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cryonics links.
author Robert McIntyre <rlm@mit.edu>
date Sat, 23 Apr 2016 18:01:05 -0700
parents ba80a6a67b55
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1 #+title: Big List O' Ideas
2 #+author: Robert McIntyre
3 #+email: rlm@mit.edu
4 #+description: list of ideas from Robert McIntyre
5 #+keywords: aurellem ideas half-baked random
6 #+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org
7 #+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org
8 #+babel: :mkdirp yes :noweb yes :exports both
9 #+HTML_HEAD_EXTRA: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../css/ideas.css" />
10 #+OPTIONS: num:nil
12 * Ideas
13 # :PROPERTIES:
14 # :HTML_CONTAINER_CLASS: ideas
15 # :END:
17 This is a list of all the good ideas I've had that I felt like writing
18 down for the past ~ 10 years. Some of them could be practical
19 inventions and are "just" waiting for that 95% perspiration to bring
20 them to fruition, some are ideas for science fiction, and some are
21 simple observations. They are arranged roughly in reverse
22 chronological order, with the most recent ideas at the top of the
23 list. The ones at the bottom of the list are heavily influenced by my
24 time at MIT, the ones at the top, by my time at 21st Century Medicine.
26 If you find some of these interesting and would like to collaborate on
27 them with me or discuss them in more detail, I'd love to hear from
28 you. You can email me at ideas@aurellem.org.
30 If you want to use one of these ideas as your own and run with it,
31 please feel free. I'd love to hear about it if you do.
33 #+begin_quote
34 There's no end to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care about
35 getting credit.
36 #+end_quote
39 #+BEGIN_HTML
40 <hr/>
41 #+END_HTML
45 ** A simple merge procedure for uploads
46 Putting aside the philosophical problems around mind-uploading for
47 a moment, imagine that you were /already/ a computer program
48 running on a suitable robotic body. Let's say that the program is
49 based off a detailed emulation of your brain -- no one really
50 understands exactly /how/ the program is doing its computations,
51 only that it faithfully recreates the original biological
52 computations. At this point, you might want to be able to exist in
53 multiple places at once while still maintining a coherent unity of
54 identity, but how do you do it? You /can't/ modifiy your mind to
55 handle multiple bodies at once, because this would require
56 extensive understanding of exactly how your program is doing its
57 computations in order to scale it to multiple bodies. But you can't
58 just copy yourself either, because the copies will eventually
59 diverge leading to a loss of unity of identity. You can't easily
60 merge copies together after they've "diverged" because again, you'd
61 have to come up with a coherent theory of mind to merge the
62 datastructures. One simple way to do merges is this: First, you
63 need to acchitect the robot bodies to record every single bit
64 that's passing through all sensory nerves throughout a small time
65 interval that's insufficient to create significant divergence. For
66 sake of argument I'll assume that you do this each day. This stream
67 of data represents the ultimate "life recording" and can be easily
68 accomplished either in simulation of physical reality by using
69 custom sensory organs, like in [[http://aurellem.org/#CORTEX][=CORTEX=]]. This set of information,
70 if played back to a copy of you in the exact mental state right
71 before the start of recording, would perfectaly match with the
72 choices of the individual and serve as an adequate replacement for
73 the world, even though it contains almost no information compared
74 to the world! Once you can do the "full life records," then the
75 procedure works like this: At the morning of Day 1 you "checkout"
76 the one copy of you from yesterday and make around 10 copies which
77 each live out their day. Each copy records a full "life recording"
78 for the day. Then one copy is chosen as the "trunk" and the rest as
79 branches. The trunk replays the life-recordings of the branches in
80 accelerated time over the night, and the branches are then deleted
81 leaving only one individual that remembers 10 consecutive days
82 spent in different contexts. Then you repeat the process for Day 2
83 and so on. I'll call this the "small delta-T approximation" method
84 for mind-merging. It works as long as the timeframe is not too long
85 an is limited by how fast you can faithfully replay life
86 recordings. You don't have to be "offline" for any amount of time
87 while doing this: You can also alternate two sets of 10, one for
88 the day and one for the night, and have the night and day trunks be
89 generated from the last day / night group's trunk,
90 respectively. This trades having to "sleep" for the day/night crews
91 not being able to remember what happened last night/day
92 respectively. The more you know about how brains work, the faster
93 you can integrate previous experience and the more copies you can
94 sustain. This methods means that you never lose any experience, but
95 if you're willing to lose some nonessential experiences, a more
96 extreme version of this might be to make a copy of yourself that
97 accomplishes a task and then reports anything of note in a written
98 report.
100 ** Earth, Air, Water
102 Probably all intelligent species name their planet "dirt" in their
103 language, unless the're aquatic or flying, then they'd name it
104 "water" and "air" respectively.
106 ** Cure for Color Blindness
108 Could it be possible to administer some retroviruses via direct
109 injection to the retina, to cause some of the cells in the retina
110 to begin expressing different color pigments? The brain ought to
111 easily sort out the rest and enable color vision. Furthremore,
112 could we add some more colors to baesline human eyes? Theory --
113 people who are color blind have better color spatial accuity for
114 the colors they can see, because this is the tradeoff involved with
115 the retrovirus therapy: Re-purposing color detectors to see new
116 colors at the expense of spatial acuity for the old set of colors.
118 ** Passion of the Christ Missed Opportunity
120 In the Passion of the Christ, they do the entire show using Latin,
121 Aramaic, etc, with subtitles. They should have had a part where
122 Jesus does the sermon on the mount, he turns to the camera, and
123 starts speaking in English, with no subtitles. It would have been
124 1.) biblically accurate and 2.) awesome. It would have been such a
125 powerful example to convey Jesus' divinity, and show off another
126 miracle. It felt like they were setting up for it the entire movie,
127 and they missed it!
129 ** Xenobiotic Chimeric Methalation Rewriting
131 You make chimeric sea urchins with human reproductive stem cells,
132 so that the sea urchins produce sea urchin-like HUMAN sperm and
133 eggs. Then you can have two human males / females reproduce without
134 the methylation problem, by using the sea urchins as
135 intermediades. And the normal ethical problems of human/animal
136 chimeras are avoided because the sea urchins don't have brains to
137 begin with.
139 ** Physical PGP Signatures
141 You punch into your phone "I want to sign a contract" It gives you
142 a gensym (or you enter a name) like:
143 https://contracts.example.com/car-insurance-2015-09-26
145 Then you sign your name, date, and include the link on the contract
146 under "PGP sig". Then you take a picture with your phone and enter
147 your signing password. It gets uploaded to your website and the
148 image gets PGP signed with your key. Now you have a timestamped
149 archive of the contract, and anyone can verify it by looking at the
150 physical contract itself!
152 ** The Digital Third Eye
154 You wire in a third optical input to the human brain, but it
155 doesn't tranduce light form the real world, bus instead is
156 connected to the "internet of things" and shows you metadata about
157 things you are looking at // serves as an interface to your own
158 mind and body. Then eventually simply real things without metadata
159 seem flat and fake compared to the objects in cities and other
160 annotated areas. This third eye doesn't occupy any of your normal
161 visual field but actually EXPANDS your visual field.
