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     3.2 +++ b/org/good-ideas.org	Sun Apr 12 17:31:34 2015 -0700
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     3.4 +#+title: Big List O' Ideas
     3.5 +#+author: Robert McIntyre
     3.6 +#+email: rlm@mit.edu
     3.7 +#+description: list of ideas from Robert McIntyre
     3.8 +#+keywords: aurellem ideas half-baked random
     3.9 +#+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org
    3.10 +#+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org
    3.11 +#+babel: :mkdirp yes :noweb yes :exports both
    3.12 +#+HTML_HEAD_EXTRA: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../css/ideas.css" />
    3.13 +#+OPTIONS: num:nil
    3.14 +
    3.15 +* Ideas
    3.16 +  # :PROPERTIES:
    3.17 +  # :HTML_CONTAINER_CLASS: ideas
    3.18 +  # :END:
    3.19 +
    3.20 +  This is a list of all the good ideas I've had that I felt like writing
    3.21 +  down for the past ~ 10 years. Some of them could be practical
    3.22 +  inventions and are "just" waiting for that 95% perspiration to bring
    3.23 +  them to fruition, some are ideas for science fiction, and some are
    3.24 +  simple observations.  They are arranged roughly in reverse
    3.25 +  chronological order, with the most recent ideas at the top of the
    3.26 +  list. The ones at the bottom of the list are heavily influenced by my
    3.27 +  time at MIT, the ones at the top, by my time at 21st Century Medicine.
    3.28 +
    3.29 +  If you find some of these interesting and would like to collaborate on
    3.30 +  them with me or discuss them in more detail, I'd love to hear from
    3.31 +  you. You can email me at ideas@aurellem.org.
    3.32 +
    3.33 +  If you want to use one of these ideas as your own and run with it,
    3.34 +  please feel free. I'd love to hear about it if you do.
    3.35 +
    3.36 +  #+begin_quote
    3.37 +  There's no end to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care about
    3.38 +  getting credit.
    3.39 +  #+end_quote
    3.40 +
    3.41 +
    3.42 +  #+BEGIN_HTML
    3.43 +<hr/>
    3.44 +  #+END_HTML
    3.45 +
    3.46 +** The Ocean becomes a Drop 
    3.47 +   Upload faces challenges to grow into they type of person that can
    3.48 +   join the greater society -- a god. They have to go though quests
    3.49 +   that replicate all the things that humanity had to accomplish, like
    3.50 +   going to the moon, by themselves.
    3.51 +
    3.52 +** Butterfly Drone
    3.53 +   If big butterflies used to exist, then maybe we could make
    3.54 +   butterfly-inspired drones!
    3.55 +
    3.56 +** Methylation Sex-Symmetry Breaking
    3.57 +   Human sex cells have methylation patterns that encode male/female
    3.58 +   origin. If you combine two male patterns, the fetus grows "too
    3.59 +   fast" and dies. Two female patterns causes the fetus to enter a
    3.60 +   "vegatable" state and fail to develop. Evolutionary biologists say
    3.61 +   that this reflects the asymmetry of energy investement for creating
    3.62 +   offspring. If that's true, then species that cast-spawn will lack
    3.63 +   this asymmetry, and give clues about how to remove it in humans. If
    3.64 +   even cast spawners like sea urchins have it, then that means
    3.65 +   there's something deeper going on!
    3.66 +
    3.67 +** Homosexual Reproduction
    3.68 +   You take genetic material from two males and put it into an egg
    3.69 +   cell that has had all genetic material removed. Or, you take the
    3.70 +   genetic material from one egg and put it in another egg. This would
    3.71 +   allow homosexual couples to genetically reproduce. One technical
    3.72 +   challenge blocking this technique is that human gametes have
    3.73 +   methylation patterns that encode male/female origin, and only a
    3.74 +   male+female pattern gives rise to viable offspring. You could
    3.75 +   "recondition" male / female gametes to give them the opposite
    3.76 +   pattern, perhaps by incubating them in the appropriate
    3.77 +   environment. You also could try taking stem cells and making them
    3.78 +   form the appropriate structures in vitro.
    3.79 +
    3.80 +** Poly-Vitrification
    3.81 +   Large molecules such as PVP are able to vitrify at around -20C, and
    3.82 +   at farily small concentrations. IF they could be introduced into
    3.83 +   cells, they would be quite useful as vitrification agents. However,
    3.84 +   it's difficult to get them in because they are so big. So instead,
    3.85 +   use smaller agents which combine together into polymers at low
    3.86 +   temperature. In particular, Fructose, trehalose, and glycerol seem
    3.87 +   to have the desired properties (though you need to make versions of
    3.88 +   fructose and trehalose that can penetrate).
    3.89 +
    3.90 +** Whole Brain Perfusion Embedding
    3.91 +   Do the standard EM embedding protocol, but skip the osmium step,
    3.92 +   and use the "perfusion pausing" method to prevent overextraction
    3.93 +   during the dehydration and embedding steps. I think that you can
    3.94 +   perfuse resins into the brain, simply because you can perfuse
    3.95 +   viscous rubber when doing vascular casts.
    3.96 +
    3.97 +** Very Slow Physiological Pressure Perfusion
    3.98 +   Less extreme example of the "perfusion pausing" trick -- just keep
    3.99 +   the perfusion running and don't put the perfusion target into the
   3.100 +   liquid as deep.
   3.101 +
   3.102 +** Perfusion Pausing
   3.103 +   One problem with doing perfusion of heads / organs where the veins
   3.104 +   freely leak fluid is that if you STOP the perfusion, you rapidly
   3.105 +   loose pressure in the organ as your perfusate leaks out. You can
   3.106 +   prevent this by submerging the organ/head/rat whatever in fluid at
   3.107 +   an appropriate deepness. You would have to slowly decrease the flow
   3.108 +   rate while simultaneously lowering the perfusing object into the
   3.109 +   fluid. To start again, reverse the process -- reengage the
   3.110 +   peristaltic pump slowly while removing the organ from the fluid.
   3.111 +
   3.112 +** Textbook Mimiricy Evolution
   3.113 +   As surgery becomes more common, there develops a distinct selective
   3.114 +   pressure for individuals' organ layouts to look more like the
   3.115 +   medical textbooks!
   3.116 +
   3.117 +** Transparent Skin
   3.118 +   Temporary / permament transparent skin. Allows for examination of
   3.119 +   organs / muscles and visual prevention of disease and detection or
   3.120 +   abnormalities / good things eg. excercise optimization.
   3.121 +
   3.122 +** Sweet Information
   3.123 +   Candy with a whole book written in it. Eat a book!
   3.124 +
   3.125 +** Targeted Immunosuppressant
   3.126 +   Just kill off the B-cells and friends that would cause problems in
   3.127 +   a organ-transplant / other situation. AIDS is good at killing these
   3.128 +   cells -- maybe make it can be modified to just target the ones that
   3.129 +   will cause problems. Then you can premptively kill off that part of
   3.130 +   someone's immune system before a transplant. ALSO, you can kill off
   3.131 +   everyone's defenses against other blood types and make people
   3.132 +   effectively type AB+ w.r.t blood transfusions. Actually, why not
   3.133 +   give babies this treatment so that they're automatically compatable
   3.134 +   with all blood types?  It would be like a blood transfusion
   3.135 +   vaccine. The immune system does this already when it's first
   3.136 +   growing; maybe it can be "retrained" to accept new things, or the
   3.137 +   mechanism of immune cell death be co-opted for these purposes.
   3.138 +
   3.139 +** Fuck-you Tetris
   3.140 +   Tetris that actively gives you the worst possible piece.
   3.141 +
   3.142 +** Pockets
   3.143 +   More things should have them! Chairs, tables, cups, hats,
   3.144 +   trashcans, basically anything is better with a pocket.
   3.145 +
   3.146 +** Colored Shower Head
   3.147 +   A shower head add-on that measures the temp of the water and
   3.148 +   changes the color of the water streams w/ an LED to show you the
   3.149 +   temperature. That way you can align to the color you want and see
   3.150 +   the temperature without feeling it.
