+This is a list of all the ideas I've had that I felt like writing down +for the past ~ 8 years. Some of them could be practical inventions and +are "just" waiting the that 95% perspiration to bring them to +fruition, some are ideas for science fiction, and some are simple +observations. Some are really only for my own personal notes and are +not meant to be comprehensible. 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. +

+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. +

the great computing slow-down

In general, our computers are + getting faster and faster. However, eventually our brains will be + made of the same stuff our computers are made of! This has very + interesting consequences – I can add 2+2 and get four in about a + second. Since my neurons actually work at around 10-60 hertz in + parallel, this means that it takes me around 10-30 operations to + do this addition. That's actually not bad in terms of computing + time. If my neurons were as fast as the latest transitors, then + most calculators would be SLOWER than me at adding numbers. Only + the newest, most optimized calculators would be faster, and then + only about 10 times faster! This means that once we begin to + think at the speed of our technology, that technology will + suddenly seem pitifully slow in comparison to how it seems + now. And no amount of technical progress will remedy it, because + that same progress will also make us all think faster. We'll + either have to settle with living in "slow time" to do some + computations, or learn to make smarter hardware with special + optimizations. But this is actually really hard, because we'll be + working with machines that will appear to us about as fast as + MECHANICAL computers. So, in the future, all the cool parties + will be in cyperspace at vastly accelerated speeds compared to + how we exist now. But at these parties, the computers will SUCK! + Of course, this is one of the few things that can save us from AI + risk, because those AI's won't seem so scary when the're build + out of rickety mechanical parts form our perspective. + +

unitary reverse evolution of chaos+minds

Chaotic systems diverge + exponentially in state space. Do you get anything interesting + when part of the physical system associated with the chaotic + system is a object that performs some sort of computation? Is it + possible for the computational system to play a + percision-enabling role in determining the final/initial + conditions of the chaotic system, just by tracing out thoughts in + its decision paths? This is probably too vague of an idea right + now, I just wanted to write it down. + +

microwave time

the cooking time you enter on most microwaves is + insane. It's expressed in what I call a "hybrid base", a + combination of base 10 and base 60. You can get absurd things + like 100 < 61, and 120 == 80! I wonder if these hybrid base + systems could be very useful for some purposes! + +

three-eyes

if you had three eyes, would you still draw cubes like + we currently draw them? Or would all 2D-representations of 3D + space always look hopelessly fake? + +

visual taste/smell assay

get a grid of bacteria, each expressing + a human taste/smell receptor linked to some sort of fluorscent + activity or ion pump. Use a camera / electrical grid to transduce + the smell / taste signal into bits! + +

carabiner mushroom lock

you can take a trapazodial carabiner and + make it so that a chain link is caught between the wide end of + the carabiner and another chain attached to the carabiner. + +

children's tool shop

I think that kids should be provided with + tool shops – these would be nice sheds with a good collection of + tools to do various things – circuit components and soldering + irons, wires, a small lathe, drill press, belt sander, a + centrifuge, microscope, and telescope, etc. The idea is that the + kid can now think, "I could use X to do this thing that I'm + thinking about" – the building becomes an extension of the kid's + body & mind. + +

fluid display

like the previous idea about matching refractances + between glass and liquid, except you make a lot of + switchable glass tubes in various patterns in the + glass, and actively pump colored liquid through the + tubes (the tubes have glass-like fluid in them by + default.) The result is that you can cause the + tubes to appear and dissappear, and vary their + colors as well! + +

immunoincompatibility

take the human genome, and refactor it so + that it doesn't use a particular codon at all. Then remove the + support from our ribosomes for that codon. What does this do for + us? It makes us immune to almost all viruses! + +

life cycle

it's called a cycle, right? So, the thing that repeats + itself over and over, right? Not much of a cycle if + you don't come back after you die, if you ask me! + +

car with no blind spots

use some cameras in the back of the car + to augment the rear-view mirror so that you never have to turn + around in order to lane change. + +

partial cell death

you freeze a set of cells using some cryo + protocol and 60% survive. How can this be explained? It seems to + me that if the cells are the same, and the conditions + homogoneous, then all the cells should either die or + live. However, suppose that there is a metabolic cycle that needs + to be in a certain phase for the cell to survive. If the cells + are asynchronous, then you might end up with some cells dying + because there were in the wrong part of their cycle. This implies + that you might be able to cryoprotect cells by causing them to + enter a certain metabolic mode before freezing. + +