163 ** Ultimate Limits of Monogamy
165 Let's say that you're immortal and monogamous. The longer you live
166 with your partner, the more you build an internal model of them,
167 and they you. Eventually these models may become complete, and then
168 you two are actually one single recursive entity which references
169 itself. As you offload more processing to the other (such as old
170 couples actually do -- "remember when we were at that place,
171 what-was-his-name honey?"), then computationally you are a single
172 mind distributed across two bodies. (There's a reason why old
173 couples often die as a pair). You might decide to actually merge
174 bodies eventually. But then, you were both monogamous, so the
175 combined person will be monogamous (and lonely because it lacks a
176 partner). So you get married again, rinse, wash, repeat. All the
177 monogamous people within a certain "compatability group" eventually
178 become one. Our "social center of mass" doesn't lie within our own
179 bodies!
181 ** Dream Rewinding
183 How to record a complete dream without disturbing it or modifying
184 your brain? you need to be an upload: split yourself, and one of
185 you stays awake whike the other sleeps. then you detect a dream in
186 progress by monotoring rapid eye movememt in your sleeping self,
187 and you wake yourself up every few minutes and tell yoursef about
188 the dream. Then sleeping-your restarts the dream, continuation
189 passing style, forgetting everything that was just said, and you
190 repeat this process until the dream is over. Then awake-you and
191 sleeping-you merge each other by taking sleeping-you and replaying
192 the memories of awake-you, and you write a final report on the
193 dream using the "saccade" reports to jog your memory.
195 It would really let you directly test theories of memory because
196 you can test a person every second if you want to. I see a couple
197 ways this could play out: you could report a dream that follows a
198 linear narrative, with the story advancing a little bit each time
199 (the "storytelling" hypothesis), you might say something totally
200 different each time (the "garbage memory access" hypothesis), or
201 something even weider like where you report exactly the same thing
202 between seconds 0-20, then something totally different during
203 seconds 20-40, etc.
205 ** Denser than Osmium
207 Do the "misicibility" thing with an osmium alloy to get something
208 even more dense. Basically osmium + something else might be denser
209 then pure osmium.
211 ** AI Hypnosis
213 Hypnosis might be good for studying AI, becuse it might probide a
214 "debugger" for ananlyzing the human mind. I briefly tried this
215 while at MIT, but it needs MUCH more work to be properly
216 evaulated. Also, things you can do under hypnosis provide
217 constraints on what the mind's capabilities are. Also, hypnosis
218 iteslf is a worthwhile thing to study in its own right.
220 ** The Ocean Becomes a Drop
221 Upload faces challenges to grow into the type of person that can
222 join the greater society -- a god. They have to go though quests
223 that replicate all the things that humanity had to accomplish, like
224 going to the moon, by themselves.
226 ** Butterfly Drone
227 If big butterflies used to exist, then maybe we could make
228 butterfly-inspired drones!
230 ** Methylation Sex-Symmetry Breaking
231 Human sex cells have methylation patterns that encode male/female
232 origin. If you combine two male patterns, the fetus grows "too
233 fast" and dies. Two female patterns causes the fetus to enter a
234 "vegatable" state and fail to develop. Evolutionary biologists say
235 that this reflects the asymmetry of energy investement for creating
236 offspring. If that's true, then species that cast-spawn will lack
237 this asymmetry, and give clues about how to remove it in humans. If
238 even cast spawners like sea urchins have it, then that means
239 there's something deeper going on!
241 ** Homosexual Reproduction
242 You take genetic material from two males and put it into an egg
243 cell that has had all genetic material removed. Or, you take the
244 genetic material from one egg and put it in another egg. This would
245 allow homosexual couples to genetically reproduce. One technical
246 challenge blocking this technique is that human gametes have
247 methylation patterns that encode male/female origin, and only a
248 male+female pattern gives rise to viable offspring. You could
249 "recondition" male / female gametes to give them the opposite
250 pattern, perhaps by incubating them in the appropriate
251 environment. You also could try taking stem cells and making them
252 form the appropriate structures in vitro.
254 ** Poly-Vitrification
255 Large molecules such as PVP are able to vitrify at around -20C, and
256 at farily small concentrations. IF they could be introduced into
257 cells, they would be quite useful as vitrification agents. However,
258 it's difficult to get them in because they are so big. So instead,
259 use smaller agents which combine together into polymers at low
260 temperature. In particular, Fructose, trehalose, and glycerol seem
261 to have the desired properties (though you need to make versions of
262 fructose and trehalose that can penetrate).
264 ** Whole Brain Perfusion Embedding
265 Do the standard EM embedding protocol, but skip the osmium step,
266 and use the "perfusion pausing" method to prevent overextraction
267 during the dehydration and embedding steps. I think that you can
268 perfuse resins into the brain, simply because you can perfuse
269 viscous rubber when doing vascular casts.
271 ** Very Slow Physiological Pressure Perfusion
272 Less extreme example of the "perfusion pausing" trick -- just keep
273 the perfusion running and don't put the perfusion target into the
274 liquid as deep.
276 ** Perfusion Pausing
277 One problem with doing perfusion of heads / organs where the veins
278 freely leak fluid is that if you STOP the perfusion, you rapidly
279 loose pressure in the organ as your perfusate leaks out. You can
280 prevent this by submerging the organ/head/rat whatever in fluid at
281 an appropriate deepness. You would have to slowly decrease the flow
282 rate while simultaneously lowering the perfusing object into the
283 fluid. To start again, reverse the process -- reengage the
284 peristaltic pump slowly while removing the organ from the fluid.
286 ** Textbook Mimiricy Evolution
287 As surgery becomes more common, there develops a distinct selective
288 pressure for individuals' organ layouts to look more like the
289 medical textbooks!
291 ** Transparent Skin
292 Temporary / permament transparent skin. Allows for examination of
293 organs / muscles and visual prevention of disease and detection or
294 abnormalities / good things eg. excercise optimization.
296 ** Sweet Information
297 Candy with a whole book written in it. Eat a book!
299 ** Targeted Immunosuppressant
300 Just kill off the B-cells and friends that would cause problems in
301 a organ-transplant / other situation. AIDS is good at killing these
302 cells -- maybe make it can be modified to just target the ones that
303 will cause problems. Then you can premptively kill off that part of
304 someone's immune system before a transplant. ALSO, you can kill off
305 everyone's defenses against other blood types and make people
306 effectively type AB+ w.r.t blood transfusions. Actually, why not
307 give babies this treatment so that they're automatically compatable
308 with all blood types? It would be like a blood transfusion
309 vaccine. The immune system does this already when it's first
310 growing; maybe it can be "retrained" to accept new things, or the
311 mechanism of immune cell death be co-opted for these purposes.
313 ** Fuck-you Tetris
314 Tetris that actively gives you the worst possible
315 piece. Implemented! http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastet.html ,
316 https://github.com/johnny-morrice/solumns/releases
318 ** Pockets
319 More things should have them! Chairs, tables, cups, hats,
320 trashcans, basically anything is better with a pocket.
322 ** Colored Shower Head
323 A shower head add-on that measures the temp of the water and
324 changes the color of the water streams w/ an LED to show you the
325 temperature. That way you can align to the color you want and see
326 the temperature without feeling it.
328 ** Giant Dragonflies
329 We could rapidly MAKE giant dragonflies by evolving modern
330 dragonflies in an very oxygen rich environment!
332 ** Whirlpool of Light
333 Shine a laser out into space. But the planet is spinning! What you
334 get is a spiral of light! And as this signal expands, does it
335 eventually reveal it's quantized nature?