   3.151 +
   3.152 +** Giant Dragonflies
   3.153 +   We could rapidly MAKE giant dragonflies by evolving modern
   3.154 +   dragonflies in an very oxygen rich environment!
   3.155 +
   3.156 +** Whirlpool of Light
   3.157 +   Shine a laser out into space. But the planet is spinning! What you
   3.158 +   get is a spiral of light! And as this signal expands, does it
   3.159 +   eventually reveal it's quantized nature?
   3.160 +
   3.161 +** Perfusion Cooking
   3.162 +   You do cardiac bypass on an animal like a pig, then pump in tasty,
   3.163 +   tasty perfusate (like marinade) into the animal's
   3.164 +   vasculature. Then, you switch out to saline and increase the
   3.165 +   temperature of the saline to rapidly and uniformly cook the
   3.166 +   animal. It could be the tastiest meat ever!
   3.167 +
   3.168 +** Timestamp Verification
   3.169 +   You sign your message, and it has a timestamp at the top, with a +-
   3.170 +   percision number.  Then you send it over to the public timestamp
   3.171 +   server, which only signs the message if it gets the message within
   3.172 +   the timestamp window. Or the computer just signs the message but
   3.173 +   puts a timestamp at the beginning. So if everyone trusts the
   3.174 +   timestamp server, you can get reliable timestamps, and prove
   3.175 +   priority on ideas, etc.
   3.176 +
   3.177 +** The Great Computing Slow-Down
   3.178 +   In general, our computers are getting faster and faster according
   3.179 +   to Moore's law. However, eventually our brains will be made of the
   3.180 +   same stuff our computers are made of! This has very interesting
   3.181 +   consequences -- I can add 2+2 and get four in about a second. Since
   3.182 +   my neurons actually work at around 10-60 hertz in parallel, this
   3.183 +   means that it takes me around 10-30 operations to do this
   3.184 +   addition. That's actually not bad in terms of computing time. If my
   3.185 +   neurons were as fast as the latest transitors, then most
   3.186 +   calculators (made with earlier transistors) would be SLOWER than me
   3.187 +   at adding numbers. Only the newest, most optimized calculators
   3.188 +   would be faster, and then only about 10 times faster!  This means
   3.189 +   that once we begin to think at the speed of our technology, that
   3.190 +   technology will suddenly seem pitifully slow in comparison to how
   3.191 +   it seems now. And no amount of technical progress will remedy it,
   3.192 +   because that same progress will also make us all think
   3.193 +   faster. We'll either have to settle with living in "slow time" to
   3.194 +   do some computations, or learn to make smarter hardware with
   3.195 +   special optimizations. But this is actually really hard, because
   3.196 +   we'll be working with machines that will appear to us about as fast
   3.197 +   as MECHANICAL computers. So, in the future, all the cool parties
   3.198 +   will be in cyperspace at vastly accelerated speeds compared to how
   3.199 +   we exist now. But at these parties, the computers will SUCK!  Of
   3.200 +   course, this is one of the few things that can save us from AI
   3.201 +   risk, because those AI's won't seem so scary when the're build out
   3.202 +   of rickety old mechanical parts form our perspective.
   3.203 +
   3.204 +** Unitary Reverse Evolution of Chaos+Minds
   3.205 +   Chaotic systems diverge exponentially in state space. Do you get
   3.206 +   anything interesting when part of the physical system associated
   3.207 +   with the chaotic system is a object that performs some sort of
   3.208 +   computation? Is it possible for the computational system to play a
   3.209 +   percision-enabling role in determining the final/initial conditions
   3.210 +   of the chaotic system, just by tracing out thoughts in its decision
   3.211 +   paths? This is probably too vague of an idea right now, I just
   3.212 +   wanted to write it down.
   3.213 +
   3.214 +** Microwave-Time
   3.215 +   The cooking time you enter on most microwaves is insane. It's
   3.216 +   expressed in what I call a "hybrid base", a combination of base 10
   3.217 +   and base 60. You can get absurd things like 100 < 61, and 120 ==
   3.218 +   80! I wonder if these hybrid base systems could be very useful for
   3.219 +   some purposes!
   3.220 +
   3.221 +** Three Eyes
   3.222 +   If you had three eyes, would you still draw cubes like we currently
   3.223 +   draw them? Or would all 2D-representations of 3D space always look
   3.224 +   hopelessly fake?
   3.225 +
   3.226 +** Digital Taste/Smell Assay
   3.227 +   Get a grid of bacteria, each expressing a human taste/smell
   3.228 +   receptor linked to some sort of fluorscent activity or ion
   3.229 +   pump. Use a camera / electrical grid to transduce the smell / taste
   3.230 +   signal into bits! Inspired by gel-sight from MIT.
   3.231 +
   3.232 +** Childrens' Tool Shop
   3.233 +   I think that kids should be provided with tool shops -- these would
   3.234 +   be nice sheds with a good collection of tools to do various things
   3.235 +   -- circuit components and soldering irons, wires, a small lathe,
   3.236 +   drill press, belt sander, a centrifuge, microscope, and telescope,
   3.237 +   etc. The idea is that the kid can now think, "I could use X to do
   3.238 +   this thing that I'm thinking about" -- the building becomes an
   3.239 +   extension of the kid's body & mind.
   3.240 +
   3.241 +** Fluid Display
   3.242 +   Like the previous idea about matching refractances between glass
   3.243 +   and liquid, except you make a lot of switchable glass tubes in
   3.244 +   various patterns in the glass, and actively pump colored liquid
   3.245 +   through the tubes (the tubes have glass-like fluid in them by
   3.246 +   default.) The result is that you can cause the tubes to appear and
   3.247 +   dissappear, and vary their colors as well!
   3.248 +
   3.249 +** Immunoincompatibility
   3.250 +   Take the human genome, and refactor it so that it doesn't use a
   3.251 +   particular codon at all. Then remove the support from our ribosomes
   3.252 +   for that codon. What does this do for us? It makes us immune to
   3.253 +   almost all viruses! There is at least one bacteria that already
   3.254 +   does this to great effect.
   3.255 +
   3.256 +** Life Cycle
   3.257 +   It's called a cycle, right? So, the thing that repeats itself over
   3.258 +   and over, right? Not much of a cycle if you don't come back after
   3.259 +   you die, if you ask me!
   3.260 +
   3.261 +** Car with no Blind Spots
   3.262 +   Use some cameras in the back of the car to augment the rear-view
   3.263 +   mirror so that you never have to turn around in order to lane
   3.264 +   change.
   3.265 +
   3.266 +** Metabolic Windows and Freezing
   3.267 +   You freeze a set of cells using some cryo protocol and 60%
   3.268 +   survive. How can this be explained? It seems to me that if the
   3.269 +   cells are the same, and the conditions homogoneous, then all the
   3.270 +   cells should either die or live. However, suppose that there is a
   3.271 +   metabolic cycle that needs to be in a certain phase for the cell to
   3.272 +   survive. If the cells are asynchronous, then you might end up with
   3.273 +   some cells dying because there were in the wrong part of their
   3.274 +   cycle. This implies that you might be able to cryoprotect cells by
   3.275 +   causing them to enter a certain metabolic mode before freezing.
   3.276 +
   3.277 +** Cryonics Color Appeal
   3.278 +   Perfusate used by cryonics companies could have red food coloring
   3.279 +   in it. It's just a nice touch so that the cryonics patient looks
   3.280 +   more life-like than with clear CPAs, and hopefully might get
   3.281 +   treated with more respect.
