#+title: Big List O' Ideas

 #+author: Robert McIntyre

 #+email: rlm@mit.edu

 #+description: list of ideas from Robert McIntyre

 #+keywords: aurellem ideas half-baked random

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

   down for the past ~ 10 years. Some of them could be practical

   inventions and are "just" waiting for that 95% perspiration to bring

   them to fruition, some are ideas for science fiction, and some are

   simple observations.  They are arranged roughly in reverse

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

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

   time at MIT, the ones at the top, by my time at 21st Century Medicine.

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

   #+begin_quote

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

   getting credit.

   #+end_quote

 

 

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 ** The Ocean Becomes a Drop 

    Upload faces challenges to grow into they type of person that can

    join the greater society -- a god. They have to go though quests

    that replicate all the things that humanity had to accomplish, like

    going to the moon, by themselves.

 

 ** Butterfly Drone

    If big butterflies used to exist, then maybe we could make

    butterfly-inspired drones!

 

 ** Methylation Sex-Symmetry Breaking

    Human sex cells have methylation patterns that encode male/female

    origin. If you combine two male patterns, the fetus grows "too

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

    "vegatable" state and fail to develop. Evolutionary biologists say

    that this reflects the asymmetry of energy investement for creating

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

    this asymmetry, and give clues about how to remove it in humans. If

    even cast spawners like sea urchins have it, then that means

    there's something deeper going on!

 

 ** Homosexual Reproduction

    You take genetic material from two males and put it into an egg

    cell that has had all genetic material removed. Or, you take the

    genetic material from one egg and put it in another egg. This would

    allow homosexual couples to genetically reproduce. One technical

    challenge blocking this technique is that human gametes have

    methylation patterns that encode male/female origin, and only a

    male+female pattern gives rise to viable offspring. You could

    "recondition" male / female gametes to give them the opposite

    pattern, perhaps by incubating them in the appropriate

    environment. You also could try taking stem cells and making them

    form the appropriate structures in vitro.

 

 ** Poly-Vitrification

    Large molecules such as PVP are able to vitrify at around -20C, and

    at farily small concentrations. IF they could be introduced into

    cells, they would be quite useful as vitrification agents. However,

    it's difficult to get them in because they are so big. So instead,

    use smaller agents which combine together into polymers at low

    temperature. In particular, Fructose, trehalose, and glycerol seem

    to have the desired properties (though you need to make versions of

    fructose and trehalose that can penetrate).

 

 ** Whole Brain Perfusion Embedding

    Do the standard EM embedding protocol, but skip the osmium step,

    and use the "perfusion pausing" method to prevent overextraction

    during the dehydration and embedding steps. I think that you can

    perfuse resins into the brain, simply because you can perfuse

    viscous rubber when doing vascular casts.

 

 ** Very Slow Physiological Pressure Perfusion

    Less extreme example of the "perfusion pausing" trick -- just keep

    the perfusion running and don't put the perfusion target into the

    liquid as deep.

 

 ** Perfusion Pausing

    One problem with doing perfusion of heads / organs where the veins

    freely leak fluid is that if you STOP the perfusion, you rapidly

    loose pressure in the organ as your perfusate leaks out. You can

    prevent this by submerging the organ/head/rat whatever in fluid at

    an appropriate deepness. You would have to slowly decrease the flow

    rate while simultaneously lowering the perfusing object into the

    fluid. To start again, reverse the process -- reengage the

    peristaltic pump slowly while removing the organ from the fluid.

 

 ** Textbook Mimiricy Evolution

    As surgery becomes more common, there develops a distinct selective

    pressure for individuals' organ layouts to look more like the

    medical textbooks!

 

 ** Transparent Skin

    Temporary / permament transparent skin. Allows for examination of

    organs / muscles and visual prevention of disease and detection or

    abnormalities / good things eg. excercise optimization.

 

 ** Sweet Information

    Candy with a whole book written in it. Eat a book!

 

 ** Targeted Immunosuppressant

    Just kill off the B-cells and friends that would cause problems in

    a organ-transplant / other situation. AIDS is good at killing these

    cells -- maybe make it can be modified to just target the ones that

    will cause problems. Then you can premptively kill off that part of

    someone's immune system before a transplant. ALSO, you can kill off

    everyone's defenses against other blood types and make people

    effectively type AB+ w.r.t blood transfusions. Actually, why not

    give babies this treatment so that they're automatically compatable

    with all blood types?  It would be like a blood transfusion

    vaccine. The immune system does this already when it's first

    growing; maybe it can be "retrained" to accept new things, or the

    mechanism of immune cell death be co-opted for these purposes.

 

 ** Fuck-you Tetris

    Tetris that actively gives you the worst possible piece.

 

 ** Pockets

    More things should have them! Chairs, tables, cups, hats,

    trashcans, basically anything is better with a pocket.

 

 ** Colored Shower Head

    A shower head add-on that measures the temp of the water and

    changes the color of the water streams w/ an LED to show you the

    temperature. That way you can align to the color you want and see

    the temperature without feeling it.

 

 ** Giant Dragonflies

    We could rapidly MAKE giant dragonflies by evolving modern

    dragonflies in an very oxygen rich environment!

 

 ** Whirlpool of Light

    Shine a laser out into space. But the planet is spinning! What you

    get is a spiral of light! And as this signal expands, does it

    eventually reveal it's quantized nature?

 

 ** Perfusion Cooking

    You do cardiac bypass on an animal like a pig, then pump in tasty,

    tasty perfusate (like marinade) into the animal's

    vasculature. Then, you switch out to saline and increase the

    temperature of the saline to rapidly and uniformly cook the

    animal. It could be the tastiest meat ever!