337 ** Perfusion Cooking
338 You do cardiac bypass on an animal like a pig, then pump in tasty,
339 tasty perfusate (like marinade) into the animal's
340 vasculature. Then, you switch out to saline and increase the
341 temperature of the saline to rapidly and uniformly cook the
342 animal. It could be the tastiest meat ever!
344 ** Timestamp Verification
345 You sign your message, and it has a timestamp at the top, with a +-
346 percision number. Then you send it over to the public timestamp
347 server, which only signs the message if it gets the message within
348 the timestamp window. Or the computer just signs the message but
349 puts a timestamp at the beginning. So if everyone trusts the
350 timestamp server, you can get reliable timestamps, and prove
351 priority on ideas, etc.
353 ** The Great Computing Slow-Down
354 In general, our computers are getting faster and faster according
355 to Moore's law. However, eventually our brains will be made of the
356 same stuff our computers are made of! This has very interesting
357 consequences -- I can add 2+2 and get four in about a second. Since
358 my neurons actually work at around 10-60 hertz in parallel, this
359 means that it takes me around 10-30 operations to do this
360 addition. That's actually not bad in terms of computing time. If my
361 neurons were as fast as the latest transitors, then most
362 calculators (made with earlier transistors) would be SLOWER than me
363 at adding numbers. Only the newest, most optimized calculators
364 would be faster, and then only about 10 times faster! This means
365 that once we begin to think at the speed of our technology, that
366 technology will suddenly seem pitifully slow in comparison to how
367 it seems now. And no amount of technical progress will remedy it,
368 because that same progress will also make us all think
369 faster. We'll either have to settle with living in "slow time" to
370 do some computations, or learn to make smarter hardware with
371 special optimizations. But this is actually really hard, because
372 we'll be working with machines that will appear to us about as fast
373 as MECHANICAL computers. So, in the future, all the cool parties
374 will be in cyperspace at vastly accelerated speeds compared to how
375 we exist now. But at these parties, the computers will SUCK! Of
376 course, this is one of the few things that can save us from AI
377 risk, because those AI's won't seem so scary when the're build out
378 of rickety old mechanical parts form our perspective.
380 ** Unitary Reverse Evolution of Chaos+Minds
381 Chaotic systems diverge exponentially in state space. Do you get
382 anything interesting when part of the physical system associated
383 with the chaotic system is a object that performs some sort of
384 computation? Is it possible for the computational system to play a
385 percision-enabling role in determining the final/initial conditions
386 of the chaotic system, just by tracing out thoughts in its decision
387 paths? This is probably too vague of an idea right now, I just
388 wanted to write it down.
390 ** Microwave-Time
391 The cooking time you enter on most microwaves is insane. It's
392 expressed in what I call a "hybrid base", a combination of base 10
393 and base 60. You can get absurd things like 100 < 61, and 120 ==
394 80! I wonder if these hybrid base systems could be very useful for
395 some purposes! Dylan [[http://logical.ai/microwave/org/sawtooth.html][wrote a blog post on this subject!]]
397 ** Three Eyes
398 If you had three eyes, would you still draw cubes like we currently
399 draw them? Or would all 2D-representations of 3D space always look
400 hopelessly fake?
402 ** Digital Taste/Smell Assay
403 Get a grid of bacteria, each expressing a human taste/smell
404 receptor linked to some sort of fluorscent activity or ion
405 pump. Use a camera / electrical grid to transduce the smell / taste
406 signal into bits! Inspired by gel-sight from MIT.
408 ** Childrens' Tool Shop
409 I think that kids should be provided with tool shops -- these would
410 be nice sheds with a good collection of tools to do various things
411 -- circuit components and soldering irons, wires, a small lathe,
412 drill press, belt sander, a centrifuge, microscope, and telescope,
413 etc. The idea is that the kid can now think, "I could use X to do
414 this thing that I'm thinking about" -- the building becomes an
415 extension of the kid's body & mind.
417 ** Fluid Display
418 Like the previous idea about matching refractances between glass
419 and liquid, except you make a lot of switchable glass tubes in
420 various patterns in the glass, and actively pump colored liquid
421 through the tubes (the tubes have glass-like fluid in them by
422 default.) The result is that you can cause the tubes to appear and
423 dissappear, and vary their colors as well!
425 ** Immunoincompatibility
426 Take the human genome, and refactor it so that it doesn't use a
427 particular codon at all. Then remove the support from our ribosomes
428 for that codon. What does this do for us? It makes us immune to
429 almost all viruses! There is at least one bacteria that already
430 does this to great effect.
432 ** Life Cycle
433 It's called a cycle, right? So, the thing that repeats itself over
434 and over, right? Not much of a cycle if you don't come back after
435 you die, if you ask me!
437 ** Car with no Blind Spots
438 Use some cameras in the back of the car to augment the rear-view
439 mirror so that you never have to turn around in order to lane
440 change.
442 ** Metabolic Windows and Freezing
443 You freeze a set of cells using some cryo protocol and 60%
444 survive. How can this be explained? It seems to me that if the
445 cells are the same, and the conditions homogoneous, then all the
446 cells should either die or live. However, suppose that there is a
447 metabolic cycle that needs to be in a certain phase for the cell to
448 survive. If the cells are asynchronous, then you might end up with
449 some cells dying because there were in the wrong part of their
450 cycle. This implies that you might be able to cryoprotect cells by
451 causing them to enter a certain metabolic mode before freezing.
453 ** Cryonics Color Appeal
454 Perfusate used by cryonics companies could have red food coloring
455 in it. It's just a nice touch so that the cryonics patient looks
456 more life-like than with clear CPAs, and hopefully might get
457 treated with more respect.
459 ** Paramagnetic CPA
460 you take a CPA that can be influenced by magnetic fields so that
461 its degrees of freedom are limited. Then, you release the field,
462 instantaly increasing the size of the state space of the system and
463 dramatically decreasing the temperature enough to plunge the system
464 past homogenous nucleation temperature and directly to the glass
465 transition temperature, creating a doubly unstable glass at much
466 lower CPA concentrations than possible at conventional CPA
467 concentrations. A major technical limitation facing this technique
468 is that it's a very minor effect -- you can only get about 0.1C
469 with most systems that have been studied so far.
471 ** Room Temp Ramen
472 How does the physics of cooking noodles work? Could you use a
473 vacuum instead of heat to force water into the noodle?
475 ** Personal Carbon Offset
476 Feel bad about contribuiting to global warming by using electricity
477 / driving a car? Forget trying to "conserve" or "minimize your
478 carbon footprint". Follow the Platinum rule -- make the world
479 BETTER off than you found it! This would be a small, self
480 contained system that sucks C02 out of the air. It uses
481 electricity, but it's so efficient at removing CO2 that it more
482 than offsets the CO2 produced by even a coal plant to produce that
483 electricity. This way, you can still drive even a gas guzzler, but
484 have a net negative carbon footprint! Maybe something cool could be
485 done with the carbon as well. Use as much electricity as you want,
486 but negate the damage to the enviroment with more technology.
488 ** Undoing Spermogenesis
489 With enough sperm, you can derive the donor's entire genome. You
490 gain more confidence in the alleles for a particular gene the more
491 sperm you have. Each additional sperm gives you the same sort of
492 information you'd get flipping a coin and trying to decide whether
493 the coin is H/T of H/H. Is there enough sperm in the the average
494 load for you to be as confident as mitosis?