   3.282 +
   3.283 +** Paramagnetic CPA
   3.284 +   you take a CPA that can be influenced by magnetic fields so that
   3.285 +   its degrees of freedom are limited. Then, you release the field,
   3.286 +   instantaly increasing the size of the state space of the system and
   3.287 +   dramatically decreasing the temperature enough to plunge the system
   3.288 +   past homogenous nucleation temperature and directly to the glass
   3.289 +   transition temperature, creating a doubly unstable glass at much
   3.290 +   lower CPA concentrations than possible at conventional CPA
   3.291 +   concentrations. A major technical limitation facing this technique
   3.292 +   is that it's a very minor effect -- you can only get about 0.1C
   3.293 +   with most systems that have been studied so far.
   3.294 +
   3.295 +- room temp noodles :: how does the physics of cooking noodles work?
   3.296 +     Could you use a vacuum instead of heat to force water into the
   3.297 +     noodle?
   3.298 +
   3.299 +- personal carbon offset :: feel bad about contribuiting to global
   3.300 +     warming by using electricity / driving a car? Forget trying to
   3.301 +     "conserve" or "minimize your carbon footprint". Follow the
   3.302 +     Platinum rule -- make the world BETTER off than you found it!
   3.303 +     This would be a small, self contained system that sucks C02 out
   3.304 +     of the air. It uses electricity, but it's so efficient at
   3.305 +     removing CO2 that it more than offsets the CO2 produced by even a
   3.306 +     coal plant to produce that electricity. This way, you can still
   3.307 +     drive even a gas guzzler, but have a net negative carbon
   3.308 +     footprint! Maybe something cool could be done with the carbon as
   3.309 +     well. Use as much electricity as you want, but negate the damage
   3.310 +     to the enviroment with more technology. 
   3.311 +
   3.312 +- undoing spermogenesis :: with enough sperm, you can derive the
   3.313 +     donor's entire genome. You gain more confidence in the alleles
   3.314 +     for a particular gene the more sperm you have. Each additional
   3.315 +     sperm gives you the same sort of information you'd get flipping a
   3.316 +     coin and trying to decide whether the coin is H/T of H/H. Is
   3.317 +     there enough sperm in the the average load for you to be as
   3.318 +     confident as mitosis?
   3.319 +
   3.320 +- mars life :: we could engineer life that could survive on mars
   3.321 +     (probably some non-vascular photosynthetic poikilohydric creature
   3.322 +     like a lichen) by taking an extremophile from Antarctica and
   3.323 +     evolving it in increasingly Martian conditions. This could be an
   3.324 +     easy start to a terraforming process.
   3.325 +
   3.326 +- problem with Aubrey de Grey's ideas :: Aubrey de Grey says that we
   3.327 +     might be able to live forever by continually repairing our bodies
   3.328 +     at the cellular level -- he details 7 different mechanisms of
   3.329 +     damage and says that if all of them are dealt with /together/
   3.330 +     that it would stop aging. (You can't miss even one because
   3.331 +     they're all fatal.)  However, it doesn't take into account that
   3.332 +     we are also beings of information and that there is a very real
   3.333 +     software component to our existence. Even if our biological
   3.334 +     chassies can be maintained forever, I think it is unlikely that
   3.335 +     our minds will operate well far outside of the design constraints
   3.336 +     that we've evolved to handle. Say I programmed a webserver with
   3.337 +     the express goal of it being able to serve webpages for month on
   3.338 +     some stock server. I'll do fairly rigorous testing to make sure
   3.339 +     that it can handle the expected load then then some. Now say that
   3.340 +     you want to keep a particular instance of this webserver running
   3.341 +     indefinitely. (The program instance is like your mind and the
   3.342 +     computer it's running on is like your body). You might very well
   3.343 +     be able to keep the physical computer infrastructure running for
   3.344 +     forever by replacing hard drives / ram / CPUs, etc. However,
   3.345 +     since I designed the webserver to work for a month, it probably
   3.346 +     has memory leaks, rare stochastic bugs, or other built in limits
   3.347 +     / constraints (think log files or some date rollover shenanigans)
   3.348 +     that will ultimately kill the webserver even with eternally
   3.349 +     perfect hardware. Do you really expect that a webserver
   3.350 +     engineered to work for 1 month will run for 10 years without
   3.351 +     catastrophically crashing? Not even Apache can do this! In fact,
   3.352 +     if I put in the extreme effort to make it that robust, I've
   3.353 +     wasted time that I could have spent on other projects by pursuing
   3.354 +     an unnecessary engineering goal. Likewise, human minds have only
   3.355 +     ever run for at most 122 years before they are destroyed due to
   3.356 +     hardware degradation. Fixing the hardware doesn't change any
   3.357 +     software bugs that are almost certainly present in the human
   3.358 +     mind. Think of all the pathological things that can go wrong with
   3.359 +     a webserver, multiply it by a million, and that likely how
   3.360 +     evolution has designed our minds. For example, consider memory :
   3.361 +     why should you expect that we have evolved the ability to
   3.362 +     coherently organize memories past say 150 years? There's been
   3.363 +     absolutely no selective pressure for this ability, so you can bet
   3.364 +     that if there's any fitness to be gained from not having
   3.365 +     unlimited memory potential (such as better metabolic efficiency),
   3.366 +     we have it! You might think that maybe we would just forget
   3.367 +     things the same way that we sort of forget things that happen
   3.368 +     earlier in our lives, but complicated information processing
   3.369 +     systems don't have to fail gracefully when they're pushed far
   3.370 +     past their design constraints. A 150 year old person is just as
   3.371 +     likely to suffer a catastrophic psychosis due to software
   3.372 +     limitations associated with memory as he is to do something with
   3.373 +     all those memories we might consider reasonable. More likely, in
   3.374 +     fact, since there are so very many ways for a complicated
   3.375 +     software system to break and so few ways for it to run
   3.376 +     successfully. Therefore, I think Aubrey de Grey's "hardware-only"
   3.377 +     approach is missing a very important component of longevity
   3.378 +     science, and any successful effort to make people live orders of
   3.379 +     magnitude longer than they do naturally will need to deal with
   3.380 +     people's software as well as their hardware.
   3.381 +
   3.382 +- validating neurocryopreservation :: Problem : you want to test
   3.383 +     whether a brain is functionally preserved through vitrification,
   3.384 +     but you don't want to figure out how to preserve all the other
   3.385 +     organs in the animal. It might be possible to keep the rest of
   3.386 +     the body at almost 0C and vitrify just the head for only a few
   3.387 +     minutes. Induce hypothermia, then separate out the head's blood
   3.388 +     supply from the rest of the body, then just cryoptotect and
   3.389 +     vitrify the head. Might need some sort of thermal guard to keep
   3.390 +     the outer head / neck from becoming too cold. You leave the
   3.391 +     spinal cord intact! Then you devitrify to 0C, remove
   3.392 +     cryoprotectant, and then reattach the blood supply. You can
   3.393 +     determine brain preservation using behavioral assays!
   3.394 +
   3.395 +- freezing water purifier :: you slowly freeze water, but also run
   3.396 +     liquid water over the frozen mass. This takes away basically all
   3.397 +     impurities and creates "washed ice" then you melt the ice. Maybe
   3.398 +     you could re-use the heat from creating the ice to melt the ice?
   3.399 +
   3.400 +- ultra strength :: allow a person to visualize their muscle
   3.401 +     recruitment patterns. Give them adrenaline and let them feel what
   3.402 +     it's like to have the normal limits removed. See if they can
   3.403 +     replicate the effects.
   3.404 +
   3.405 +- phone names :: make a PX record for domain names that's like the MX
   3.406 +     record, except that it is a phone number instead of an IP
   3.407 +     address. That way, you can use the domain name registration
   3.408 +     system to provide names for phone numbers. Then, as long as you
   3.409 +     control the domain, you can point people to your current phone
   3.410 +     number by updating that record.
   3.411 +
   3.412 +- edible flowers :: Edible white flowers that you put in a colored
   3.413 +     solution with flavor. When the flower turns the right color, it
   3.414 +     is also flavored and ready to eat!
   3.415 +
   3.416 +- lead bone :: Could you fill in all the empty spaces in a bone with
   3.417 +     lead? Might be cool!