 

 ** Timestamp Verification

    You sign your message, and it has a timestamp at the top, with a +-

    percision number.  Then you send it over to the public timestamp

    server, which only signs the message if it gets the message within

    the timestamp window. Or the computer just signs the message but

    puts a timestamp at the beginning. So if everyone trusts the

    timestamp server, you can get reliable timestamps, and prove

    priority on ideas, etc.

 

 ** The Great Computing Slow-Down

    In general, our computers are getting faster and faster according

    to Moore's law. However, eventually our brains will be made of the

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

    consequences -- I can add 2+2 and get four in about a second. Since

    my neurons actually work at around 10-60 hertz in parallel, this

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

    addition. That's actually not bad in terms of computing time. If my

    neurons were as fast as the latest transitors, then most

    calculators (made with earlier transistors) would be SLOWER than me

    at adding numbers. Only the newest, most optimized calculators

    would be faster, and then only about 10 times faster!  This means

    that once we begin to think at the speed of our technology, that

    technology will suddenly seem pitifully slow in comparison to how

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

    because that same progress will also make us all think

    faster. We'll either have to settle with living in "slow time" to

    do some computations, or learn to make smarter hardware with

    special optimizations. But this is actually really hard, because

    we'll be working with machines that will appear to us about as fast

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

    will be in cyperspace at vastly accelerated speeds compared to how

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

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

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

    of rickety old mechanical parts form our perspective.

 

 ** Unitary Reverse Evolution of Chaos+Minds

    Chaotic systems diverge exponentially in state space. Do you get

    anything interesting when part of the physical system associated

    with the chaotic system is a object that performs some sort of

    computation? Is it possible for the computational system to play a

    percision-enabling role in determining the final/initial conditions

    of the chaotic system, just by tracing out thoughts in its decision

    paths? This is probably too vague of an idea right now, I just

    wanted to write it down.

 

 ** Microwave-Time

    The cooking time you enter on most microwaves is insane. It's

    expressed in what I call a "hybrid base", a combination of base 10

    and base 60. You can get absurd things like 100 < 61, and 120 ==

    80! I wonder if these hybrid base systems could be very useful for

    some purposes!

 

 ** Three Eyes

    If you had three eyes, would you still draw cubes like we currently

    draw them? Or would all 2D-representations of 3D space always look

    hopelessly fake?

 

 ** Digital Taste/Smell Assay

    Get a grid of bacteria, each expressing a human taste/smell

    receptor linked to some sort of fluorscent activity or ion

    pump. Use a camera / electrical grid to transduce the smell / taste

    signal into bits! Inspired by gel-sight from MIT.

 

 ** Childrens' Tool Shop

    I think that kids should be provided with tool shops -- these would

    be nice sheds with a good collection of tools to do various things

    -- circuit components and soldering irons, wires, a small lathe,

    drill press, belt sander, a centrifuge, microscope, and telescope,

    etc. The idea is that the kid can now think, "I could use X to do

    this thing that I'm thinking about" -- the building becomes an

    extension of the kid's body & mind.

 

 ** Fluid Display

    Like the previous idea about matching refractances between glass

    and liquid, except you make a lot of switchable glass tubes in

    various patterns in the glass, and actively pump colored liquid

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

    default.) The result is that you can cause the tubes to appear and

    dissappear, and vary their colors as well!

 

 ** Immunoincompatibility

    Take the human genome, and refactor it so that it doesn't use a

    particular codon at all. Then remove the support from our ribosomes

    for that codon. What does this do for us? It makes us immune to

    almost all viruses! There is at least one bacteria that already

    does this to great effect.

 

 ** Life Cycle

    It's called a cycle, right? So, the thing that repeats itself over

    and over, right? Not much of a cycle if you don't come back after

    you die, if you ask me!

 

 ** Car with no Blind Spots

    Use some cameras in the back of the car to augment the rear-view

    mirror so that you never have to turn around in order to lane

    change.

 

 ** Metabolic Windows and Freezing

    You freeze a set of cells using some cryo protocol and 60%

    survive. How can this be explained? It seems to me that if the

    cells are the same, and the conditions homogoneous, then all the

    cells should either die or live. However, suppose that there is a

    metabolic cycle that needs to be in a certain phase for the cell to

    survive. If the cells are asynchronous, then you might end up with

    some cells dying because there were in the wrong part of their

    cycle. This implies that you might be able to cryoprotect cells by

    causing them to enter a certain metabolic mode before freezing.

 

 ** Cryonics Color Appeal

    Perfusate used by cryonics companies could have red food coloring

    in it. It's just a nice touch so that the cryonics patient looks

    more life-like than with clear CPAs, and hopefully might get

    treated with more respect.

 

 ** Paramagnetic CPA

    you take a CPA that can be influenced by magnetic fields so that

    its degrees of freedom are limited. Then, you release the field,

    instantaly increasing the size of the state space of the system and

    dramatically decreasing the temperature enough to plunge the system

    past homogenous nucleation temperature and directly to the glass

    transition temperature, creating a doubly unstable glass at much

    lower CPA concentrations than possible at conventional CPA

    concentrations. A major technical limitation facing this technique

    is that it's a very minor effect -- you can only get about 0.1C

    with most systems that have been studied so far.

 

 ** Room Temp Ramen

    How does the physics of cooking noodles work?  Could you use a

    vacuum instead of heat to force water into the noodle?