496 ** Mars Life
497 We could engineer life that could survive on mars (probably some
498 non-vascular photosynthetic poikilohydric creature like a lichen)
499 by taking an extremophile from Antarctica and evolving it in
500 increasingly Martian conditions. This could be an easy start to a
501 terraforming process.
503 ** Problem with Aubrey de Grey's Ideas
504 Aubrey de Grey says that we might be able to live forever by
505 continually repairing our bodies at the cellular level -- he
506 details 7 different mechanisms of damage and says that if all of
507 them are dealt with /together/ that it would stop aging. (You can't
508 miss even one because they're all fatal.) However, it doesn't take
509 into account that we are also beings of information and that there
510 is a very real software component to our existence. Even if our
511 biological chassies can be maintained forever, I think it is
512 unlikely that our minds will operate well far outside of the design
513 constraints that we've evolved to handle. Say I programmed a
514 webserver with the express goal of it being able to serve webpages
515 for month on some stock server. I'll do fairly rigorous testing to
516 make sure that it can handle the expected load then then some. Now
517 say that you want to keep a particular instance of this webserver
518 running indefinitely. (The program instance is like your mind and
519 the computer it's running on is like your body). You might very
520 well be able to keep the physical computer infrastructure running
521 for forever by replacing hard drives / ram / CPUs, etc. However,
522 since I designed the webserver to work for a month, it probably has
523 memory leaks, rare stochastic bugs, or other built in limits /
524 constraints (think log files or some date rollover shenanigans)
525 that will ultimately kill the webserver even with eternally perfect
526 hardware. Do you really expect that a webserver engineered to work
527 for 1 month will run for 10 years without catastrophically
528 crashing? Not even Apache can do this! In fact, if I put in the
529 extreme effort to make it that robust, I've wasted time that I
530 could have spent on other projects by pursuing an unnecessary
531 engineering goal. Likewise, human minds have only ever run for at
532 most 122 years before they are destroyed due to hardware
533 degradation. Fixing the hardware doesn't change any software bugs
534 that are almost certainly present in the human mind. Think of all
535 the pathological things that can go wrong with a webserver,
536 multiply it by a million, and that likely how evolution has
537 designed our minds. For example, consider memory : why should you
538 expect that we have evolved the ability to coherently organize
539 memories past say 150 years? There's been absolutely no selective
540 pressure for this ability, so you can bet that if there's any
541 fitness to be gained from not having unlimited memory potential
542 (such as better metabolic efficiency), we have it! You might think
543 that maybe we would just forget things the same way that we sort of
544 forget things that happen earlier in our lives, but complicated
545 information processing systems don't have to fail gracefully when
546 they're pushed far past their design constraints. A 150 year old
547 person is just as likely to suffer a catastrophic psychosis due to
548 software limitations associated with memory as he is to do
549 something with all those memories we might consider
550 reasonable. More likely, in fact, since there are so very many ways
551 for a complicated software system to break and so few ways for it
552 to run successfully. Therefore, I think Aubrey de Grey's
553 "hardware-only" approach is missing a very important component of
554 longevity science, and any successful effort to make people live
555 orders of magnitude longer than they do naturally will need to deal
556 with people's software as well as their hardware.
558 ** Validating Neurocryopreservation
559 Problem : you want to test whether a brain is functionally
560 preserved through vitrification, but you don't want to figure out
561 how to preserve all the other organs in the animal. It might be
562 possible to keep the rest of the body at almost 0C and vitrify just
563 the head for only a few minutes. Induce hypothermia, then separate
564 out the head's blood supply from the rest of the body, then just
565 cryoptotect and vitrify the head. Might need some sort of thermal
566 guard to keep the outer head / neck from becoming too cold. You
567 leave the spinal cord intact! Then you devitrify to 0C, remove
568 cryoprotectant, and then reattach the blood supply. You can
569 determine brain preservation using behavioral assays!
571 ** Freezing Water Purifier
572 You slowly freeze water, but also run liquid water over the frozen
573 mass. This takes away basically all impurities and creates "washed
574 ice" then you melt the ice. Maybe you could re-use the heat from
575 creating the ice to melt the ice?
577 ** Ultra Strength
578 Allow a person to visualize their muscle recruitment patterns. Give
579 them adrenaline and let them feel what it's like to have the normal
580 limits removed. See if they can replicate the effects.
582 ** Phone Names
583 Make a PX record for domain names that's like the MX record, except
584 that it is a phone number instead of an IP address. That way, you
585 can use the domain name registration system to provide names for
586 phone numbers. Then, as long as you control the domain, you can
587 point people to your current phone number by updating that record.
589 ** Edible Flowers
590 Edible white flowers that you put in a colored solution with
591 flavor. When the flower turns the right color, it is also flavored
592 and ready to eat!
594 ** Lead Bone
595 Could you fill in all the empty spaces in a bone with lead? Might
596 be cool!
598 ** The Quest for Life
599 Many stories that have immortal characters have the "immortal who
600 wants to become mortal" trope. I want to story where the
601 protagonist loses their immortality and feels /angry/ and ashamed
602 about losing something that's so absolutely crucial to their
603 identity. A reverse of "death makes life worth living", they feel
604 that living forever is what makes life worth living. Now they've
605 "lost their sunrise" or their "connection to the timeless universe"
606 or something. So they go on a quest to get it back, learning about
607 themselves along the way, and regaining the precious thing they
608 lost in the beginning. Which, it they can actually gain their
609 immortality back, means that they never lost it in the first place!
611 ** World Map
612 Take a small table and paint the continents in toothpaste on the
613 table. Make a slightly raised barrier around the table. Slowly pour
614 water onto the table, and it will form the oceans!
616 ** Stage Magic Rituals
617 Rituals should incorporate elements of stage magic. For example in
618 Teller's rendition of Shakespeare's Tempest, they have a scene
619 where they levitate a crown in front of someone, then put it on his
620 head. They also have a wedding ceremony where they levitated the
621 bride as well. Actual weddings and other ceremonies should
622 incorporate stage magic as an enhancement to the gravitas!
624 ** Isotope Time Dilation
625 Use a cyclotron to speed up rare isotopes developed in nuclear
626 fusion experiments. The relativistic time dilation will stop the
627 isotopes from decaying, and allow time to study them. This is based
628 on radioactive isotopes that fall through the earth's atmosphere
629 that take hundreds of times longer to decay than normal.
631 ** Marsupial Stimulation
632 You take a freshly pouched marsupial baby, and show it videos and
633 other interactive things while it matures in the pouch. What mental
634 effects would this have?
636 ** The Dynamically Well-Tempered Clavier
637 Some older ways of tuning instruments sound better, but we use the
638 even-tempered scale today because it makes it easier to switch
639 keys. With electronic music, why not make key-annotations and
640 dynamically re-tune the piece to sound good in the current key?
641 Could be done as a midi+annotation -> midi compiler for initial
642 experimentation.
644 ** Death Always Implies Damage
645 is is possible for a corpse to differ from a living person only in
646 the fact that one is dead and the other is alive? NO! A corpse must
647 always have some sort of molecular damage which causes the loss of
648 function!
650 ** Inner Eye
651 Surgically install a bunch of tiny cameras inside a person. Then,
652 you can activate them all and get a picture of your internal organs
653 for diagnostic purposes.