   3.418 +
   3.419 +- the quest for life  :: Many stories that have immortal characters
   3.420 +     have the "immortal who wants to become mortal" trope. I want to
   3.421 +     story where the protagonist loses their immortality and feels
   3.422 +     /angry/ and ashamed about losing something that's so absolutely
   3.423 +     crucial to their identity. A reverse of "death makes life worth
   3.424 +     living", they feel that living forever is what makes life worth
   3.425 +     living. Now they've "lost their sunrise" or their "connection to
   3.426 +     the timeless universe" or something. So they go on a quest to get
   3.427 +     it back, learning about themselves along the way, and regaining
   3.428 +     the precious thing they lost in the beginning. Which, it they can
   3.429 +     actually gain their immortality back, means that they never lost
   3.430 +     it in the first place!
   3.431 +
   3.432 +- world-map :: take a small table and paint the continents in
   3.433 +     toothpaste on the table. Make a slightly raised barrier around
   3.434 +     the table. Slowly pour water onto the table, and it will form the
   3.435 +     oceans!
   3.436 +
   3.437 +- stage magic rituals :: rituals should incorporate elements of stage
   3.438 +     magic. For example in Teller's rendition of Shakespeare's
   3.439 +     Tempest, they have a scene where they levitate a crown in front
   3.440 +     of someone, then put it on his head. They also have a wedding
   3.441 +     ceremony where they levitated the bride as well. Actual weddings
   3.442 +     and other ceremonies should incorporate stage magic as an
   3.443 +     enhancement to the gravitas!
   3.444 +
   3.445 +- isotope time dilation :: use a cyclotron to speed up rare isotopes
   3.446 +     developed in nuclear fusion experiments. The relativistic time
   3.447 +     dilation will stop the isotopes from decaying, and allow time to
   3.448 +     study them. This is based on radioactive isotopes that fall
   3.449 +     through the earth's atmosphere that take hundreds of times longer
   3.450 +     to decay than normal.
   3.451 +
   3.452 +- marsupial stimulation :: You take a freshly pouched marsupial baby,
   3.453 +     and show it videos and other interactive things while it matures
   3.454 +     in the pouch. What mental effects would this have?
   3.455 +
   3.456 +- The dynamically well tempered clavier :: Some older ways of tuning
   3.457 +     instruments sound better, but we use the even-tempered scale
   3.458 +     today because it makes it easier to switch keys. With electronic
   3.459 +     music, why not make key-annotations and dynamically re-tune the
   3.460 +     piece to sound good in the current key? Could be done as a
   3.461 +     midi+annotation -> midi compiler for initial experimentation.
   3.462 +
   3.463 +- death always implies damage :: is is possible for a corpse to differ
   3.464 +     from a living person only in the fact that one is dead and the
   3.465 +     other is alive? NO! A corpse must always have some sort of
   3.466 +     molecular damage which causes the loss of function!
   3.467 +
   3.468 +- inner eye :: Surgically install a bunch of tiny cameras inside a
   3.469 +     person. Then, you can activate them all and get a picture of your
   3.470 +     internal organs for diagnostic purposes.
   3.471 +
   3.472 +- chaos rails :: The homoclinic tangle (which I call the "rails of
   3.473 +     chaos") is very beautiful. We couldn't even visualize it before
   3.474 +     computers because it's so complicated! Someone should make a
   3.475 +     visualization of it. Here's my inital [[/thoughts/images/rails-of-chaos.png][The Rails of Chaos]]
   3.476 +
   3.477 +- cryonics middle ages :: some people say that cryonics is an
   3.478 +     experiment and that it is foolish to wait until we have revived a
   3.479 +     human. There is a middle ground where the procedure has a dismal
   3.480 +     success rate on humans, say 1 in 20, so that you'd be a fool to
   3.481 +     try revival. Nonetheless, this very risky procedure could be the
   3.482 +     legal proof of concept needed to create a new class of life
   3.483 +     between "living" and "dead": "stasis".
   3.484 +
   3.485 +- Minds and Mirrors :: neat thought experiment -- if you take a mirror
   3.486 +     of someone by actually reversing a person's chirality molecule by
   3.487 +     molecule, then will the only be able to read mirror writing? The
   3.488 +     answer is yes, by analogy to a purely mechanical scan-tron
   3.489 +     device. This is one of the only interesting transforms I know
   3.490 +     that can take a human brain and change it in subtle,
   3.491 +     non-destructive ways. It's also an argument against dualism.
   3.492 +
   3.493 +- biosphere in a bottle :: There are around 15 million species. 15
   3.494 +     million stem cells will fill only a tiny size, far less than a cubic
   3.495 +     inch. Preserve a single cell from every species on earth in this
   3.496 +     small space, and you will have a record of our current biosphere
   3.497 +     that can be protected. "Hold the genetic data of all species in
   3.498 +     your hand!"
   3.499 +
   3.500 +- chaos lock :: The "arrow of time" points in the direction of
   3.501 +     increasing entropy. The time evolution of chaotic systems depend
   3.502 +     exquisitely on their initial state. If you take a measurement of
   3.503 +     a chaotic system at any given point of time, you can evolve that
   3.504 +     system backwards or forwards based on your measurement. So let's
   3.505 +     say you start the chaotic system in a VERY low entropy state,
   3.506 +     then let it run for a while, then take a measurement with some
   3.507 +     uncertainty. Your measurement is pretty good, but obviously not
   3.508 +     PERFECT. If you evolve the chaotic system back in time, then you
   3.509 +     will see that you don't really reach a state with low entropy an
   3.510 +     hour before (the entropy is easy to measure with surrogates like
   3.511 +     alignment, etc). So use this technique to SEARCH for a more
   3.512 +     accurate measurement! This potentially can give you many more
   3.513 +     orders of magnitude than you could get alone just using an
   3.514 +     instrument. Sometimes it will give you bad results, the the odds
   3.515 +     of it doing that are infinitesimal, and you can just measure a
   3.516 +     couple of times.
   3.517 +
   3.518 +- cryo-evolution :: perhaps there would be a way to rapidly evolve a
   3.519 +     symbiotic bacterial organism that could protect human tissues
   3.520 +     from freezing damage.
   3.521 +
   3.522 +- suicide parasite :: sometimes, people kill themselves for no good
   3.523 +     reason. We often explain this with things like "hidden
   3.524 +     depression" or we say that they had something like chronic jaw or
   3.525 +     back pain. I think that smells of rationalization. I don't buy
   3.526 +     it. I propose that in many suicide cases there is a disease that
   3.527 +     causes the suicidal behavior. We already know that certain
   3.528 +     parasites have mind-bending properties in other animals, even
   3.529 +     mammals like mice. It's not much of a stretch to imagine a
   3.530 +     parasite that causes suicides in humans. Some problems:
   3.531 +     - What does the suicide parasite get out of it? :: This might be
   3.532 +          answered by the whole thing being a glitch caused by
   3.533 +          cross-species contamination. Toxoplasma works this way.
   3.534 +     - What predictions does a disease model make :: suicide should
   3.535 +          be more common among people who share a contagion
   3.536 +          vector. There should be suicides that don't make any
   3.537 +          sense : people who weren't really depressed, who had no
   3.538 +          reason to kill themselves. People who have killed themselves
   3.539 +          should have a higher incidence of some unknown parasite in
   3.540 +          their brains. 
   3.541 +
   3.542 +- domestic insects :: People should eat more bugs because they're much
   3.543 +     more efficient, so why not do some major domestication research
   3.544 +     to make very appealing bugs? Beetles, in particular, seem to be
   3.545 +     excellent targets for domestication because they have extreme
   3.546 +     levels of genetic malleability. Remember that lobster was once
   3.547 +     seen as an animal only fit for prisoners to consume!