 

 ** Personal Carbon Offset

    Feel bad about contribuiting to global warming by using electricity

    / driving a car? Forget trying to "conserve" or "minimize your

    carbon footprint". Follow the Platinum rule -- make the world

    BETTER off than you found it!  This would be a small, self

    contained system that sucks C02 out of the air. It uses

    electricity, but it's so efficient at removing CO2 that it more

    than offsets the CO2 produced by even a coal plant to produce that

    electricity. This way, you can still drive even a gas guzzler, but

    have a net negative carbon footprint! Maybe something cool could be

    done with the carbon as well. Use as much electricity as you want,

    but negate the damage to the enviroment with more technology.

 

 ** Undoing Spermogenesis

    With enough sperm, you can derive the donor's entire genome. You

    gain more confidence in the alleles for a particular gene the more

    sperm you have. Each additional sperm gives you the same sort of

    information you'd get flipping a coin and trying to decide whether

    the coin is H/T of H/H. Is there enough sperm in the the average

    load for you to be as confident as mitosis?

 

 ** Mars Life

    We could engineer life that could survive on mars (probably some

    non-vascular photosynthetic poikilohydric creature like a lichen)

    by taking an extremophile from Antarctica and evolving it in

    increasingly Martian conditions. This could be an easy start to a

    terraforming process.

 

 ** Problem with Aubrey de Grey's Ideas

    Aubrey de Grey says that we might be able to live forever by

    continually repairing our bodies at the cellular level -- he

    details 7 different mechanisms of damage and says that if all of

    them are dealt with /together/ that it would stop aging. (You can't

    miss even one because they're all fatal.)  However, it doesn't take

    into account that we are also beings of information and that there

    is a very real software component to our existence. Even if our

    biological chassies can be maintained forever, I think it is

    unlikely that our minds will operate well far outside of the design

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

    webserver with the express goal of it being able to serve webpages

    for month on some stock server. I'll do fairly rigorous testing to

    make sure that it can handle the expected load then then some. Now

    say that you want to keep a particular instance of this webserver

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

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

    well be able to keep the physical computer infrastructure running

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

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

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

    constraints (think log files or some date rollover shenanigans)

    that will ultimately kill the webserver even with eternally perfect

    hardware. Do you really expect that a webserver engineered to work

    for 1 month will run for 10 years without catastrophically

    crashing? Not even Apache can do this! In fact, if I put in the

    extreme effort to make it that robust, I've wasted time that I

    could have spent on other projects by pursuing an unnecessary

    engineering goal. Likewise, human minds have only ever run for at

    most 122 years before they are destroyed due to hardware

    degradation. Fixing the hardware doesn't change any software bugs

    that are almost certainly present in the human mind. Think of all

    the pathological things that can go wrong with a webserver,

    multiply it by a million, and that likely how evolution has

    designed our minds. For example, consider memory : why should you

    expect that we have evolved the ability to coherently organize

    memories past say 150 years? There's been absolutely no selective

    pressure for this ability, so you can bet that if there's any

    fitness to be gained from not having unlimited memory potential

    (such as better metabolic efficiency), we have it! You might think

    that maybe we would just forget things the same way that we sort of

    forget things that happen earlier in our lives, but complicated

    information processing systems don't have to fail gracefully when

    they're pushed far past their design constraints. A 150 year old

    person is just as likely to suffer a catastrophic psychosis due to

    software limitations associated with memory as he is to do

    something with all those memories we might consider

    reasonable. More likely, in fact, since there are so very many ways

    for a complicated software system to break and so few ways for it

    to run successfully. Therefore, I think Aubrey de Grey's

    "hardware-only" approach is missing a very important component of

    longevity science, and any successful effort to make people live

    orders of magnitude longer than they do naturally will need to deal

    with people's software as well as their hardware.

 

 ** Validating Neurocryopreservation

    Problem : you want to test whether a brain is functionally

    preserved through vitrification, but you don't want to figure out

    how to preserve all the other organs in the animal. It might be

    possible to keep the rest of the body at almost 0C and vitrify just

    the head for only a few minutes. Induce hypothermia, then separate

    out the head's blood supply from the rest of the body, then just

    cryoptotect and vitrify the head. Might need some sort of thermal

    guard to keep the outer head / neck from becoming too cold. You

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

    cryoprotectant, and then reattach the blood supply. You can

    determine brain preservation using behavioral assays!

 

 ** Freezing Water Purifier

    You slowly freeze water, but also run liquid water over the frozen

    mass. This takes away basically all impurities and creates "washed

    ice" then you melt the ice. Maybe you could re-use the heat from

    creating the ice to melt the ice?

 

 ** Ultra Strength

    Allow a person to visualize their muscle recruitment patterns. Give

    them adrenaline and let them feel what it's like to have the normal

    limits removed. See if they can replicate the effects.

 

 ** Phone Names

    Make a PX record for domain names that's like the MX record, except

    that it is a phone number instead of an IP address. That way, you

    can use the domain name registration system to provide names for

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

    point people to your current phone number by updating that record.

 

 ** Edible Flowers

    Edible white flowers that you put in a colored solution with

    flavor. When the flower turns the right color, it is also flavored

    and ready to eat!

 

 ** Lead Bone

    Could you fill in all the empty spaces in a bone with lead? Might

    be cool!

 

 ** The Quest for Life 

    Many stories that have immortal characters have the "immortal who

    wants to become mortal" trope. I want to story where the

    protagonist loses their immortality and feels /angry/ and ashamed

    about losing something that's so absolutely crucial to their

    identity. A reverse of "death makes life worth living", they feel

    that living forever is what makes life worth living. Now they've

    "lost their sunrise" or their "connection to the timeless universe"

    or something. So they go on a quest to get it back, learning about

    themselves along the way, and regaining the precious thing they

    lost in the beginning. Which, it they can actually gain their

    immortality back, means that they never lost it in the first place!

