plastic disk with a camera underneath the disk. You would
1311 be able to hold the device out and it would measure the rate of
1312 accumulation of water droplets from fine mists and light rain by
1313 using computer vision to measure the diameters of the drops.
1315 - Big Brother Farming :: This would be a vision system that would
1316 individually monitor each plant and turn on water, etc to ensure
1317 maximum/uniform growth for each plant.
1319 - Discrete Faucet :: A faucet with discrete ticks instead of
1320 continuous.
1322 - Laser Circle :: take a glass microfiliment and shine a laser at one
1323 end at an oblique angle. It will make a perfect,
1324 large circle on the wall, converting a laser beam
1325 into a laser cone, preserving most of the energy of
1326 the laser.
1328 - Invisible Glass :: Take a container of liquid and embed a
1329 glass sculpture made out of glass that has exactly the same index
1330 of refraction and color of the liquid. Then the sculpture will be
1331 totally invisible in the container, and will only be revealed
1332 when the liquid is drained. The container might be a fancy
1333 wine/spirit bottle or an hourglass.
1335 - Caterpillar people :: A race of caterpillar like creatures gains
1336 intelligence after eons of predation by birds, etc. These
1337 caterpillar creatures still undergo metamorphosis into a large
1338 butterfly-like creature. The metamorphosis process turns the
1339 caterpillar's brain into mush and reforms it into a minimal,
1340 dumb, truly insect-like mind, completely destroying the person
1341 the caterpillar was. The society develops all sorts of customs and
1342 religious interpretations of the metamorphosis. It is viewed as
1343 good and natural by some since it is part of their life cycle and
1344 necessary to propagate the species, as only the butterflies can
1345 mate. Some think that the butterflies are still the same person
1346 because they have the same soul, even they no longer posses the
1347 memories or personality of the original caterpillar. Some see the
1348 butterfly form as the "true form" of the species, since the
1349 butterflies can fly, mate, and are beautiful. Many make a big
1350 deal out of the fact that 1-2% of the caterpillar's mind is
1351 actually preserved in the butterfly. Some see it as a terrible
1352 tragedy and argue that the caterpillars should try to stop the
1353 metamorphosis by technology. Practically, some very important
1354 members of society undergo hormone therapy and/or surgery to
1355 prevent metamorphosis so that they can live longer as themselves.
1357 This is a continuation of Marvin Minsky's ideas about pain being
1358 something that preserves our bodies while destroying our minds,
1359 something that is a remnant from our too harsh animal days that
1360 hasn't caught up to the fact that we have very complex brains
1361 now. It's a worst-case scenario about a maladaptive genetic
1362 legacy. Also, it's inspired by "There She Is!!!", which makes a
1363 compelling point about homosexuality by introducing a second
1364 gender characteristic (bunny/cat, male/female), which makes
1365 homophobia look very silly. Here, our own biological legacy of
1366 pain and death is made to look like the tragedy it is through the
1367 lens of the the caterpillar people.
1369 - relationships as a business :: [[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx][Turnover-Crisis]] is an excellent talk
1370 about the "culture of quitting," which is about better business
1371 by letting people go instead of keeping them around past their
1372 "apex". Focuses on information transfer. Cool idea of an alumni
1373 network, which for relationships would be a group of satisfied
1374 ex-lovers, who would recommend new people your way, and who might
1375 consider coming to you again, refreshed from their time away with
1376 new stories/experiences. I should look for examples of this and
1377 how they worked out.
1379 - coffee with tea :: /rlm-tea/ contains 2% sugar, 10% cream, and 20%
1380 dylan coffee. /dylan coffee/ contains 5% sugar,
1381 20% cream, and 10% rlm-tea. Start your mornings
1382 with recursion!
1384 - psychic crystal :: in a science fiction story, this would be an
1385 object that is very easy to move physically but is extremely
1386 difficult to move with telekinesis.
1388 - http://betsofbitco.in/ :: what a great place for an AI/person to
1389 prove themselves as a good predictor. I wish this could be
1390 automated.