   3.548 +
   3.549 +- birth-clones :: What if each person was intentionally split at birth
   3.550 +     into a normal embryo and a few "backup" cells which are then
   3.551 +     frozen. The backup cells are created just the same way as natural
   3.552 +     identical twins. The backups can be used to regenerate
   3.553 +     organs. etc. Also, it would be a good sci-fi concept, because you
   3.554 +     could have a culture where people reward people who were
   3.555 +     especially awesome are "reborn" from their backups. Imagine
   3.556 +     having a young Bach every generation, etc.
   3.557 +
   3.558 +- pronunciation guide :: a simple webpage where you type in a word and
   3.559 +     it returns a simple, English sentence describing exactly how to
   3.560 +     pronounce the word. For people who don't want to learn IPA.
   3.561 +
   3.562 +- Learning to Teleport :: This is a story about a person who is
   3.563 +     struggling with his/her society's ideas about teleportation. It's
   3.564 +     considered a fundamental part of being a member of that society
   3.565 +     (after all, the difference between animals and humans is that
   3.566 +     humans are creatures of pure information while animals are
   3.567 +     burdened with base matter, "that's how you travel the stars,
   3.568 +     etc") Humans are born normally, grow up, and then eventually
   3.569 +     transcend via destructive upload. Analogies to jumping off a
   3.570 +     diving board into a pool (which I simply /could not do/ for a
   3.571 +     long time), etc.
   3.572 +
   3.573 +- no-float-ice :: cup that has cross beams at the bottom where ice
   3.574 +     forms. Then when you drink liquid from the glass, the ice stays
   3.575 +     at the bottom and doesn't hit your lips. For bars and fancy
   3.576 +     things.
   3.577 +
   3.578 +- bitcoins for immigrants :: A common case with Mexican immigrants
   3.579 +     (illegal or not) is that they want to send money they've earned
   3.580 +     in the US back to their families in Mexico. They currently do
   3.581 +     this through things like Money Gram or Western Union, and they
   3.582 +     get fleeced in the process with fees. Bitcoin could greatly
   3.583 +     reduce the cost of sending money from America to Mexico, but I
   3.584 +     don't believe that it's currently used for that among Mexican
   3.585 +     immigrants currently due to lack of knowledge. I bet you could
   3.586 +     set up physical locations like those obnoxious Western Union huts
   3.587 +     in places like Texas, Arizona, etc, and greatly undercut
   3.588 +     them. Or, perhaps some educational seminars about bitcoin might
   3.589 +     be in order. There's some money to be made there because there is
   3.590 +     great demand, and it's a good thing to boot!
   3.591 +
   3.592 +- reverse eye-tracking :: A painting that is actually a digital screen
   3.593 +     with a camera. It records people's eye tracks permanently. It's
   3.594 +     "artistic" because paintings are normally these things that you
   3.595 +     look at without changing, but this one is changed the second you
   3.596 +     look at it, recording where /you/ looked forever for others to
   3.597 +     see. Make it be a painting of a woman and see the trolling as the
   3.598 +     breasts and groin area light up with interest from all the males
   3.599 +     passing by.
   3.600 +
   3.601 +- smart toilets :: Instead of using indirect measures like infrared
   3.602 +     detectors of the presence of a person, use computer vision to
   3.603 +     directly measure whether the toilet needs to be flushed. I think
   3.604 +     a lot of things will end up going this way as we get better
   3.605 +     computer vision.
   3.606 +
   3.607 +- validate chemopreservation :: chemopreservation is difficult to
   3.608 +     validate because it destroys the functionality of a brain, and
   3.609 +     brain simulation will take a long time to mature as a
   3.610 +     technology. However, one very powerful way to validate
   3.611 +     chemopreservation would be to have a person/animal learn
   3.612 +     something with high complexity such as a number or the solution
   3.613 +     to a maze, or a flashbulb memory. Then you preserve their brain
   3.614 +     chemically, slice it up, and read /that specific memory/ from the
   3.615 +     detailed brain scan. Much more difficult, but much more doable.
   3.616 +
   3.617 +- candy screw :: edible candy screw with candy nuts that you can screw
   3.618 +     as well.
   3.619 +
   3.620 +- better bibliography :: when writing a thesis or paper, have the
   3.621 +     bibliography not just be an opaque list of resources, but have it
   3.622 +     be a list of /summaries/ and /qualities/ that each paper has in
   3.623 +     the context of the paper being written. When examining a
   3.624 +     bibliography, I want to know if reading the papers in the
   3.625 +     bibliography are worth my time, and I also am probably also
   3.626 +     interested in exactly the things that are being discussed in the
   3.627 +     paper I'm reading. The bibliography is the perfect place to
   3.628 +     provide information about the referenced papers from the
   3.629 +     author's perspective. I will use this biographic form in my own
   3.630 +     thesis!
   3.631 +
   3.632 +- chess visual :: to show the vast size of the game trees considered
   3.633 +     by computers, show two people playing chess in a void. They are
   3.634 +     floating in space, and there is a simple chess board between
   3.635 +     them. Then, as they play, the game tree's they are considering
   3.636 +     are drawn behind him. The root of the tree starts centered in
   3.637 +     their heads or whatever they use to think, and the tree grows out
   3.638 +     from behind, never crossing the dividing plane between the two
   3.639 +     players. Each player's tree is a different color. As they grow,
   3.640 +     there are animations for pruning, etc. Eventually, they look like
   3.641 +     the hemispheres of a brain, wings, etc. A human's tree might
   3.642 +     occasionally have a long chain, while the computer tree would be
   3.643 +     more uniform. You could compare deep blue and a modern
   3.644 +     laptop. Use actual data when fighting two computers!
   3.645 +
   3.646 +- tamper proof gold bars :: [[http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/gold-plated-tungsten-alloy-bar.html][this site]] offers gold plated tungsten bars
   3.647 +     as "novelty" items. One reason to prefer coins is because they
   3.648 +     are much harder to counterfeit because there is less surface area
   3.649 +     to mass ratio. However, gold bars are still a great design
   3.650 +     because they can hold a lot of value in a small space. A gold bar
   3.651 +     could be given the same protections (and more) that gold coins
   3.652 +     have to offer by changing it into a "gold book", which would have
   3.653 +     hundreds of "pages" of gold bound together. This could be
   3.654 +     implemented with multiple steel rods going through the book which
   3.655 +     can be removed, or some more classier mechanism for holding the
   3.656 +     pages. The point is that the bar can be EASILY subdivided (and
   3.657 +     people would perform this test before buying), thus guaranteeing
   3.658 +     it's authenticity.
   3.659 +
   3.660 +- high school science :: this is a lesson in scientific ethics. The
   3.661 +     goal is to calculate /g/, the local gravitational
   3.662 +     acceleration. The students are told that the textbook says it's
   3.663 +     /exactly/ 9.81 before they start the experiment. See how they
   3.664 +     doctor their results to get closer to the textbook value. It's
   3.665 +     neat because for any given school, /g/ is probably *not* exactly
   3.666 +     equal to 9.81, because that is just an average!
   3.667 +
   3.668 +- opencourseware subtitles :: there are people who type up lectures at
   3.669 +     MIT while they are being given, so that hearing impared students
   3.670 +     can follow along. These recordings should be kept and given to
   3.671 +     OCW for subtitles. If the timestamps of keys are recorded, then
   3.672 +     it is easy to make subtitles.
   3.673 +
   3.674 +- screen locking timing :: you use your computer camera to see if you
   3.675 +     are sitting in front of the computer. If you are, then the screen
   3.676 +     will never lock. If you are, then the screen will lock with a
   3.677 +     30-40 second timeout. It's an extension of using inactivity to
   3.678 +     initiate the countdown, just with more information.
   3.679 +
   3.680 +- mirror toilet :: a toilet with a square basin made of mirror instead
   3.681 +     of porcelain. That way, you can see how good of a wipe job you
   3.682 +     have done / watch how your excretion system works.