655 ** Chaos Rails
656 The homoclinic tangle (which I call the "rails of chaos") is very
657 beautiful. We couldn't even visualize it before computers because
658 it's so complicated! Someone should make a visualization of
659 it. Here's my inital stab at it: [[../images/rails-of-chaos.png][The Rails of Chaos]]
661 ** Cryonics Middle Ages
662 Some people say that cryonics is an experiment and that it is
663 foolish to wait until we have revived a human. There is a middle
664 ground where the procedure has a dismal success rate on humans, say
665 1 in 20, so that you'd be a fool to try revival. Nonetheless, this
666 very risky procedure could be the legal proof of concept needed to
667 create a new class of life between "living" and "dead": "stasis".
669 ** Minds and Mirrors
670 Neat thought experiment -- if you take a mirror of someone by
671 actually reversing a person's chirality molecule by molecule, then
672 will the only be able to read mirror writing? The answer is yes, by
673 analogy to a purely mechanical scan-tron device. This is one of the
674 only interesting transforms I know that can take a human brain and
675 change it in subtle, non-destructive ways. It's also an argument
676 against dualism.
678 ** Biosphere in a Bottle
679 There are around 15 million species. 15 million stem cells will
680 fill only a tiny size, far less than a cubic inch. Preserve a
681 single cell from every species on earth in this small space, and
682 you will have a record of our current biosphere that can be
683 protected. "Hold the genetic data of all species in your hand!"
685 ** Chaos Lock
686 The "arrow of time" points in the direction of increasing
687 entropy. The time evolution of chaotic systems depend exquisitely
688 on their initial state. If you take a measurement of a chaotic
689 system at any given point of time, you can evolve that system
690 backwards or forwards based on your measurement. So let's say you
691 start the chaotic system in a VERY low entropy state, then let it
692 run for a while, then take a measurement with some
693 uncertainty. Your measurement is pretty good, but obviously not
694 PERFECT. If you evolve the chaotic system back in time, then you
695 will see that you don't really reach a state with low entropy an
696 hour before (the entropy is easy to measure with surrogates like
697 alignment, etc). So use this technique to SEARCH for a more
698 accurate measurement! This potentially can give you many more
699 orders of magnitude than you could get alone just using an
700 instrument. Sometimes it will give you bad results, the the odds of
701 it doing that are infinitesimal, and you can just measure a couple
702 of times.
704 ** Cryo Evolution
705 Perhaps there would be a way to rapidly evolve a symbiotic
706 bacterial organism that could protect human tissues from freezing
707 damage.
709 ** Suicide Parasite
710 Sometimes, people kill themselves for no good reason. We often
711 explain this with things like "hidden depression" or we say that
712 they had something like chronic jaw or back pain. I think that
713 smells of rationalization. I don't buy it. I propose that in many
714 suicide cases there is a disease that causes the suicidal
715 behavior. We already know that certain parasites have mind-bending
716 properties in other animals, even mammals like mice. It's not much
717 of a stretch to imagine a parasite that causes suicides in
718 humans. Some problems:
720 *What does the suicide parasite get out of it?* : This might be
721 answered by the whole thing being a glitch caused by cross-species
722 contamination. Toxoplasma works this way.
724 *What predictions does a disease model make* : suicide should be
725 more common among people who share a contagion vector. There should
726 be suicides that don't make any sense : people who weren't really
727 depressed, who had no reason to kill themselves. People who have
728 killed themselves should have a higher incidence of some unknown
729 parasite in their brains.
731 ** Domestic Insects
732 People should eat more bugs because they're much more efficient, so
733 why not do some major domestication research to make very appealing
734 bugs? Beetles, in particular, seem to be excellent targets for
735 domestication because they have extreme levels of genetic
736 malleability. Remember that lobster was once seen as an animal only
737 fit for prisoners to consume!
739 ** Birth-Clones
740 What if each person was intentionally split at birth into a normal
741 embryo and a few "backup" cells which are then frozen. The backup
742 cells are created just the same way as natural identical twins. The
743 backups can be used to regenerate organs. etc. Also, it would be a
744 good sci-fi concept, because you could have a culture where people
745 reward people who were especially awesome are "reborn" from their
746 backups. Imagine having a young Bach every generation, etc.
748 ** Pronunciation Guide
749 A simple webpage where you type in a word and it returns a simple,
750 English sentence describing exactly how to pronounce the word. For
751 people who don't want to learn IPA.
753 ** Learning to Teleport
754 This is a story about a person who is struggling with his/her
755 society's ideas about teleportation. It's considered a fundamental
756 part of being a member of that society (after all, the difference
757 between animals and humans is that humans are creatures of pure
758 information while animals are burdened with base matter, "that's
759 how you travel the stars, etc") Humans are born normally, grow up,
760 and then eventually transcend via destructive upload. Analogies to
761 jumping off a diving board into a pool (which I simply /could not
762 do/ for a long time), etc.
764 ** No-Float-Ice
765 Cup that has cross beams at the bottom where ice forms. Then when
766 you drink liquid from the glass, the ice stays at the bottom and
767 doesn't hit your lips. For bars and fancy things.
769 ** Bitcoins for Immigrants
770 A common case with Mexican immigrants (illegal or not) is that they
771 want to send money they've earned in the US back to their families
772 in Mexico. They currently do this through things like Money Gram or
773 Western Union, and they get fleeced in the process with
774 fees. Bitcoin could greatly reduce the cost of sending money from
775 America to Mexico, but I don't believe that it's currently used for
776 that among Mexican immigrants currently due to lack of knowledge. I
777 bet you could set up physical locations like those obnoxious
778 Western Union huts in places like Texas, Arizona, etc, and greatly
779 undercut them. Or, perhaps some educational seminars about bitcoin
780 might be in order. There's some money to be made there because
781 there is great demand, and it's a good thing to boot!
783 ** Reverse Eye-Tracking
784 A painting that is actually a digital screen with a camera. It
785 records people's eye tracks permanently. It's "artistic" because
786 paintings are normally these things that you look at without
787 changing, but this one is changed the second you look at it,
788 recording where /you/ looked forever for others to see. Make it be
789 a painting of a woman and see the trolling as the breasts and groin
790 area light up with interest from all the males passing by. Then
791 watch as the painting turns into a commentary on perception and
792 popularity -- a sort of eigenvector of perception! Will all
793 paintings turn into the same thing eventually?
795 ** Smart Toilets
796 Instead of using indirect measures like infrared detectors of the
797 presence of a person, use computer vision to directly measure
798 whether the toilet needs to be flushed. I think a lot of things
799 will end up going this way as we get better computer vision.
801 ** Validate Chemopreservation
802 Chemopreservation is difficult to validate because it destroys the
803 functionality of a brain, and brain simulation will take a long
804 time to mature as a technology. However, one very powerful way to
805 validate chemopreservation would be to have a person/animal learn
806 something with high complexity such as a number or the solution to
807 a maze, or a flashbulb memory. Then you preserve their brain
808 chemically, slice it up, and read /that specific memory/ from the
809 detailed brain scan. Much more difficult, but much more doable.