cryonics color appeal

perfusate used by cryonics companies should + have red food coloring in it. It's just a nice touch so that the + cryonics patient looks more life-like than with clear CPAs, and + hopefully might get treated with more respect. + +

paramagnetic CPA

you take a CPA that can be influenced by + magnetic fields so that its degrees of freedom are limited. Then, + you release the field, instantaly increasing the size of the + state space of the system and dramatically decreasing the + temperature enough to plunge the system past homogenous + nucleation temperature and directly to the glass transition + temperature, creating a doubly unstable glass at much lower CPA + concentrations than possible at conventional CPA concentrations. + +

room temp noodles

how does the physics of cooking noodles work? + Could you use a vacuum instead of heat to force water into the + noodle? + +

personal carbon offset

feel bad about contribuiting to global + warming by using electricity / driving a car? Forget trying to + "conserve" or "minimize your carbon footprint". Follow the + Platinum rule – make the world BETTER off than you found it! + This would be a small, self contained system that sucks C02 out + of the air. It uses electricity, but it's so efficient at + removing CO2 that it more than offsets the CO2 produced by even a + coal plant to produce that electricity. This way, you can still + drive even a gas guzzler, but have a net negative carbon + footprint! Maybe something cool could be done with the carbon as + well. Use as much electricity as you want, but negate the damage + to the enviroment with more technology. + +

undoing spermogenesis

with enough sperm, you can derive the + donor's entire genome. You gain more confidence in the alleles + for a particular gene the more sperm you have. Each additional + sperm gives you the same sort of information you'd get flipping a + coin and trying to decide whether the coin is H/T of H/H. Is + there enough sperm in the the average load for you to be as + confident as mitosis? + +

mars life

we could engineer life that could survive on mars + (probably some non-vascular photosynthetic + poikilohydric creature like a lichen) by taking an + extremophile from Antarctica and evolving it in + increasingly Martian conditions. This could be an easy + start to a terraforming process. + +

problem with Aubrey de Grey's ideas

Aubrey de Grey says that we + might be able to live forever by continually repairing our bodies + at the cellular level – he details 7 different mechanisms of + damage and says that if all of them are dealt with together + that it would stop aging. (You can't miss even one because + they're all fatal.) However, it doesn't take into account that + we are also beings of information and that there is a very real + software component to our existence. Even if our biological + chassies can be maintained forever, I think it is unlikely that + our minds will operate well far outside of the design constraints + that we've evolved to handle. Say I programmed a webserver with + the express goal of it being able to serve webpages for month on + some stock server. I'll do fairly rigorous testing to make sure + that it can handle the expected load then then some. Now say that + you want to keep a particular instance of this webserver running + indefinitely. (The program instance is like your mind and the + computer it's running on is like your body). You might very well + be able to keep the physical computer infrastructure running for + forever by replacing hard drives / ram / CPUs, etc. However, + since I designed the webserver to work for a month, it probably + has memory leaks, rare stochastic bugs, or other built in limits + / constraints (think log files or some date rollover shenanigans) + that will ultimately kill the webserver even with eternally + perfect hardware. Do you really expect that a webserver + engineered to work for 1 month will run for 10 years without + catastrophically crashing? Not even Apache can do this! In fact, + if I put in the extreme effort to make it that robust, I've + wasted time that I could have spent on other projects by pursuing + an unnecessary engineering goal. Likewise, human minds have only + ever run for at most 122 years before they are destroyed due to + hardware degradation. Fixing the hardware doesn't change any + software bugs that are almost certainly present in the human + mind. Think of all the pathological things that can go wrong with + a webserver, multiply it by a million, and that likely how + evolution has designed our minds. For example, consider memory : + why should you expect that we have evolved the ability to + coherently organize memories past say 150 years? There's been + absolutely no selective pressure for this ability, so you can bet + that if there's any fitness to be gained from not having + unlimited memory potential (such as better metabolic efficiency), + we have it! You might think that maybe we would just forget + things the same way that we sort of forget things that happen + earlier in our lives, but complicated information processing + systems don't have to fail gracefully when they're pushed far + past their design constraints. A 150 year old person is just as + likely to suffer a catastrophic psychosis due to software + limitations associated with memory as he is to do something with + all those memories we might consider reasonable. More likely, in + fact, since there are so very many ways for a complicated + software system to break and so few ways for it to run + successfully. Therefore, I think Aubrey de Grey's "hardware-only" + approach is missing a very important component of longevity + science, and any successful effort to make people live orders of + magnitude longer than they do naturally will need to deal with + people's software as well as their hardware. + +