 

 ** World Map

    Take a small table and paint the continents in toothpaste on the

    table. Make a slightly raised barrier around the table. Slowly pour

    water onto the table, and it will form the oceans!

 

 ** Stage Magic Rituals

    Rituals should incorporate elements of stage magic. For example in

    Teller's rendition of Shakespeare's Tempest, they have a scene

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

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

    bride as well. Actual weddings and other ceremonies should

    incorporate stage magic as an enhancement to the gravitas!

 

 ** Isotope Time Dilation

    Use a cyclotron to speed up rare isotopes developed in nuclear

    fusion experiments. The relativistic time dilation will stop the

    isotopes from decaying, and allow time to study them. This is based

    on radioactive isotopes that fall through the earth's atmosphere

    that take hundreds of times longer to decay than normal.

 

 ** Marsupial Stimulation

    You take a freshly pouched marsupial baby, and show it videos and

    other interactive things while it matures in the pouch. What mental

    effects would this have?

 

 ** The Dynamically Well-Tempered Clavier

    Some older ways of tuning instruments sound better, but we use the

    even-tempered scale today because it makes it easier to switch

    keys. With electronic music, why not make key-annotations and

    dynamically re-tune the piece to sound good in the current key?

    Could be done as a midi+annotation -> midi compiler for initial

    experimentation.

 

 ** Death Always Implies Damage

    is is possible for a corpse to differ from a living person only in

    the fact that one is dead and the other is alive? NO! A corpse must

    always have some sort of molecular damage which causes the loss of

    function!

 

 ** Inner Eye

    Surgically install a bunch of tiny cameras inside a person. Then,

    you can activate them all and get a picture of your internal organs

    for diagnostic purposes.

 

 ** Chaos Rails

    The homoclinic tangle (which I call the "rails of chaos") is very

    beautiful. We couldn't even visualize it before computers because

    it's so complicated! Someone should make a visualization of

    it. Here's my inital stab at it:  [[../images/rails-of-chaos.png][The Rails of Chaos]]

 

 ** Cryonics Middle Ages

    Some people say that cryonics is an experiment and that it is

    foolish to wait until we have revived a human. There is a middle

    ground where the procedure has a dismal success rate on humans, say

    1 in 20, so that you'd be a fool to try revival. Nonetheless, this

    very risky procedure could be the legal proof of concept needed to

    create a new class of life between "living" and "dead": "stasis".

 

 ** Minds and Mirrors

    Neat thought experiment -- if you take a mirror of someone by

    actually reversing a person's chirality molecule by molecule, then

    will the only be able to read mirror writing? The answer is yes, by

    analogy to a purely mechanical scan-tron device. This is one of the

    only interesting transforms I know that can take a human brain and

    change it in subtle, non-destructive ways. It's also an argument

    against dualism.

 

 ** Biosphere in a Bottle

    There are around 15 million species. 15 million stem cells will

    fill only a tiny size, far less than a cubic inch. Preserve a

    single cell from every species on earth in this small space, and

    you will have a record of our current biosphere that can be

    protected. "Hold the genetic data of all species in your hand!"

 

 ** Chaos Lock

    The "arrow of time" points in the direction of increasing

    entropy. The time evolution of chaotic systems depend exquisitely

    on their initial state. If you take a measurement of a chaotic

    system at any given point of time, you can evolve that system

    backwards or forwards based on your measurement. So let's say you

    start the chaotic system in a VERY low entropy state, then let it

    run for a while, then take a measurement with some

    uncertainty. Your measurement is pretty good, but obviously not

    PERFECT. If you evolve the chaotic system back in time, then you

    will see that you don't really reach a state with low entropy an

    hour before (the entropy is easy to measure with surrogates like

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

    accurate measurement! This potentially can give you many more

    orders of magnitude than you could get alone just using an

    instrument. Sometimes it will give you bad results, the the odds of

    it doing that are infinitesimal, and you can just measure a couple

    of times.

 

 ** Cryo Evolution

    Perhaps there would be a way to rapidly evolve a symbiotic

    bacterial organism that could protect human tissues from freezing

    damage.

 

 ** Suicide Parasite

    Sometimes, people kill themselves for no good reason. We often

    explain this with things like "hidden depression" or we say that

    they had something like chronic jaw or back pain. I think that

    smells of rationalization. I don't buy it. I propose that in many

    suicide cases there is a disease that causes the suicidal

    behavior. We already know that certain parasites have mind-bending

    properties in other animals, even mammals like mice. It's not much

    of a stretch to imagine a parasite that causes suicides in

    humans. Some problems:

 

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

    answered by the whole thing being a glitch caused by cross-species

    contamination. Toxoplasma works this way.

 

    *What predictions does a disease model make* : suicide should be

    more common among people who share a contagion vector. There should

    be suicides that don't make any sense : people who weren't really

    depressed, who had no reason to kill themselves. People who have

    killed themselves should have a higher incidence of some unknown

    parasite in their brains.

 

 ** Domestic Insects

    People should eat more bugs because they're much more efficient, so

    why not do some major domestication research to make very appealing

    bugs? Beetles, in particular, seem to be excellent targets for

    domestication because they have extreme levels of genetic

    malleability. Remember that lobster was once seen as an animal only

    fit for prisoners to consume!