811 ** Candy Screw
812 Edible candy screw with candy nuts that you can screw as well.
814 ** Better Bibliography
815 When writing a thesis or paper, have the bibliography not just be
816 an opaque list of resources, but have it be a list of /summaries/
817 and /qualities/ that each paper has in the context of the paper
818 being written. When examining a bibliography, I want to know if
819 reading the papers in the bibliography are worth my time, and I
820 also am probably also interested in exactly the things that are
821 being discussed in the paper I'm reading. The bibliography is the
822 perfect place to provide information about the referenced papers
823 from the author's perspective. I will use this biographic form in
824 my own thesis!
826 ** Chess Visual
827 To show the vast size of the game trees considered by computers,
828 show two people playing chess in a void. They are floating in
829 space, and there is a simple chess board between them. Then, as
830 they play, the game tree's they are considering are drawn behind
831 him. The root of the tree starts centered in their heads or
832 whatever they use to think, and the tree grows out from behind,
833 never crossing the dividing plane between the two players. Each
834 player's tree is a different color. As they grow, there are
835 animations for pruning, etc. Eventually, they look like the
836 hemispheres of a brain, wings, etc. A human's tree might
837 occasionally have a long chain, while the computer tree would be
838 more uniform. You could compare deep blue and a modern laptop. Use
839 actual data when fighting two computers!
841 ** Tamper Proof Gold Bars
842 [[Http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/gold-plated-tungsten-alloy-bar.html][This site]] offers gold plated tungsten bars as "novelty" items. One
843 reason to prefer coins is because they are much harder to
844 counterfeit because there is less surface area to mass
845 ratio. However, gold bars are still a great design because they can
846 hold a lot of value in a small space. A gold bar could be given the
847 same protections (and more) that gold coins have to offer by
848 changing it into a "gold book", which would have hundreds of
849 "pages" of gold bound together. This could be implemented with
850 multiple steel rods going through the book which can be removed, or
851 some more classier mechanism for holding the pages. The point is
852 that the bar can be EASILY subdivided (and people would perform
853 this test before buying), thus guaranteeing it's authenticity.
855 ** High School Science
856 This is a lesson in scientific ethics. The goal is to calculate
857 /g/, the local gravitational acceleration. The students are told
858 that the textbook says it's /exactly/ 9.81 before they start the
859 experiment. See how they doctor their results to get closer to the
860 textbook value. It's neat because for any given school, /g/ is
861 probably *not* exactly equal to 9.81, because that is just an
862 average!
864 ** Opencourseware Subtitles
865 There are people who type up lectures at MIT while they are being
866 given, so that hearing impared students can follow along. These
867 recordings should be kept and given to OCW for subtitles. If the
868 timestamps of keys are recorded, then it is easy to make subtitles.
870 ** Screen Locking Timing
871 You use your computer camera to see if you are sitting in front of
872 the computer. If you are, then the screen will never lock. If you
873 are, then the screen will lock with a 30-40 second timeout. It's an
874 extension of using inactivity to initiate the countdown, just with
875 more information.
877 ** Mirror Toilet
878 A toilet with a square basin made of mirror instead of
879 porcelain. That way, you can see how good of a wipe job you have
880 done / watch how your excretion system works.
882 ** X-ray telepresence
883 given that a doctor is operating on a patient via telepresence, one
884 cool things you can do is shine X-rays into the patient to view the
885 insides during real time. (This doesn't expose either the doctor or
886 patient to chronically damaging amounts of X-rays) If the system
887 was coupled with a Bayesian model of the layout of the structure,
888 and the x-rays were only fired whenever the uncertainty of the
889 model reached a certain threshold, then the radiation damage and
890 surgery risk could be minimized.
892 ** Superfluid Vascular System
893 I wonder what would happen if you replaced the blood in a human
894 with a superfluid. What would the physical dynamics be? Would the
895 superfluid flow through the vasculature, or would it ignore it and
896 travel through the cells, or something else entirely. Since
897 superfluids need to be cold to retain their superfluidity, how
898 would the dynamics change during perfusion of a superfluid, where
899 the fluid gains and looses superfluidity as it goes deeper into the
900 body and is cooled by superfluid from upstream. In summary there
901 are two things to simulate 1.) replace all blood in human with
902 superfluid instantly. 2.) perfuse superfluid into human.
904 ** Projective Guessing
905 I think that we read and see things by making a really good guess
906 about what we're expecting to see, and then searching for our guess
907 in what we see. If it really doesn't match, then we start to make
908 more guesses / analyze the image from first principles, but most
909 stuff is projective guessing.
911 ** Intestinal Flora Maintenance
912 Why not inoculate babies at birth with "ideal" gut flora instead of
913 whatever bullshit they naturally get, thus giving them optimal
914 digestive/nutrient extraction capabilities. Might also be able to
915 make their farts not stink for life, too. MORE IMPORTANTLY, might
916 help to preventatively stop some forms of /colic/, which affects 1
917 in 5 babies and causes constant screaming and pain for about 5
918 weeks.
920 ** Server Culture -- Mirrors
921 Make a distributed system where people can mirror the websites of
922 people they like -- essentially cover the server costs of favored
923 websites. This could make popular websites run at no cost. The
924 system would require that the mirrored content be the same as the
925 official source. Sort of like bit-torrent for websites.
927 ** Map Programming
928 One problem with functional programming is that in order to remain
929 functional, you have to pass up arguments up into each calling
930 function to get the full range of behavior from the lower level
931 functions. Normally people come to a compromise involving
932 abstraction and sparing use of dynamic variables to configure
933 runtime behavior. What would be the advantages of making a
934 programming language where every function receives one argument, a
935 map, which contains all the symbol bindings it would ever need?
936 This map is passed on to all subordinate functions. This way, you
937 could replace functions on the fly, and arrange for there to be
938 sensible defaults, etc. Might cause more harm than good but is an
939 interesting idea.
941 ** Rest Nest
942 A small EEG device you would attach to your head when you go to
943 sleep at night. ML algorithms would determine your particular sleep
944 cycles. This would mostly be an alarm clock that you could give a
945 time range, say 7:00AM - 7:15AM, and it would wake you up during an
946 ideal time corresponding to then end of one of your 90 min sleep
947 cycles. You would feel much more rested upon waking up, and would
948 wake up faster. There might be some other uses for the EEG data as
949 well.
951 ** Image Compression
952 Use a library like gimp or opencv to process an image to make it
953 have less entropy, then store the reverse of those operations along
954 with the compressed simpler image as a super-compressed image file
955 (possibly accepting some losses). Trades file size for
956 decompression time, and allows one to cheat by using information in
957 gimp/opencv to compress the image.
959 ** Aldehyde-Stabalized Cryopreservation
960 Why not use a fixative to buy enough time to ramp up
961 cryoprotectants to an acceptable level at room temperature? Then,
962 the whole system can be rapidly cooled and vitrified. This method
963 "severs the biological link" in that the fixatives are highly
964 toxic, but current vitrification procedures do this anyway since
965 there can be a lot of freezing damage.
967 ** Dilated Security Camera
968 A security camera that would capture full video footage of
969 everything at 60fps but then decide to keep only every 1 frame
970 every 5 seconds unless there's something "interesting" happening.
972 ** Bitcoin Wallet
973 Part of "server culture", this would be something like
974 "coin.your-domain.com" which would serve as your personal trusted
975 access to your own bitcoins from anywhere.
