#+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 noodles :: how does the physics of cooking noodles work?

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

      noodle?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      to the enviroment with more technology. 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

      confident as mitosis?

 

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

      (probably some non-vascular photosynthetic poikilohydric creature

      like a lichen) by taking an extremophile from Antarctica and

      evolving it in increasingly Martian conditions. This could be an

      easy start to a terraforming process.

 

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

      might be able to live forever by continually repairing our bodies

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

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

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

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

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

      software component to our existence. Even if our biological

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

      our minds will operate well far outside of the design constraints

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

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

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

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

      you want to keep a particular instance of this webserver running

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

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

      be able to keep the physical computer infrastructure running for

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

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

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

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

      that will ultimately kill the webserver even with eternally

      perfect hardware. Do you really expect that a webserver

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

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

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

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

      an unnecessary engineering goal. Likewise, human minds have only

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

      hardware degradation. Fixing the hardware doesn't change any

      software bugs that are almost certainly present in the human

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

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

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

      why should you expect that we have evolved the ability to

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

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

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

      unlimited memory potential (such as better metabolic efficiency),

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

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

      earlier in our lives, but complicated information processing

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

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

      likely to suffer a catastrophic psychosis due to software

      limitations associated with memory as he is to do something with

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

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

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

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

      approach is missing a very important component of longevity

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

      magnitude longer than they do naturally will need to deal with

      people's software as well as their hardware.

 

 - validating neurocryopreservation :: Problem : you want to test

      whether a brain is functionally preserved through vitrification,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      cryoprotectant, and then reattach the blood supply. You can

      determine brain preservation using behavioral assays!

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

      recruitment patterns. Give them adrenaline and let them feel what

      it's like to have the normal limits removed. See if they can

      replicate the effects.

 

 - 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 [[/thoughts/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.

 

 - 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 :: (like light tweezers) to mechanically separate

                   fluids with different index 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

   

 - 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. 

 

 - 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

 

 - 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.

 

 - 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)

 

 - 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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