validating neurocryopreservation

Problem : you want to test + whether a brain is functionally preserved through vitrification, + but you don't want to figure out how to preserve all the other + organs in the animal. It might be possible to keep the rest of + the body at almost 0C and vitrify just the head for only a few + minutes. Induce hypothermia, then separate out the head's blood + supply from the rest of the body, then just cryoptotect and + vitrify the head. Might need some sort of thermal guard to keep + the outer head / neck from becoming too cold. You leave the + spinal cord intact! Then you devitrify to 0C, remove + cryoprotectant, and then reattach the blood supply. You can + determine brain preservation using behavioral assays! + +

freezing water purifier

you slowly freeze water, but also run + liquid water over the frozen mass. This takes away basically all + impurities and creates "washed ice" then you melt the ice. Maybe + you could re-use the heat from creating the ice to melt the ice? + +

ultra strength

allow a person to visualize their muscle + recruitment patterns. Give them adrenaline and let + them feel what it's like to have the normal limits + removed. See if they can replicate the effects. + +

phone names

make a PX record for domain names that's like the MX + record, except that it is a phone number instead of + an IP address. That way, you can use the domain name + registration system to provide names for phone + numbers. Then, as long as you control the domain, you + can point people to your current phone number by + updating that record. + +

edible flowers

Edible white flowers that you put in a colored + solution with flavor. When the flower turns the + right color, it is also flavored and ready to eat! + +

suicide cryonics

according to this, people who commit impulsive + suicides have a newfound sense of the importance of life. Perhaps + they are good cryonics targets. + +

lead bone

Could you fill in all the empty spaces in a bone with + lead? Might be cool. + +

the quest for life

Every stupid story has the "immortal who + wants to become mortal" or some other such idea. I want to story + where the protagonist loses their immortality and feels angry + and ashamed about losing something that's so absolutely crucial + to their identity. A reverse of "death makes life worth living", + they feel that living forever is what makes life worth + living. Now they've "lost their sunrise" or their "connection to + the timeless universe" or something. So they go on a quest to get + it back, learning about themselves along the way, and regaining + the precious thing they lost in the beginning. + +

world-map

take a small table and paint the continents in + toothpaste on the table. Make a slightly raised barrier + around the table. Slowly pour water onto the table, and + it will form the oceans! + +

stage magic rituals

rituals should incorporate elements of stage + magic. Foe example in Teller's tempest, they have a scene where + they levitate a crown in front of someone, then put it on his + head. They also have a wedding ceremony where they levitated the + bride as well. Actual weddings and other ceremonies should + incorporate stage magic as an enhancement. + +

isotope time dilation

use a cyclotron to speed up rare isotopes + developed in nuclear fusion experiments. The relativistic time + dilation will stop the isotopes from decaying, and allow time to + study them. This is based on radioactive isotopes that fall + through the earth's atmosphere that take hundreds of times + longer to decay than normal. + +

marsupial stimulation

You take a freshly pouched marsupial baby, + and show it videos and other interactive things while it matures + in the pouch. What mental effects would this have? + +

dynamic re-keying

Some older ways of tuning instruments sound + better, but we use the even-tempered scale today because it makes + it easier to switch keys. With electronic music, why not make + key-annotations and dynamically re-tune the piece to sound good + in the current key? Could be done as a midi+annotation -> midi + compiler for experimentation. + +

death always implies damage

is is possible for a corpse to differ + from a living person only in the fact that one is dead and the + other is alive? NO! A corpse must always have some sort of + molecular damage which causes the loss of function! + +

inner eye

Surgically install a bunch of tiny cameras inside a + person. Then, you can activate them all and get a + picture of your internal organs for diagnostic + purposes. + +

chaos rails

should make a visualization of the homoclinic tangle, + it's truly beautiful. + +

context gobbler

this would be in "inside-out macro" that takes + the context (like you use for things like error, continuations, + and friends) and transforms it to something else. Maybe useful? + +