 

 ** Birth-Clones

    What if each person was intentionally split at birth into a normal

    embryo and a few "backup" cells which are then frozen. The backup

    cells are created just the same way as natural identical twins. The

    backups can be used to regenerate organs. etc. Also, it would be a

    good sci-fi concept, because you could have a culture where people

    reward people who were especially awesome are "reborn" from their

    backups. Imagine having a young Bach every generation, etc.

 

 ** Pronunciation Guide

    A simple webpage where you type in a word and it returns a simple,

    English sentence describing exactly how to pronounce the word. For

    people who don't want to learn IPA.

 

 ** Learning to Teleport

    This is a story about a person who is struggling with his/her

    society's ideas about teleportation. It's considered a fundamental

    part of being a member of that society (after all, the difference

    between animals and humans is that humans are creatures of pure

    information while animals are burdened with base matter, "that's

    how you travel the stars, etc") Humans are born normally, grow up,

    and then eventually transcend via destructive upload. Analogies to

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

    do/ for a long time), etc.

 

 ** No-Float-Ice

    Cup that has cross beams at the bottom where ice forms. Then when

    you drink liquid from the glass, the ice stays at the bottom and

    doesn't hit your lips. For bars and fancy things.

 

 ** Bitcoins for Immigrants

    A common case with Mexican immigrants (illegal or not) is that they

    want to send money they've earned in the US back to their families

    in Mexico. They currently do this through things like Money Gram or

    Western Union, and they get fleeced in the process with

    fees. Bitcoin could greatly reduce the cost of sending money from

    America to Mexico, but I don't believe that it's currently used for

    that among Mexican immigrants currently due to lack of knowledge. I

    bet you could set up physical locations like those obnoxious

    Western Union huts in places like Texas, Arizona, etc, and greatly

    undercut them. Or, perhaps some educational seminars about bitcoin

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

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

 

 ** Reverse Eye-Tracking

    A painting that is actually a digital screen with a camera. It

    records people's eye tracks permanently. It's "artistic" because

    paintings are normally these things that you look at without

    changing, but this one is changed the second you look at it,

    recording where /you/ looked forever for others to see. Make it be

    a painting of a woman and see the trolling as the breasts and groin

    area light up with interest from all the males passing by. Then

    watch as the painting turns into a commentary on perception and

    popularity -- a sort of eigenvector of perception! Will all

    paintings turn into the same thing eventually?

 

 ** Smart Toilets

    Instead of using indirect measures like infrared detectors of the

    presence of a person, use computer vision to directly measure

    whether the toilet needs to be flushed. I think a lot of things

    will end up going this way as we get better computer vision.

 

 ** Validate Chemopreservation

    Chemopreservation is difficult to validate because it destroys the

    functionality of a brain, and brain simulation will take a long

    time to mature as a technology. However, one very powerful way to

    validate chemopreservation would be to have a person/animal learn

    something with high complexity such as a number or the solution to

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

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

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

 

 ** Candy Screw

    Edible candy screw with candy nuts that you can screw as well.

 

 ** Better Bibliography

    When writing a thesis or paper, have the bibliography not just be

    an opaque list of resources, but have it be a list of /summaries/

    and /qualities/ that each paper has in the context of the paper

    being written. When examining a bibliography, I want to know if

    reading the papers in the bibliography are worth my time, and I

    also am probably also interested in exactly the things that are

    being discussed in the paper I'm reading. The bibliography is the

    perfect place to provide information about the referenced papers

    from the author's perspective. I will use this biographic form in

    my own thesis!

 

 ** Chess Visual

    To show the vast size of the game trees considered by computers,

    show two people playing chess in a void. They are floating in

    space, and there is a simple chess board between them. Then, as

    they play, the game tree's they are considering are drawn behind

    him. The root of the tree starts centered in their heads or

    whatever they use to think, and the tree grows out from behind,

    never crossing the dividing plane between the two players. Each

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

    animations for pruning, etc. Eventually, they look like the

    hemispheres of a brain, wings, etc. A human's tree might

    occasionally have a long chain, while the computer tree would be

    more uniform. You could compare deep blue and a modern laptop. Use

    actual data when fighting two computers!

 

 ** Tamper Proof Gold Bars

    [[Http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/gold-plated-tungsten-alloy-bar.html][This site]] offers gold plated tungsten bars as "novelty" items. One

    reason to prefer coins is because they are much harder to

    counterfeit because there is less surface area to mass

    ratio. However, gold bars are still a great design because they can

    hold a lot of value in a small space. A gold bar could be given the

    same protections (and more) that gold coins have to offer by

    changing it into a "gold book", which would have hundreds of

    "pages" of gold bound together. This could be implemented with

    multiple steel rods going through the book which can be removed, or

    some more classier mechanism for holding the pages. The point is

    that the bar can be EASILY subdivided (and people would perform

    this test before buying), thus guaranteeing it's authenticity.

 

 ** High School Science

    This is a lesson in scientific ethics. The goal is to calculate

    /g/, the local gravitational acceleration. The students are told

    that the textbook says it's /exactly/ 9.81 before they start the

    experiment. See how they doctor their results to get closer to the

    textbook value. It's neat because for any given school, /g/ is

    probably *not* exactly equal to 9.81, because that is just an

    average!

 

 ** Opencourseware Subtitles

    There are people who type up lectures at MIT while they are being

    given, so that hearing impared students can follow along. These

    recordings should be kept and given to OCW for subtitles. If the

    timestamps of keys are recorded, then it is easy to make subtitles.

 

 ** Screen Locking Timing

    You use your computer camera to see if you are sitting in front of

    the computer. If you are, then the screen will never lock. If you

    are, then the screen will lock with a 30-40 second timeout. It's an

    extension of using inactivity to initiate the countdown, just with

    more information.