   3.683 +
   3.684 +- X-ray telepresence :: given that a doctor is operating on a patient
   3.685 +     via telepresence, one cool things you can do is shine X-rays into
   3.686 +     the patient to view the insides during real time. (This doesn't
   3.687 +     expose either the doctor or patient to chronically damaging
   3.688 +     amounts of X-rays) If the system was coupled with a Bayesian
   3.689 +     model of the layout of the structure, and the x-rays were only
   3.690 +     fired whenever the uncertainty of the model reached a certain
   3.691 +     threshold, then the radiation damage and surgery risk could be
   3.692 +     minimized.
   3.693 +
   3.694 +- superfluid vascular system :: I wonder what would happen if you
   3.695 +     replaced the blood in a human with a superfluid. What would the
   3.696 +     physical dynamics be? Would the superfluid flow through the
   3.697 +     vasculature, or would it ignore it and travel through the cells,
   3.698 +     or something else entirely. Since superfluids need to be cold to
   3.699 +     retain their superfluidity, how would the dynamics change during
   3.700 +     perfusion of a superfluid, where the fluid gains and looses
   3.701 +     superfluidity as it goes deeper into the body and is cooled by
   3.702 +     superfluid from upstream. In summary there are two things to
   3.703 +     simulate 1.) replace all blood in human with superfluid
   3.704 +     instantly. 2.) perfuse superfluid into human.
   3.705 +
   3.706 +- projective guessing :: I think that we read and see things by
   3.707 +     making a really good guess about what we're expecting to see,
   3.708 +     and then searching for our guess in what we see. If it really
   3.709 +     doesn't match, then we start to make more guesses / analyze the
   3.710 +     image from first principles, but most stuff is projective
   3.711 +     guessing.
   3.712 +
   3.713 +- Intestinal flora maintenance :: why not inoculate babies at birth
   3.714 +     with "ideal" gut flora instead of whatever bullshit they
   3.715 +     naturally get, thus giving them optimal digestive/nutrient
   3.716 +     extraction capabilities. Might also be able to make their farts
   3.717 +     not stink for life, too. MORE IMPORTANTLY, might help to
   3.718 +     preventatively stop some forms of /colic/, which affects 1 in 5
   3.719 +     babies and causes constant screaming and pain for about 5 weeks.
   3.720 +
   3.721 +- server culture -- mirrors :: make a distributed system where people
   3.722 +     can mirror the websites of people they like -- essentially cover
   3.723 +     the server costs of favored websites. This could make popular
   3.724 +     websites run at no cost. The system would require that the
   3.725 +     mirrored content be the same as the official source. Sort of like
   3.726 +     bit-torrent for websites.
   3.727 +
   3.728 +- map programming :: one problem with functional programming is that
   3.729 +     in order to remain functional, you have to pass up arguments up
   3.730 +     into each calling function to get the full range of behavior
   3.731 +     from the lower level functions. Normally people come to a
   3.732 +     compromise involving abstraction and sparing use of dynamic
   3.733 +     variables to configure runtime behavior. What would be the
   3.734 +     advantages of making a programming language where every function
   3.735 +     receives one argument, a map, which contains all the symbol
   3.736 +     bindings it would ever need? This map is passed on to all
   3.737 +     subordinate functions. This way, you could replace functions on
   3.738 +     the fly, and arrange for there to be sensible defaults,
   3.739 +     etc. Might cause more harm than good but is an interesting idea.
   3.740 +
   3.741 +- rest nest :: a small EEG device you would attach to your head when
   3.742 +     you go to sleep at night. ML algorithms would determine your
   3.743 +     particular sleep cycles. This would mostly be an alarm clock that
   3.744 +     you could give a time range, say 7:00AM - 7:15AM, and it would
   3.745 +     wake you up during an ideal time corresponding to then end of one
   3.746 +     of your 90 min sleep cycles. You would feel much more rested upon
   3.747 +     waking up, and would wake up faster. There might be some other
   3.748 +     uses for the EEG data as well.
   3.749 +
   3.750 +- image compression :: use a library like gimp or opencv to process an
   3.751 +     image to make it have less entropy, then store the reverse of
   3.752 +     those operations along with the compressed simpler image as a
   3.753 +     super-compressed image file (possibly accepting some
   3.754 +     losses). Trades file size for decompression time, and allows one
   3.755 +     to cheat by using information in gimp/opencv to compress the
   3.756 +     image. 
   3.757 +
   3.758 +- aldehyde-stabalized cryopreservation :: why not use a fixative to
   3.759 +     buy enough time to ramp up cryoprotectants to an acceptable level
   3.760 +     at room temperature? Then, the whole system can be rapidly cooled
   3.761 +     and vitrified. This method "severs the biological link" in that
   3.762 +     the fixatives are highly toxic, but current vitrification
   3.763 +     procedures do this anyway since there can be a lot of freezing
   3.764 +     damage.
   3.765 +
   3.766 +- dilated security camera :: a security camera that would capture
   3.767 +     full video footage of everything at 60fps but then decide to keep
   3.768 +     only every 1 frame every 5 seconds unless there's something
   3.769 +     "interesting" happening.
   3.770 +
   3.771 +- bitcoin wallet :: Part of "server culture", this would be something
   3.772 +                    like "coin.your-domain.com" which would serve as
   3.773 +                    your personal trusted access to your own bitcoins
   3.774 +                    from anywhere.
   3.775 +
   3.776 +- libpay :: this would be a free library which would enable
   3.777 +            micro-donations to software projects and other projects,
   3.778 +            so that you could donate a penny to "emacs" and it would
   3.779 +            be automatically split up to every person who has ever
   3.780 +            contributed to emacs in proportion to the amount of
   3.781 +            community esteem, code quantity, bugs fixed, whatever the
   3.782 +            community decides. This might make it possible for
   3.783 +            programmers to live entirely off of free programming.
   3.784 +
   3.785 +- pronouns :: use capital letters A-Z instead of pronouns. They solve
   3.786 +              pronoun referents and gender neutrality, are short to
   3.787 +              say, and you can encode useful information into the
   3.788 +              choice of letter. For example, instead of "Meetings
   3.789 +              shall be presided over by the president, unless she is
   3.790 +              absent." USE "Meetings shall be presided over by the
   3.791 +              president, unless P is absent." We already use this a
   3.792 +              little, since I and U are reserved for the subject and
   3.793 +              object respectively.
   3.794 +
   3.795 +- phone DSP :: software app that inserts an audio DSP between the
   3.796 +               input to a phone and the output. The DSP is delicious
   3.797 +               and configurable, and can allow men to make their
   3.798 +               voices deeper, etc. The app would allow you to hear
   3.799 +               your own voice as others hear it. Most people hate how
   3.800 +               their own voice sounds. The app would also allow one to
   3.801 +               immediately change the parameters of the DSP using good
   3.802 +               presets.
   3.803 +
   3.804 +- restaurant receipts :: use a carbon copy receipt instead of two stupid
   3.805 +     copies. 
   3.806 +
   3.807 +- crossdressing :: Easiest way to disguise oneself as a woman is to
   3.808 +                   wear a burka.
   3.809 +
   3.810 +- book-mode :: intelligent color highlighting for books and
   3.811 +               articles. It would disambiguate pronouns and involved
   3.812 +               references. For example, if "Rachael" was assigned the
   3.813 +               color red, and "the blonde haired girl" refers to
   3.814 +               "Rachael", then "the blonde haired girl" would be
   3.815 +               colored red. Also, you could disambiguate multi part
   3.816 +               run-on sentences by highlighting each
   3.817 +               subcomponent. Maybe would also have applications to
   3.818 +               scientific reading.
   3.819 +
   3.820 +- Handheld light Rain measurement :: this would be a clear, teflon
   3.821 +     coated plastic disk with a camera underneath the disk. You would
   3.822 +     be able to hold the device out and it would measure the rate of
   3.823 +     accumulation of water droplets from fine mists and light rain by
   3.824 +     using computer vision to measure the diameters of the drops.