1392 - true reflection :: don't forget about that mirror in the student
1393 center!, it's two mirrors at right angles, like staring at a
1394 corner of a room. The light reflects so that it shows you what
1395 you actually look like, instead of your mirror image.
1397 - remote control wasp :: use computer to drive wings with remote
1398 power/logic.
1400 - encrypted email phone book :: public (distributed?) database of
1401 email->private-key pairs, to enable automatic encryption.
1403 - universal eye color :: every equivalent creature will see each
1404 others' eyes as black -- it's universal. Even if the creatures
1405 see in radio waves, and their eyes are 2m long pieces of jagged
1406 metal, when those creatures look at each other, they will see
1407 black, the absence of light and color (since it's being absorbed
1408 by the sensor array).
1410 - intelligent microwave :: it learns where the hot nodes of its fields
1411 are, and uses them to evenly heat any food item. It has an infrared
1412 camera or something to keep track of how hot the food is. That way,
1413 you don't get bowls where the edges are boiling, while the center is
1414 still frozen. Requires a little bit of intelligence/vision, since
1415 the exact pattern of heating totally depends on the exact shape of
1416 the food. Wouldn't need a carousel, and wouldn't need a timer,
1417 just a desired temperature. Could also detect ice, and automatically
1418 defrost the parts which are frozen. Might be able to work much
1419 faster since it can avoid overheating; might have problems with
1420 heating the insides of thick things, might need a weight sensor too.
1422 + Would be much cleaner than other microwaves, since food would
1423 "sputter" and splash liquid much less.
1425 + Throw in some SIFT+R processing to match previously cooked foods
1426 and learn the exact heating profiles for things that have been
1427 cooked before -- it can get faster the more it's used.
1429 - compression :: brain-aware image compression algorithm
1431 - Credit card proxy :: would be a company which works like paypal
1432 except for real world transactions
1434 - Flesh pillow :: a pillow like the arm or torso of a human, complete
1435 with simulated temperature, bones, and heartbeat.
1437 - super screw :: a screw which has only one or two threads and instead
1438 uses compression to fit into a hole (the whole shank
1439 of the screw is split into multiple pieces to
1440 accomplish this; the tip is a point, then the middle
1441 bulges out and gets compressed when screwed in.
1443 - light filter :: (like light tweezers) to mechanically separate
1444 fluids with different index of refraction
1446 - chalk eraser project :: maybe make a directional eraser, for easy
1447 release of chalk dust, like fur, and how it likes to rest in a
1448 certain direction.
1450 - silver socks :: socks laced with silver for the antimicrobial
1451 properties.
1453 - UROP :: magnet gear/metal teeth tape
1455 - Rod of Moses :: device to distill urine through evaporation and
1456 easily dispose of urea crystals for use in desert --
1457 produce drinkable water.
1459 - UROP :: Make the LED in line with the flow for the micro injector, so
1460 that it may transmit maximum flow. Motor that changes
1461 distance of internal magnet from windings depending on
1462 desired speed so as to obtain maximum power efficiency.
1464 - lottery scraper :: web scraper which monitors various lotteries,
1465 looking for "special" gimmick changes in the rules (like 4x
1466 winnings on Wednesdays) and computes expected value...
1468 - Memristiors novel design :: make an evolutionary algorithm to make
1469 old stuff using all four basic circuit elements.
1471 - Conductive concrete :: concrete that has embedded metal fibers so
1472 that it can conduct electricity.
1474 - little bitty melting pot :: might be useful for some types of
1475 manufacturing/3D printing -- how small can an induction melter be
1476 made, for example.
1478 - power strip/timer programmable combination :: meh
1480 - algorithms :: which learn what their inputs are and in what order,
1481 and can adapt to changing circumstances -- they
1482 remember previous arguments and adapt so as to respond
1483 to different connections.