 

 ** Mirror Toilet

    A toilet with a square basin made of mirror instead of

    porcelain. That way, you can see how good of a wipe job you have

    done / watch how your excretion system works.

 

 ** X-ray telepresence

    given that a doctor is operating on a patient via telepresence, one

    cool things you can do is shine X-rays into the patient to view the

    insides during real time. (This doesn't expose either the doctor or

    patient to chronically damaging amounts of X-rays) If the system

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

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

    model reached a certain threshold, then the radiation damage and

    surgery risk could be minimized.

 

 ** Superfluid Vascular System

    I wonder what would happen if you replaced the blood in a human

    with a superfluid. What would the physical dynamics be? Would the

    superfluid flow through the vasculature, or would it ignore it and

    travel through the cells, or something else entirely. Since

    superfluids need to be cold to retain their superfluidity, how

    would the dynamics change during perfusion of a superfluid, where

    the fluid gains and looses superfluidity as it goes deeper into the

    body and is cooled by superfluid from upstream. In summary there

    are two things to simulate 1.) replace all blood in human with

    superfluid instantly. 2.) perfuse superfluid into human.

 

 ** Projective Guessing

    I think that we read and see things by making a really good guess

    about what we're expecting to see, and then searching for our guess

    in what we see. If it really doesn't match, then we start to make

    more guesses / analyze the image from first principles, but most

    stuff is projective guessing.

 

 ** Intestinal Flora Maintenance

    Why not inoculate babies at birth with "ideal" gut flora instead of

    whatever bullshit they naturally get, thus giving them optimal

    digestive/nutrient extraction capabilities. Might also be able to

    make their farts not stink for life, too. MORE IMPORTANTLY, might

    help to preventatively stop some forms of /colic/, which affects 1

    in 5 babies and causes constant screaming and pain for about 5

    weeks.

 

 ** Server Culture -- Mirrors

    Make a distributed system where people can mirror the websites of

    people they like -- essentially cover the server costs of favored

    websites. This could make popular websites run at no cost. The

    system would require that the mirrored content be the same as the

    official source. Sort of like bit-torrent for websites.

 

 ** Map Programming

    One problem with functional programming is that in order to remain

    functional, you have to pass up arguments up into each calling

    function to get the full range of behavior from the lower level

    functions. Normally people come to a compromise involving

    abstraction and sparing use of dynamic variables to configure

    runtime behavior. What would be the advantages of making a

    programming language where every function receives one argument, a

    map, which contains all the symbol bindings it would ever need?

    This map is passed on to all subordinate functions. This way, you

    could replace functions on the fly, and arrange for there to be

    sensible defaults, etc. Might cause more harm than good but is an

    interesting idea.

 

 ** Rest Nest

    A small EEG device you would attach to your head when you go to

    sleep at night. ML algorithms would determine your particular sleep

    cycles. This would mostly be an alarm clock that you could give a

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

    ideal time corresponding to then end of one of your 90 min sleep

    cycles. You would feel much more rested upon waking up, and would

    wake up faster. There might be some other uses for the EEG data as

    well.

 

 ** Image Compression

    Use a library like gimp or opencv to process an image to make it

    have less entropy, then store the reverse of those operations along

    with the compressed simpler image as a super-compressed image file

    (possibly accepting some losses). Trades file size for

    decompression time, and allows one to cheat by using information in

    gimp/opencv to compress the image.

 

 ** Aldehyde-Stabalized Cryopreservation

    Why not use a fixative to buy enough time to ramp up

    cryoprotectants to an acceptable level at room temperature? Then,

    the whole system can be rapidly cooled and vitrified. This method

    "severs the biological link" in that the fixatives are highly

    toxic, but current vitrification procedures do this anyway since

    there can be a lot of freezing damage.

 

 ** Dilated Security Camera

    A security camera that would capture full video footage of

    everything at 60fps but then decide to keep only every 1 frame

    every 5 seconds unless there's something "interesting" happening.

 

 ** Bitcoin Wallet

    Part of "server culture", this would be something like

    "coin.your-domain.com" which would serve as your personal trusted

    access to your own bitcoins from anywhere.

 

 ** Libpay

    This would be a free library which would enable micro-donations to

    software projects and other projects, so that you could donate a

    penny to "emacs" and it would be automatically split up to every

    person who has ever contributed to emacs in proportion to the

    amount of community esteem, code quantity, bugs fixed, whatever the

    community decides. This might make it possible for programmers to

    live entirely off of free programming.

 

 ** Pronouns

    Use capital letters A-Z instead of pronouns. They solve pronoun

    referents and gender neutrality, are short to say, and you can

    encode useful information into the choice of letter. For example,

    instead of "Meetings shall be presided over by the president,

    unless she is absent." USE "Meetings shall be presided over by the

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

    I and U are reserved for the subject and object respectively.

 

 ** Phone DSP

    Software app that inserts an audio DSP between the input to a phone

    and the output. The DSP is delicious and configurable, and can

    allow men to make their voices deeper, etc. The app would allow you

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

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

    change the parameters of the DSP using good presets.

 

 ** Restaurant Receipts

    Use a carbon copy receipt instead of two stupid copies.

 

 ** Crossdressing

    Easiest way to disguise oneself as a woman is to wear a burka.

 

 ** Book-Mode

    Intelligent color highlighting for books and articles. It would

    disambiguate pronouns and involved references. For example, if

    "Rachael" was assigned the color red, and "the blonde haired girl"

    refers to "Rachael", then "the blonde haired girl" would be colored

    red. Also, you could disambiguate multi part run-on sentences by

    highlighting each subcomponent. Maybe would also have applications

    to scientific reading.