   3.825 +
   3.826 +- Big Brother Farming :: This would be a vision system that would
   3.827 +     individually monitor each plant and turn on water, etc to ensure
   3.828 +     maximum/uniform growth for each plant. 
   3.829 +
   3.830 +- Discrete Faucet :: A faucet with discrete ticks instead of
   3.831 +     continuous. 
   3.832 +
   3.833 +- Laser Circle :: take a glass microfiliment and shine a laser at one
   3.834 +                  end at an oblique angle. It will make a perfect,
   3.835 +                  large circle on the wall, converting a laser beam
   3.836 +                  into a laser cone, preserving most of the energy of
   3.837 +                  the laser.
   3.838 +
   3.839 +- Invisible Glass :: Take a container of liquid and embed a
   3.840 +     glass sculpture made out of glass that has exactly the same index
   3.841 +     of refraction and color of the liquid. Then the sculpture will be
   3.842 +     totally invisible in the container, and will only be revealed
   3.843 +     when the liquid is drained. The container might be a fancy
   3.844 +     wine/spirit bottle or an hourglass.
   3.845 +
   3.846 +- Caterpillar people :: A race of caterpillar like creatures gains
   3.847 +     intelligence after eons of predation by birds, etc. These
   3.848 +     caterpillar creatures still undergo metamorphosis into a large
   3.849 +     butterfly-like creature. The metamorphosis process turns the
   3.850 +     caterpillar's brain into mush and reforms it into a minimal,
   3.851 +     dumb, truly insect-like mind, completely destroying the person
   3.852 +     the caterpillar was. The society develops all sorts of customs and
   3.853 +     religious interpretations of the metamorphosis. It is viewed as
   3.854 +     good and natural by some since it is part of their life cycle and
   3.855 +     necessary to propagate the species, as only the butterflies can
   3.856 +     mate. Some think that the butterflies are still the same person
   3.857 +     because they have the same soul, even they no longer posses the
   3.858 +     memories or personality of the original caterpillar. Some see the
   3.859 +     butterfly form as the "true form" of the species, since the
   3.860 +     butterflies can fly, mate, and are beautiful. Many make a big
   3.861 +     deal out of the fact that 1-2% of the caterpillar's mind is
   3.862 +     actually preserved in the butterfly. Some see it as a terrible
   3.863 +     tragedy and argue that the caterpillars should try to stop the
   3.864 +     metamorphosis by technology. Practically, some very important
   3.865 +     members of society undergo hormone therapy and/or surgery to
   3.866 +     prevent metamorphosis so that they can live longer as themselves.
   3.867 +
   3.868 +     This is a continuation of Marvin Minsky's ideas about pain being
   3.869 +     something that preserves our bodies while destroying our minds,
   3.870 +     something that is a remnant from our too harsh animal days that
   3.871 +     hasn't caught up to the fact that we have very complex brains
   3.872 +     now. It's a worst-case scenario about a maladaptive genetic
   3.873 +     legacy. Also, it's inspired by "There She Is!!!", which makes a
   3.874 +     compelling point about homosexuality by introducing a second
   3.875 +     gender characteristic (bunny/cat, male/female), which makes
   3.876 +     homophobia look very silly. Here, our own biological legacy of
   3.877 +     pain and death is made to look like the tragedy it is through the
   3.878 +     lens of the the caterpillar people.
   3.879 +
   3.880 +- relationships as a business :: [[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx][Turnover-Crisis]] is an excellent talk
   3.881 +     about the "culture of quitting," which is about better business
   3.882 +     by letting people go instead of keeping them around past their
   3.883 +     "apex". Focuses on information transfer. Cool idea of an alumni
   3.884 +     network, which for relationships would be a group of satisfied
   3.885 +     ex-lovers, who would recommend new people your way, and who might
   3.886 +     consider coming to you again, refreshed from their time away with
   3.887 +     new stories/experiences. I should look for examples of this and
   3.888 +     how they worked out.
   3.889 +
   3.890 +- psychic crystal :: in a science fiction story, this would be an
   3.891 +     object that is very easy to move physically but is extremely
   3.892 +     difficult to move with telekinesis.
   3.893 +
   3.894 +- true reflection :: There's a "true mirror" in the MIT student center
   3.895 +     -- it's two normal mirrors at right angles, like staring at a
   3.896 +     corner of a room. The light reflects so that it shows you what
   3.897 +     you actually look like, instead of your mirror image.
   3.898 +
   3.899 +- remote control wasp :: use computer to drive wings with remote
   3.900 +  power/logic.
   3.901 +
   3.902 +- encrypted email phone book :: public (distributed?) database of
   3.903 +     email->private-key pairs, to enable automatic encryption.
   3.904 +
   3.905 +- universal eye color :: every equivalent creature will see each
   3.906 +     others' eyes as black -- it's universal. Even if the creatures
   3.907 +     see in radio waves, and their eyes are 2m long pieces of jagged
   3.908 +     metal, when those creatures look at each other, they will see
   3.909 +     black, the absence of light and color (since it's being absorbed
   3.910 +     by the sensor array).
   3.911 +
   3.912 +- intelligent microwave :: it learns where the hot nodes of its fields
   3.913 +  are, and uses them to evenly heat any food item. It has an infrared
   3.914 +  camera or something to keep track of how hot the food is. That way,
   3.915 +  you don't get bowls where the edges are boiling, while the center is
   3.916 +  still frozen. Requires a little bit of intelligence/vision, since
   3.917 +  the exact pattern of heating totally depends on the exact shape of
   3.918 +  the food.  Wouldn't need a carousel, and wouldn't need a timer,
   3.919 +  just a desired temperature. Could also detect ice, and automatically
   3.920 +  defrost the parts which are frozen. Might be able to work much
   3.921 +  faster since it can avoid overheating; might have problems with
   3.922 +  heating the insides of thick things, might need a weight sensor too.
   3.923 +  
   3.924 +  + Would be much cleaner than other microwaves, since food would
   3.925 +    "sputter" and splash liquid much less.
   3.926 +
   3.927 +  + Throw in some SIFT+R processing to match previously cooked foods
   3.928 +    and learn the exact heating profiles for things that have been
   3.929 +    cooked before -- it can get faster the more it's used.
   3.930 +
   3.931 +- Flesh pillow :: a pillow like the arm or torso of a human, complete
   3.932 +                  with simulated temperature, bones, and heartbeat.
   3.933 +
   3.934 +- light filter :: (like light tweezers) to mechanically separate
   3.935 +                  fluids with different index of refraction
   3.936 +
   3.937 +- silver socks :: socks laced with silver for the antimicrobial
   3.938 +                  properties.
   3.939 +
   3.940 +- Rod of Moses :: device to distill urine through evaporation and
   3.941 +     easily dispose of urea crystals for use in desert -- produce
   3.942 +     drinkable water and live an extra few days!
   3.943 +
   3.944 +- lottery scraper :: web scraper which monitors various lotteries,
   3.945 +     looking for "special" gimmick changes in the rules (like 4x
   3.946 +     winnings on Wednesdays) and computes expected value...
   3.947 +
   3.948 +- Memristiors novel design :: make an evolutionary algorithm to make
   3.949 +  old stuff using all four basic circuit elements.
   3.950 +
   3.951 +- Conductive concrete :: concrete that has embedded metal fibers so
   3.952 +     that it can conduct electricity.
   3.953 +
   3.954 +- little bitty melting pot :: might be useful for some types of
   3.955 +     manufacturing/3D printing -- how small can an induction melter be
   3.956 +     made, for example.
   3.957 +
   3.958 +- true pure tones :: hear a true pure tone by direct stimulation of the
   3.959 +     nerves of the ear
   3.960 +  
   3.961 +- mechanical analogue to the electrical op-amp ::  would be an object
   3.962 +     with two levers -- you pull on one lever and the other moves the
   3.963 +     same way, no matter what's in the way or what it is driving. This
   3.964 +     analogy could be useful to teach op amps to people.