1485 - true pure tones :: hear a true pure tone by direct stimulation of the
1486 nerves of the ear
1488 - mechanical analogue to the electrical op-amp :: would be an object
1489 with two levers -- you pull on one lever and the other moves the
1490 same way, no matter what's in the way or what it is driving. This
1491 analogy could be useful to teach op amps to people.
1493 - paper folding device :: make it convenient to fold lots of papers in
1494 various ways.
1496 - concrete epoxy :: epoxy with sand/ some other solid material.
1498 - light capacitor :: suspend some ball of material with a high index
1499 of refraction and shine light into it so it gets stuck -- would
1500 the light stay trapped forever? Could you build up unlimited
1501 quantities of light inside the sphere (which could then be
1502 released slowly by frustrated internal reflection?
1504 - movie screening :: Movies always are too long at first. One way to
1505 shorten them ``scientifically" is to record blink rate during the
1506 move and then remove / shorten the frames of the parts in which
1507 there are a lot of blinking (average this over multiple people)
1508 better yet, put it online and do it across thousands of people. I
1509 got this from youtube in which there is an episode of kill bill
1510 which is composed entirely of the parts in which people had their
1511 eyes closed. slogan: want to make a movie people can't take their
1512 eyes off of? Just take those parts out!
1514 - optimize an article :: capture reading of a scientific article via
1515 screen capture while people read it, then use it to make the
1516 article better. like the movie-pruning idea.
1518 - super reading program :: teaches people the ideal mental mask to
1519 apply during reading so as to read very fast.
1521 - explosive thermite epoxy putty :: one part would contain the rust,
1522 one part the aluminum.
1524 - reading comprehension :: use the above screen capture routine to
1525 make a quiz program that constructs questions about the content
1526 you seemed to gloss over while reading. could be easy if the pdf
1527 came with embedded questions. Dylan: automatically generate
1528 word-cloud about the parts you found most interesting; help
1529 others who read the same stuff by drawing attention to the
1530 interesting parts.
1532 - hard sword :: make a samurai sword, but use osmiridum instead of
1533 martensite for the cutting part; it should be a better
1534 sword.
1536 - close range wireless :: use the induction technology used to
1537 recharge electric toothbrushes with no metal links to send data
1538 without any metal at all!
1540 - reading :: is a form of synsethesia
1542 - DNA printer :: A machine which translates the text eg, "ACTGAC" into
1543 actual DNA
1545 - black generator :: ferro-fluid magnetic field suspended micro
1546 generator to make electricity
1548 - alcohol battery :: alcohol/fluid flow powered battery
1550 - folding razor blade sword ::
1552 - perfect pitch :: learn perfect pitch using another sense in
1553 combination (sight or touch)
1555 - kaleidoscope projector ::
1557 - razor blade de-sharpener :: for guilt free disposal
1559 - bricks :: filled with luminescent plant material
1561 - bio metallic structure :: metal grids with seeds inside, which grow
1562 together and form a durable biological matrix. The metal
1563 substrate delivers water. (maybe use plastic instead of metal?)
1564 Dylan: enrich plants with inorganic compounds; electrical
1565 interfaces in cellular plant matter => remote-controlled
1566 photosynthetic/bioluminescent structures.
1568 - conducting extracellular matrix :: to allow better control of
1569 organic systems and an enhanced nervous system.
1571 - cross-modal memory hashing :: a way to retrieve memories more
1572 robustly.
1574 - flossing thimble-guards :: (these actually exist)
1576 - rules + lattice learning :: integrate lattice learning with rules by
1577 generating hypothetical examples
1579 - wooden refrigerator :: to give food a better taste Dylan: like
1580 barrels for wine, or planks for salmon. Maybe just have "flavor
1581 planks" for your pre-existing fridge. Need to mitigate effect of
1582 temperature on volatility?
1584 - radioactive transmutation molecule by molecule :: create precious
1585 metals or something else economically advantageous.