 

 ** Handheld Light Rain Measurement

    This would be a clear, teflon coated plastic disk with a camera

    underneath the disk. You would be able to hold the device out and

    it would measure the rate of accumulation of water droplets from

    fine mists and light rain by using computer vision to measure the

    diameters of the drops.

 

 ** Big Brother Farming

    This would be a vision system that would individually monitor each

    plant and turn on water, etc to ensure maximum/uniform growth for

    each plant.

 

 ** Discrete Faucet

    A faucet with discrete ticks instead of continuous.

 

 ** Laser Circle

    Take a glass microfiliment and shine a laser at one end at an

    oblique angle. It will make a perfect, large circle on the wall,

    converting a laser beam into a laser cone, preserving most of the

    energy of the laser.

 

 ** Invisible Glass

    Take a container of liquid and embed a glass sculpture made out of

    glass that has exactly the same index of refraction and color of

    the liquid. Then the sculpture will be totally invisible in the

    container, and will only be revealed when the liquid is

    drained. The container might be a fancy wine/spirit bottle or an

    hourglass.

 

 ** Caterpillar people

    A race of caterpillar like creatures gains intelligence after eons

    of predation by birds, etc. These caterpillar creatures still

    undergo metamorphosis into a large butterfly-like creature. The

    metamorphosis process turns the caterpillar's brain into mush and

    reforms it into a minimal, dumb, truly insect-like mind, completely

    destroying the person the caterpillar was. The society develops all

    sorts of customs and religious interpretations of the

    metamorphosis. It is viewed as good and natural by some since it is

    part of their life cycle and necessary to propagate the species, as

    only the butterflies can mate. Some think that the butterflies are

    still the same person because they have the same soul, even they no

    longer posses the memories or personality of the original

    caterpillar. Some see the butterfly form as the "true form" of the

    species, since the butterflies can fly, mate, and are

    beautiful. Many make a big deal out of the fact that 1-2% of the

    caterpillar's mind is actually preserved in the butterfly. Some see

    it as a terrible tragedy and argue that the caterpillars should try

    to stop the metamorphosis by technology. Practically, some very

    important members of society undergo hormone therapy and/or surgery

    to prevent metamorphosis so that they can live longer as

    themselves.

 

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

    something that preserves our bodies while destroying our minds,

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

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

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

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

    compelling point about homosexuality by introducing a second gender

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

    look very silly. Here, our own biological legacy of pain and death

    is made to look like the tragedy it is through the lens of the the

    caterpillar people.

 

 ** Relationships as a Business

    [[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx][Turnover-Crisis]] is an excellent talk about the "culture of

    quitting," which is about better business by letting people go

    instead of keeping them around past their "apex". Focuses on

    information transfer. Cool idea of an alumni network, which for

    relationships would be a group of satisfied ex-lovers, who would

    recommend new people your way, and who might consider coming to you

    again, refreshed from their time away with new

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

    they worked out.

 

 ** Psychic Crystal

    In a science fiction story, this would be an object that is very

    easy to move physically but is extremely difficult to move with

    telekinesis.

 

 ** True Reflection

    There's a "true mirror" in the MIT student center -- it's two

    normal mirrors at right angles, like staring at a corner of a

    room. The light reflects so that it shows you what you actually

    look like, instead of your mirror image.

 

 ** Remote Control Wasp

    Use computer to drive wings with remote power/logic.

 

 ** Encrypted Email Phone Book

    Public (distributed?) database of email->private-key pairs, to

    enable automatic encryption.

 

 ** Universal Eye Color

    Every equivalent creature will see each others' eyes as black --

    it's universal. Even if the creatures see in radio waves, and their

    eyes are 2m long pieces of jagged metal, when those creatures look

    at each other, they will see black, the absence of light and color

    (since it's being absorbed by the sensor array).

 

 ** Intelligent Microwave

    It learns where the hot nodes of its fields are, and uses them to

    evenly heat any food item. It has an infrared camera or something

    to keep track of how hot the food is. That way, you don't get bowls

    where the edges are boiling, while the center is still

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

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

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

    desired temperature. Could also detect ice, and automatically

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

    faster since it can avoid overheating; might have problems with

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

    too.

   

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

      "sputter" and splash liquid much less.

 

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

      and learn the exact heating profiles for things that have been

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

 

 ** Flesh Pillow

    A pillow like the arm or torso of a human, complete with simulated

    temperature, bones, and heartbeat.

 

 ** Light Filter

    Works like light-tweezers to mechanically separate fluids with

    different indexes of refraction.

 

 ** Silver Socks

    Socks laced with silver for the antimicrobial properties.

 

 ** Rod of Moses

    Device to distill urine through evaporation and easily dispose of

    urea crystals for use in desert -- produce drinkable water and live

    an extra few days!

 

 ** Lottery Scraper

    Web scraper which monitors various lotteries, looking for "special"

    gimmick changes in the rules (like 4x winnings on Wednesdays) and

    computes expected value...

 

 ** Memristiors Novel Design

    Make an evolutionary algorithm to make old stuff using all four

    basic circuit elements.

 

 ** Conductive Concrete

    Concrete that has embedded metal fibers so that it can conduct

    electricity.

 

 ** Little Bitty Melting Pot

    Might be useful for some types of manufacturing/3D printing -- how

    small can an induction melter be made, for example.

 

 ** True Pure Tones

    Hear a true pure tone by direct stimulation of the nerves of the

    ear. Like when Adelson "saw green".