977 ** Libpay
978 This would be a free library which would enable micro-donations to
979 software projects and other projects, so that you could donate a
980 penny to "emacs" and it would be automatically split up to every
981 person who has ever contributed to emacs in proportion to the
982 amount of community esteem, code quantity, bugs fixed, whatever the
983 community decides. This might make it possible for programmers to
984 live entirely off of free programming.
986 ** Pronouns
987 Use capital letters A-Z instead of pronouns. They solve pronoun
988 referents and gender neutrality, are short to say, and you can
989 encode useful information into the choice of letter. For example,
990 instead of "Meetings shall be presided over by the president,
991 unless she is absent." USE "Meetings shall be presided over by the
992 president, unless P is absent." We already use this a little, since
993 I and U are reserved for the subject and object respectively.
995 ** Phone DSP
996 Software app that inserts an audio DSP between the input to a phone
997 and the output. The DSP is delicious and configurable, and can
998 allow men to make their voices deeper, etc. The app would allow you
999 to hear your own voice as others hear it. Most people hate how
1000 their own voice sounds. The app would also allow one to immediately
1001 change the parameters of the DSP using good presets.
1003 ** Restaurant Receipts
1004 Use a carbon copy receipt instead of two stupid copies.
1006 ** Crossdressing
1007 Easiest way to disguise oneself as a woman is to wear a burka.
1009 ** Book-Mode
1010 Intelligent color highlighting for books and articles. It would
1011 disambiguate pronouns and involved references. For example, if
1012 "Rachael" was assigned the color red, and "the blonde haired girl"
1013 refers to "Rachael", then "the blonde haired girl" would be colored
1014 red. Also, you could disambiguate multi part run-on sentences by
1015 highlighting each subcomponent. Maybe would also have applications
1016 to scientific reading.
1018 ** Handheld Light Rain Measurement
1019 This would be a clear, teflon coated plastic disk with a camera
1020 underneath the disk. You would be able to hold the device out and
1021 it would measure the rate of accumulation of water droplets from
1022 fine mists and light rain by using computer vision to measure the
1023 diameters of the drops.
1025 ** Big Brother Farming
1026 This would be a vision system that would individually monitor each
1027 plant and turn on water, etc to ensure maximum/uniform growth for
1028 each plant.
1030 ** Discrete Faucet
1031 A faucet with discrete ticks instead of continuous.
1033 ** Laser Circle
1034 Take a glass microfiliment and shine a laser at one end at an
1035 oblique angle. It will make a perfect, large circle on the wall,
1036 converting a laser beam into a laser cone, preserving most of the
1037 energy of the laser.
1039 ** Invisible Glass
1040 Take a container of liquid and embed a glass sculpture made out of
1041 glass that has exactly the same index of refraction and color of
1042 the liquid. Then the sculpture will be totally invisible in the
1043 container, and will only be revealed when the liquid is
1044 drained. The container might be a fancy wine/spirit bottle or an
1045 hourglass.
1047 ** Caterpillar people
1048 A race of caterpillar like creatures gains intelligence after eons
1049 of predation by birds, etc. These caterpillar creatures still
1050 undergo metamorphosis into a large butterfly-like creature. The
1051 metamorphosis process turns the caterpillar's brain into mush and
1052 reforms it into a minimal, dumb, truly insect-like mind, completely
1053 destroying the person the caterpillar was. The society develops all
1054 sorts of customs and religious interpretations of the
1055 metamorphosis. It is viewed as good and natural by some since it is
1056 part of their life cycle and necessary to propagate the species, as
1057 only the butterflies can mate. Some think that the butterflies are
1058 still the same person because they have the same soul, even they no
1059 longer posses the memories or personality of the original
1060 caterpillar. Some see the butterfly form as the "true form" of the
1061 species, since the butterflies can fly, mate, and are
1062 beautiful. Many make a big deal out of the fact that 1-2% of the
1063 caterpillar's mind is actually preserved in the butterfly. Some see
1064 it as a terrible tragedy and argue that the caterpillars should try
1065 to stop the metamorphosis by technology. Practically, some very
1066 important members of society undergo hormone therapy and/or surgery
1067 to prevent metamorphosis so that they can live longer as
1068 themselves.
1070 This is a continuation of Marvin Minsky's ideas about pain being
1071 something that preserves our bodies while destroying our minds,
1072 something that is a remnant from our too harsh animal days that
1073 hasn't caught up to the fact that we have very complex brains
1074 now. It's a worst-case scenario about a maladaptive genetic
1075 legacy. Also, it's inspired by "There She Is!!!", which makes a
1076 compelling point about homosexuality by introducing a second gender
1077 characteristic (bunny/cat, male/female), which makes homophobia
1078 look very silly. Here, our own biological legacy of pain and death
1079 is made to look like the tragedy it is through the lens of the the
1080 caterpillar people.
1082 ** Relationships as a Business
1083 [[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx][Turnover-Crisis]] is an excellent talk about the "culture of
1084 quitting," which is about better business by letting people go
1085 instead of keeping them around past their "apex". Focuses on
1086 information transfer. Cool idea of an alumni network, which for
1087 relationships would be a group of satisfied ex-lovers, who would
1088 recommend new people your way, and who might consider coming to you
1089 again, refreshed from their time away with new
1090 stories/experiences. I should look for examples of this and how
1091 they worked out.
1093 ** Psychic Crystal
1094 In a science fiction story, this would be an object that is very
1095 easy to move physically but is extremely difficult to move with
1096 telekinesis.
1098 ** True Reflection
1099 There's a "true mirror" in the MIT student center -- it's two
1100 normal mirrors at right angles, like staring at a corner of a
1101 room. The light reflects so that it shows you what you actually
1102 look like, instead of your mirror image.
1104 ** Remote Control Wasp
1105 Use computer to drive wings with remote power/logic.
1107 ** Encrypted Email Phone Book
1108 Public (distributed?) database of email->private-key pairs, to
1109 enable automatic encryption.
1111 ** Universal Eye Color
1112 Every equivalent creature will see each others' eyes as black --
1113 it's universal. Even if the creatures see in radio waves, and their
1114 eyes are 2m long pieces of jagged metal, when those creatures look
1115 at each other, they will see black, the absence of light and color
1116 (since it's being absorbed by the sensor array).
1118 ** Intelligent Microwave
1119 It learns where the hot nodes of its fields are, and uses them to
1120 evenly heat any food item. It has an infrared camera or something
1121 to keep track of how hot the food is. That way, you don't get bowls
1122 where the edges are boiling, while the center is still
1123 frozen. Requires a little bit of intelligence/vision, since the
1124 exact pattern of heating totally depends on the exact shape of the
1125 food. Wouldn't need a carousel, and wouldn't need a timer, just a
1126 desired temperature. Could also detect ice, and automatically
1127 defrost the parts which are frozen. Might be able to work much
1128 faster since it can avoid overheating; might have problems with
1129 heating the insides of thick things, might need a weight sensor
1130 too.
1132 *+* Would be much cleaner than other microwaves, since food would
1133 "sputter" and splash liquid much less.
1135 *+* Throw in some SIFT+R processing to match previously cooked
1136 foods and learn the exact heating profiles for things that have
1137 been cooked before -- it can get faster the more it's used.
1139 ** Flesh Pillow
1140 A pillow like the arm or torso of a human, complete with simulated
1141 temperature, bones, and heartbeat.
1143 ** Light Filter
1144 Works like light-tweezers to mechanically separate fluids with
1145 different indexes of refraction.