1587 - crowd preservation :: inoculate food with tons of harmless
1588 bacteria so that there's no room for bad bacteria as a method of
1589 preservation
1591 - old school preservation :: Pasteur - style holding jar with siphon
1592 as a way to store liquids at room temperature indefinitely w/o
1593 refrigeration.
1595 - restaurant policy :: Throw rude people out of restaurant as a matter
1596 of course -- make ambiance much better.
1598 - clean windows :: make something that mixes soap with fire hydrant
1599 water (and reduces the pressure a bit) and use it
1600 to clean windows of buildings.
1602 - ocarina :: make an ocarina out of pure silver
1604 - fire pen :: pen which burns words on to the page, thus never needing
1605 any ink. Is there a way to make it runnable from the
1606 human's energy?
1608 - website to design your own soda :: and label, and have it mailed to
1609 you / sell it from your own online store.
1611 - solar panels :: that float on the ocean
1613 - handcuffs with more than two cuffs (3?) :: great for daisy chaining
1614 people, binding them to environment, etc.
1616 - vector based SOUND files :: like the pictures but with SOUND. codify
1617 sound in a language with enough symbols so that it can describe
1618 everything and encode it in that. would be like going from speech
1619 to text or smtg. Could also store sound as an image of the
1620 wavefront encoded as a vector image.
1622 - Mouse :: with a horizontal scroll wheel in addition to the vertical
1623 scroll wheel
1625 - logic maintenance system for big institutions :: to make sure the
1626 things they are thinking about doing are not retarded
1628 - http://www.regulations.gov/ :: cool site
1630 - genetically engineered glowing fruit :: sell seeds?
1632 - memory slide :: IF memories are encoded using particular sensory
1633 impressions, what happens if the sensory organ
1634 itself changes? those memories would become
1635 inaccessible. maybe this is why we can't remember
1636 much from our childhoods. also, could this happen
1637 throughout life as well? Could S remember stuff from
1638 his childhood?
1640 - make a completely indestructible phone :: no moving parts or display
1641 you should be able to slam it around all you want, and it will
1642 just work. brutally simple. aerogel around the battery, minimal
1643 interface - never gets too hot, and can be dropped into water. no
1644 holes -- uses field effects for everything from the buttons to
1645 inductive charging and data transfer.
1647 - midi to ocarina "tabs" program :: (online website? buy ocarinas from
1648 it too)
1650 - 3d printing with sound pulses (or just patterns) :: like the 8.03
1651 lecture
1653 - lighter flint on spring :: make hot, throw it at something, and it
1654 makes sparkles!
1656 - nuclear energy :: Rebranding New+Clear Energy with informational
1657 campaign and public debate forum to enforce its
1658 transparent and open nature. France needn't be the
1659 world leader in nuclear energy. (Dylan)
1661 - bubbles :: Engineer a material which has both ductility and high
1662 surface tension to make the "third"
1663 minimal-surface-energy solution to a bubble suspended
1664 between two equal-diameter rings. (Solutions are
1665 cylindrical catenary curve, two separated half-bubbles,
1666 and a double-cone)
1668 - Textbook whose content can be varied continuously :: alter level of
1669 difficulty, rigor, diction, emphasize crossover with certain
1670 other discipline, etc. Content generated dynamically from
1671 knowledge base, along with questions that are moreover altered to
1672 guide knowledge acquisition. Motivation: One book of
1673 knowledge. /One./
1675 ** From Jacob's idea list
1677 - Roommate-canceling headphones: uses roommate's laptop mic to seed
1678 noise cancellation alg in your headphones (would this
1679 work?). -Update on sound canceling headphones that take feed from
1680 tv: how about ones that cancel people talking on the phone by
1681 receiving the phone signals and playing inverse sound
1682 waves. #signalprocessing ~jcole@mit.edu
1684 - ClackerAlert -- tells if you slam the keys too hard using sound data
1685 (and speed/jerkiness data)!.Prevents RSI ~jcole@mit.e
1687 - Panic Pin :: separate pin that you can tell someone if forced to
1688 identify your PIN (idea from idea about credit cards)