# HG changeset patch
# User Robert McIntyre <rlm@mit.edu>
# Date 1428885094 25200
# Node ID f5a56e2241fb224e21f4d59774c7e642e72b58d8
# Parent  aceb837811396cee5279a7043cebdaaa866dcb75
finally creating a good-ideas page.

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diff -r aceb83781139 -r f5a56e2241fb images/rails-of-chaos.png
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diff -r aceb83781139 -r f5a56e2241fb org/good-ideas.org
--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/org/good-ideas.org	Sun Apr 12 17:31:34 2015 -0700
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+#+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
+#+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org
+#+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org
+#+babel: :mkdirp yes :noweb yes :exports both
+#+HTML_HEAD_EXTRA: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../css/ideas.css" />
+#+OPTIONS: num:nil
+
+* Ideas
+  # :PROPERTIES:
+  # :HTML_CONTAINER_CLASS: ideas
+  # :END:
+
+  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
+
+
+  #+BEGIN_HTML
+<hr/>
+  #+END_HTML
+
+** 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./
+
+
+   #+BEGIN_HTML
+<p class="end"> Still want more? Visit the <a href="./ideas.html">Raw
+Ideas</a> page, but prepare for extreme half-bakedness. </p>
+   #+END_HTML
diff -r aceb83781139 -r f5a56e2241fb org/ideas.org
--- a/org/ideas.org	Thu Feb 26 18:05:13 2015 -0800
+++ b/org/ideas.org	Sun Apr 12 17:31:34 2015 -0700
@@ -12,28 +12,51 @@
 # :HTML_CONTAINER_CLASS: ideas
 # :END:
 
-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 for 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.
+This is a list of *Every* idea I've written down
 
 #+begin_quote
 There's no end to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care about
 getting credit.
 #+end_quote
 
+- becomming alive :: 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.
+
+- population distorted map of USA :: to see states sizes in terms of #
+     of people. (already exists!
+     http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cart/doc/) 
+
+- butterfly drone :: if big butterflies used to exist, then maybe we
+     could make butterfly-inspired drones!
+
+- methylation sex symmetry breaking :: So, human 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 will say that
+     this reflects the asymmetry of energy investement for creating
+     offspring. If that's true, then species that cast-spawn will lack
+     this symmetry, 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!
+
+- reverse cannulation perfusion :: you put the organ you want to
+     perfuse in an airtight chamber with a pool of the stuff you want
+     to perfuse. You cannulate some veins and lead tubes form to
+     outside of the chamber. You pump in air and perfusate, and the
+     increasing air pressure in the chamber forces perfusate through
+     the organ. For times when you don't want to cannulate the inputs
+     -- they can be ragged, or there can be many of them. You still
+     have to guide the veins to the outside of the chamber, but
+     depending on the use case this might be far easier than
+     tradational cannulation. 
+
+- very slow physiological pressure perfusion :: less extreme example
+     of the "pausing" trick -- just keep the perfusion running and
+     don't put the perfusion target into the liquid as deep.
+
 - 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
@@ -101,8 +124,6 @@
 
 - perfusion coking :: EOM
 
-- whatever :: asdfsadasda asda
-
 - 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