cryonics middle ages

some people say that cryonics is an + experiment and that it is foolish to wait until we have revived a + human. There is a middle ground where the procedure has a dismal + success rate on humans, say 1 in 20, so that you'd be a fool to + try revival. Nonetheless, this very risky procedure could be the + legal proof of concept needed to create a new class of life + between "living" and "dead": "stasis". + +

philosophy of the mirror

neat thought experiment – if you take a + mirror of someone by actually reversing a person's chirality + molecule by molecule, then will the only be able to read mirror + writing? The answer is yes, by analogy to a purely mechanical + scan-tron device. This is one of the only interesting transforms I + know that can take a human brain and change it in subtle, + non-destructive ways. It's also an argument against dualism. + +

biosphere in a bottle

There are around 15 million species. 15 + million stem cells will fill only a tiny size, far less than a cubic + inch. Preserve a single cell from every species on earth in this + small space, and you will have a record of our current biosphere + that can be protected. "Hold the genetic data of all species in + your hand!" + +

chaos lock

The "arrow of time" points in the direction of + increasing entropy. The time evolution of chaotic + systems depend exquisitely on their initial state. If + you take a measurement of a chaotic system at any + given point of time, you can evolve that system + backwards or forwards based on your measurement. So + let's say you start the chaotic system in a VERY low + entropy state, then let it run for a while, then take + a measurement with some uncertainty. Your + measurement is pretty good, but obviously not + PERFECT. If you evolve the chaotic system back in + time, then you will see that you don't really reach + a state with low entropy an hour before (the entropy + is easy to measure with surrogates like alignment, + etc). So use this technique to SEARCH for a more + accurate measurement! This potentially can give you + many more orders of magnitude than you could get alone + just using an instrument. Sometimes it will give you + bad results, the the odds of it doing that are + infinitesimal, and you can just measure a couple of + times. + +

cryo-evolution

perhaps there would be a way to rapidly evolve a + symbiotic bacterial organism that could protect + human tissues from freezing damage. + +

suicide parasite

sometimes, people kill themselves for no good + reason. We often explain this with things like "hidden + depression" or we say that they had something like chronic jaw or + back pain. I think that smells of rationalization. I don't buy + it. I propose that in many suicide cases there is a disease that + causes the suicidal behavior. We already know that certain + parasites have mind-bending properties in other animals, even + mammals like mice. It's not much of a stretch to imagine a + parasite that causes suicides in humans. Some problems: + +

What does the suicide parasite get out of it?: This might be answered by the whole thing being a glitch caused by cross-species contamination. Toxoplasma works this way. +
What predictions does a disease model make: suicide should + be more common among people who share a contagion + vector. There should be suicides that don't make any + sense : people who weren't really depressed, who had no + reason to kill themselves. People who have killed themselves + should have a higher incidence of some unknown parasite in + their brains. + +

+ +

aurellem.org

Ideas

the great computing slow-down

unitary reverse evolution of chaos+minds

microwave time

three-eyes

visual taste/smell assay

carabiner mushroom lock

children's tool shop

fluid display

immunoincompatibility

life cycle

car with no blind spots

partial cell death

cryonics color appeal

paramagnetic CPA

room temp noodles

personal carbon offset

undoing spermogenesis

mars life

problem with Aubrey de Grey's ideas

validating neurocryopreservation

freezing water purifier

ultra strength

phone names

edible flowers

suicide cryonics

lead bone

the quest for life

world-map

stage magic rituals

isotope time dilation

marsupial stimulation

dynamic re-keying

death always implies damage

inner eye

chaos rails

context gobbler

cryonics middle ages

philosophy of the mirror

biosphere in a bottle

chaos lock

cryo-evolution

suicide parasite

domestic insects

birth-clones

pronunciation guide

cortex-search

learning to teleport

no-float-ice

bitcoins for immigrants

reverse eye-tracking

smart toilets

validate chemopreservation

candy screw

better bibliography

digital inter-library loan

chess visual

time verification

tamper proof gold bars

aurellem shirt

touch vision

high school science

opencourseware subtitles

screen locking timing

mirror toilet

test dummies

X-ray telepresence

superfluid vascular system

projective guessing

Intestinal flora maintenance

server culture : mirrors

map programming

rest nest

image compression

fixed cryopreservation

dilated security camera

bitcoin wallet

libpay

distributed graphics