1147 ** Silver Socks
1148 Socks laced with silver for the antimicrobial properties.
1150 ** Rod of Moses
1151 Device to distill urine through evaporation and easily dispose of
1152 urea crystals for use in desert -- produce drinkable water and live
1153 an extra few days!
1155 ** Lottery Scraper
1156 Web scraper which monitors various lotteries, looking for "special"
1157 gimmick changes in the rules (like 4x winnings on Wednesdays) and
1158 computes expected value...
1160 ** Memristiors Novel Design
1161 Make an evolutionary algorithm to make old stuff using all four
1162 basic circuit elements.
1164 ** Conductive Concrete
1165 Concrete that has embedded metal fibers so that it can conduct
1166 electricity.
1168 ** Little Bitty Melting Pot
1169 Might be useful for some types of manufacturing/3D printing -- how
1170 small can an induction melter be made, for example.
1172 ** True Pure Tones
1173 Hear a true pure tone by direct stimulation of the nerves of the
1174 ear. Like when Adelson "saw green".
1176 ** Mechanical analogue to the electrical op-amp
1177 would be an object with two levers -- you pull on one lever and the
1178 other moves the same way, no matter what's in the way or what it is
1179 driving. This analogy could be useful to teach op amps to people.
1181 ** Light Capacitor
1182 Suspend some ball of material with a high index of refraction and
1183 shine light into it so it gets stuck -- would the light stay
1184 trapped forever? Could you build up unlimited quantities of light
1185 inside the sphere (which could then be released slowly by
1186 frustrated internal reflection?
1188 ** Reading Comprehension
1189 use the screen capture routine to make a quiz program that
1190 constructs questions about the content you seemed to gloss over
1191 while reading. could be easy if the pdf came with embedded
1192 questions. Dylan: automatically generate word-cloud about the
1193 parts you found most interesting; help others who read the same
1194 stuff by drawing attention to the interesting parts.
1196 ** Optimize an Article
1197 Capture reading of a scientific article via screen capture while
1198 people read it, then use it to make the article better. like the
1199 movie-pruning idea.
1201 ** Movie Pruning
1202 Movies always are too long at first. One way to shorten them
1203 ``scientifically" is to record blink rate during the move and then
1204 remove / shorten the frames of the parts in which there are a lot
1205 of blinking (average this over multiple people) better yet, put it
1206 online and do it across thousands of people. I got this from
1207 youtube in which there is an episode of kill bill which is composed
1208 entirely of the parts in which people had their eyes
1209 closed. slogan: want to make a movie people can't take their eyes
1210 off of? Just take those parts out!
1212 ** Explosive Thermite Epoxy Putty
1213 One part would contain the rust, one part the aluminum.
1215 ** Concrete Epoxy
1216 Epoxy with sand/ some other solid material.
1218 ** Hard Sword
1219 Make a samurai sword, but use osmiridum instead of martensite for
1220 the cutting part; it should be a better sword.
1222 ** Close Range Wireless
1223 use the induction technology used to recharge electric toothbrushes
1224 with no metal links to send data without any metal at all!
1226 ** Perfect Pitch
1227 Learn perfect pitch using another sense in combination (sight or
1228 touch).
1230 ** Bio Metallic Structure
1231 Metal grids with seeds inside, which grow together and form a
1232 durable biological matrix. The metal substrate delivers
1233 water. (maybe use plastic instead of metal?) Dylan: enrich plants
1234 with inorganic compounds; electrical interfaces in cellular plant
1235 matter => remote-controlled photosynthetic/bioluminescent
1236 structures.
1238 ** Conducting Extracellular Matrix
1239 To allow better control of organic systems and an enhanced nervous
1240 system.
1242 ** Cross-Modal Memory Hashing
1243 A way to retrieve memories more robustly.
1245 ** Greener than Green
1246 If you stare at a red light, then you get a green after-image. If
1247 you immediately look at something green while still seeing the
1248 green after-image, you will experience a Green like none you've
1249 ever seen before -- color so intense it's beyond the range of
1250 anything that exists in the world.
1252 ** Wooden Refrigerator
1253 To give food a better taste Dylan: like barrels for wine, or planks
1254 for salmon. Maybe just have "flavor planks" for your pre-existing
1255 fridge. Need to mitigate effect of temperature on volatility?
1257 ** Radioactive Transmutation Molecule by Molecule
1258 Create precious metals or something else economically
1259 advantageous. Best transmutation I can come up with is mercury into
1260 gold, but it's not economically viable.
1262 ** Preservation Via Crowding
1263 Inoculate food with tons of harmless bacteria so that there's no
1264 room for bad bacteria as a method of preservation
1266 ** Old-School Preservation
1267 Pasteur - style holding jar with siphon as a way to store
1268 sterilized liquids at room temperature indefinitely w/o
1269 refrigeration.
1271 ** Restaurant Policy
1272 Throw rude people out of restaurant as a matter of course -- make
1273 ambiance much better.
1275 ** Clean Windows
1276 Make something that mixes soap with fire hydrant water (and reduces
1277 the pressure a bit) and use it to clean windows of buildings.
1279 ** Ocarina
1280 Make an ocarina out of pure silver. Might have really good acoustic
1281 properties.
1283 ** Fire Pen
1284 Pen which burns words on to the page, thus never needing any
1285 ink. Is there a way to make it runnable from body heat?
1287 ** Website to Design Your Own Soda
1288 and label, and have it mailed to you / sell it from your own online
1289 store.
1291 ** Ocean Power
1292 Solar panels that float on the ocean.
1294 ** Handcuffs with More Than Two Cuffs (3?)
1295 Great for daisy chaining people, binding them to environment, etc.
1297 ** Vector Based SOUND Files
1298 Like the pictures but with SOUND. codify sound in a language with
1299 enough symbols so that it can describe everything and encode it in
1300 that. would be like going from speech to text or smtg. Could also
1301 store sound as an image of the wavefront encoded as a vector image.
1303 ** Genetically Engineered Glowing Fruit
1304 They have some animals that can glow, but glowing fruit that you
1305 eat would be AWESOME!
1307 ** The Body as a Key to Memory
1308 IF memories are encoded using particular sensory impressions, what
1309 happens if the sensory organ itself changes? those memories would
1310 become inaccessible. maybe this is why we can't remember much from
1311 our childhoods. also, could this happen throughout life as well?
1312 Could S remember stuff from his childhood?
1314 ** Lighter Flint on Spring
1315 Make hot, throw it at something, and it makes sparkles!
1317 ** Rare Bubbles
1318 Engineer a material which has both ductility and high surface
1319 tension to make the "third" minimal-surface-energy solution to a
1320 bubble suspended between two equal-diameter rings. (Solutions are
1321 cylindrical catenary curve, two separated half-bubbles, and a
1322 double-cone)
1324 ** Magic Textbook
1325 whose content can be varied continuously alter level of difficulty,
1326 rigor, diction, emphasize crossover with certain other discipline,
1327 etc. Content generated dynamically from knowledge base, along with
1328 questions that are moreover altered to guide knowledge
1329 acquisition. Motivation: One book of knowledge. /One./
1332 #+BEGIN_HTML
1333 <p class="end"> Still want more? Visit the <a href="./ideas.html">Raw
1334 Ideas</a> page, but prepare for extreme half-bakedness. </p>
1335 #+END_HTML