   

 ** Mechanical analogue to the electrical op-amp

    would be an object with two levers -- you pull on one lever and the

    other moves the same way, no matter what's in the way or what it is

    driving. This analogy could be useful to teach op amps to people.

 

 ** Light Capacitor

    Suspend some ball of material with a high index of refraction and

    shine light into it so it gets stuck -- would the light stay

    trapped forever? Could you build up unlimited quantities of light

    inside the sphere (which could then be released slowly by

    frustrated internal reflection?

 

 ** Reading Comprehension

    use the screen capture routine to make a quiz program that

    constructs questions about the content you seemed to gloss over

    while reading. could be easy if the pdf came with embedded

    questions.  Dylan: automatically generate word-cloud about the

    parts you found most interesting; help others who read the same

    stuff by drawing attention to the interesting parts.

 

 ** Optimize an Article

    Capture reading of a scientific article via screen capture while

    people read it, then use it to make the article better. like the

    movie-pruning idea.

 

 ** Movie Pruning

    Movies always are too long at first. One way to shorten them

    ``scientifically" is to record blink rate during the move and then

    remove / shorten the frames of the parts in which there are a lot

    of blinking (average this over multiple people) better yet, put it

    online and do it across thousands of people. I got this from

    youtube in which there is an episode of kill bill which is composed

    entirely of the parts in which people had their eyes

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

    off of? Just take those parts out!

 

 ** Explosive Thermite Epoxy Putty

    One part would contain the rust, one part the aluminum.

 

 ** Concrete Epoxy

    Epoxy with sand/ some other solid material.

 

 ** Hard Sword

    Make a samurai sword, but use osmiridum instead of martensite for

    the cutting part; it should be a better sword.

 

 ** Close Range Wireless

    use the induction technology used to recharge electric toothbrushes

    with no metal links to send data without any metal at all!

 

 ** Perfect Pitch

    Learn perfect pitch using another sense in combination (sight or

    touch).

 

 ** Bio Metallic Structure

    Metal grids with seeds inside, which grow together and form a

    durable biological matrix. The metal substrate delivers

    water. (maybe use plastic instead of metal?)  Dylan: enrich plants

    with inorganic compounds; electrical interfaces in cellular plant

    matter => remote-controlled photosynthetic/bioluminescent

    structures.

 

 ** Conducting Extracellular Matrix

    To allow better control of organic systems and an enhanced nervous

    system.

 

 ** Cross-Modal Memory Hashing

    A way to retrieve memories more robustly.

 

 ** Greener than Green

    If you stare at a red light, then you get a green after-image. If

    you immediately look at something green while still seeing the

    green after-image, you will experience a Green like none you've

    ever seen before -- color so intense it's beyond the range of

    anything that exists in the world.

 

 ** Wooden Refrigerator

    To give food a better taste Dylan: like barrels for wine, or planks

    for salmon. Maybe just have "flavor planks" for your pre-existing

    fridge. Need to mitigate effect of temperature on volatility?

 

 ** Radioactive Transmutation Molecule by Molecule

    Create precious metals or something else economically

    advantageous. Best transmutation I can come up with is mercury into

    gold, but it's not economically viable.

 

 ** Preservation Via Crowding

    Inoculate food with tons of harmless bacteria so that there's no

    room for bad bacteria as a method of preservation

 

 ** Old-School Preservation

    Pasteur - style holding jar with siphon as a way to store

    sterilized liquids at room temperature indefinitely w/o

    refrigeration.

 

 ** Restaurant Policy

    Throw rude people out of restaurant as a matter of course -- make

    ambiance much better.

 

 ** Clean Windows

    Make something that mixes soap with fire hydrant water (and reduces

    the pressure a bit) and use it to clean windows of buildings.

 

 ** Ocarina

    Make an ocarina out of pure silver. Might have really good acoustic

    properties. 

 

 ** Fire Pen

    Pen which burns words on to the page, thus never needing any

    ink. Is there a way to make it runnable from body heat?

 

 ** Website to Design Your Own Soda

    and label, and have it mailed to you / sell it from your own online

    store.

 

 ** Ocean Power

    Solar panels that float on the ocean.

 

 ** Handcuffs with More Than Two Cuffs (3?)

    Great for daisy chaining people, binding them to environment, etc.

 

 ** Vector Based SOUND Files

    Like the pictures but with SOUND. codify sound in a language with

    enough symbols so that it can describe everything and encode it in

    that. would be like going from speech to text or smtg. Could also

    store sound as an image of the wavefront encoded as a vector image.

 

 ** Genetically Engineered Glowing Fruit

    They have some animals that can glow, but glowing fruit that you

    eat would be AWESOME!

 

 ** The Body as a Key to Memory

    IF memories are encoded using particular sensory impressions, what

    happens if the sensory organ itself changes?  those memories would

    become inaccessible. maybe this is why we can't remember much from

    our childhoods. also, could this happen throughout life as well?

    Could S remember stuff from his childhood?

 

 ** Lighter Flint on Spring

    Make hot, throw it at something, and it makes sparkles!

 

 ** Rare Bubbles

    Engineer a material which has both ductility and high surface

    tension to make the "third" minimal-surface-energy solution to a

    bubble suspended between two equal-diameter rings. (Solutions are

    cylindrical catenary curve, two separated half-bubbles, and a

    double-cone)

 

 ** Magic Textbook

    whose content can be varied continuously alter level of difficulty,

    rigor, diction, emphasize crossover with certain other discipline,

    etc. Content generated dynamically from knowledge base, along with

    questions that are moreover altered to guide knowledge

    acquisition. Motivation: One book of knowledge. /One./

 

 

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