   3.965 +
   3.966 +- light capacitor :: suspend some ball of material with a high index
   3.967 +     of refraction and shine light into it so it gets stuck -- would
   3.968 +     the light stay trapped forever? Could you build up unlimited
   3.969 +     quantities of light inside the sphere (which could then be
   3.970 +     released slowly by frustrated internal reflection?
   3.971 +
   3.972 +- reading comprehension :: use the screen capture routine to make a
   3.973 +     quiz program that constructs questions about the content you
   3.974 +     seemed to gloss over while reading. could be easy if the pdf came
   3.975 +     with embedded questions.  Dylan: automatically generate
   3.976 +     word-cloud about the parts you found most interesting; help
   3.977 +     others who read the same stuff by drawing attention to the
   3.978 +     interesting parts.
   3.979 +
   3.980 +- optimize an article :: capture reading of a scientific article via
   3.981 +     screen capture while people read it, then use it to make the
   3.982 +     article better. like the movie-pruning idea.
   3.983 +
   3.984 +- movie pruning :: Movies always are too long at first. One way to
   3.985 +     shorten them ``scientifically" is to record blink rate during the
   3.986 +     move and then remove / shorten the frames of the parts in which
   3.987 +     there are a lot of blinking (average this over multiple people)
   3.988 +     better yet, put it online and do it across thousands of people. I
   3.989 +     got this from youtube in which there is an episode of kill bill
   3.990 +     which is composed entirely of the parts in which people had their
   3.991 +     eyes closed. slogan: want to make a movie people can't take their
   3.992 +     eyes off of? Just take those parts out!
   3.993 +
   3.994 +- explosive thermite epoxy putty :: one part would contain the rust,
   3.995 +     one part the aluminum.
   3.996 +
   3.997 +- concrete epoxy :: epoxy with sand/ some other solid material.
   3.998 +
   3.999 +- hard sword :: make a samurai sword, but use osmiridum instead of
  3.1000 +                martensite for the cutting part; it should be a better
  3.1001 +                sword.
  3.1002 +
  3.1003 +- close range wireless :: use the induction technology used to
  3.1004 +     recharge electric toothbrushes with no metal links to send data
  3.1005 +     without any metal at all!
  3.1006 +
  3.1007 +- perfect pitch :: learn perfect pitch using another sense in
  3.1008 +                   combination (sight or touch)
  3.1009 +
  3.1010 +- bio metallic structure :: metal grids with seeds inside, which grow
  3.1011 +     together and form a durable biological matrix. The metal
  3.1012 +     substrate delivers water. (maybe use plastic instead of metal?)
  3.1013 +     Dylan: enrich plants with inorganic compounds; electrical
  3.1014 +     interfaces in cellular plant matter => remote-controlled
  3.1015 +     photosynthetic/bioluminescent structures.
  3.1016 +
  3.1017 +- conducting extracellular matrix :: to allow better control of
  3.1018 +     organic systems and an enhanced nervous system.
  3.1019 +
  3.1020 +- cross-modal memory hashing :: a way to retrieve memories more
  3.1021 +     robustly. 
  3.1022 +
  3.1023 +- wooden refrigerator :: to give food a better taste Dylan: like
  3.1024 +     barrels for wine, or planks for salmon. Maybe just have "flavor
  3.1025 +     planks" for your pre-existing fridge. Need to mitigate effect of
  3.1026 +     temperature on volatility?
  3.1027 +
  3.1028 +- radioactive transmutation molecule by molecule :: create precious
  3.1029 +     metals or something else economically advantageous. Best
  3.1030 +     transmutation I can come up with is mercury into gold, but it's
  3.1031 +     not economically viable.
  3.1032 +
  3.1033 +- preservation via crowding :: inoculate food with tons of harmless
  3.1034 +     bacteria so that there's no room for bad bacteria as a method of
  3.1035 +     preservation
  3.1036 +
  3.1037 +- old school preservation :: Pasteur - style holding jar with siphon
  3.1038 +     as a way to store sterilized liquids at room temperature
  3.1039 +     indefinitely w/o refrigeration.
  3.1040 +
  3.1041 +- restaurant policy :: Throw rude people out of restaurant as a matter
  3.1042 +     of course -- make ambiance much better.
  3.1043 +
  3.1044 +- clean windows :: make something that mixes soap with fire hydrant
  3.1045 +                   water (and reduces the pressure a bit) and use it
  3.1046 +                   to clean windows of buildings.
  3.1047 +
  3.1048 +- ocarina :: make an ocarina out of pure silver
  3.1049 +
  3.1050 +- fire pen :: pen which burns words on to the page, thus never needing
  3.1051 +     any ink. Is there a way to make it runnable from body heat?
  3.1052 +
  3.1053 +- website to design your own soda :: and label, and have it mailed to
  3.1054 +     you / sell it from your own online store.
  3.1055 +
  3.1056 +- solar panels :: that float on the ocean
  3.1057 +
  3.1058 +- handcuffs with more than two cuffs (3?) :: great for daisy chaining
  3.1059 +     people, binding them to environment, etc.
  3.1060 +
  3.1061 +- vector based SOUND files :: like the pictures but with SOUND. codify
  3.1062 +     sound in a language with enough symbols so that it can describe
  3.1063 +     everything and encode it in that. would be like going from speech
  3.1064 +     to text or smtg. Could also store sound as an image of the
  3.1065 +     wavefront encoded as a vector image.
  3.1066 +
  3.1067 +- genetically engineered glowing fruit :: They have some animals that
  3.1068 +     can glow, but glowing fruit that you eat would be AWESOME!
  3.1069 +
  3.1070 +- The body as a key to memory :: IF memories are encoded using
  3.1071 +     particular sensory impressions, what happens if the sensory organ
  3.1072 +     itself changes?  those memories would become inaccessible. maybe
  3.1073 +     this is why we can't remember much from our childhoods. also,
  3.1074 +     could this happen throughout life as well? Could S remember stuff
  3.1075 +     from his childhood?
  3.1076 +
  3.1077 +- lighter flint on spring :: make hot, throw it at something, and it
  3.1078 +     makes sparkles!
  3.1079 +
  3.1080 +- rare bubbles :: Engineer a material which has both ductility and high
  3.1081 +             surface tension to make the "third"
  3.1082 +             minimal-surface-energy solution to a bubble suspended
  3.1083 +             between two equal-diameter rings. (Solutions are
  3.1084 +             cylindrical catenary curve, two separated half-bubbles,
  3.1085 +             and a double-cone)
  3.1086 +
  3.1087 +- Textbook whose content can be varied continuously :: alter level of
  3.1088 +     difficulty, rigor, diction, emphasize crossover with certain
  3.1089 +     other discipline, etc. Content generated dynamically from
  3.1090 +     knowledge base, along with questions that are moreover altered to
  3.1091 +     guide knowledge acquisition. Motivation: One book of
  3.1092 +     knowledge. /One./
  3.1093 +
  3.1094 +
  3.1095 +   #+BEGIN_HTML
  3.1096 +<p class="end"> Still want more? Visit the <a href="./ideas.html">Raw
  3.1097 +Ideas</a> page, but prepare for extreme half-bakedness. </p>
  3.1098 +   #+END_HTML

     4.1 --- a/org/ideas.org	Thu Feb 26 18:05:13 2015 -0800
     4.2 +++ b/org/ideas.org	Sun Apr 12 17:31:34 2015 -0700
     4.3 @@ -12,28 +12,51 @@
     4.4  # :HTML_CONTAINER_CLASS: ideas
     4.5  # :END:
     4.6  
     4.7 -This is a list of all the ideas I've had that I felt like writing down
     4.8 -for the past ~ 8 years. Some of them could be practical inventions and
     4.9 -are "just" waiting for that 95% perspiration to bring them to
    4.10 -fruition, some are ideas for science fiction, and some are simple
    4.11 -observations. Some are really only for my own personal notes and are
    4.12 -not meant to be comprehensible. They are arranged roughly in reverse
    4.13 -chronological order, with the most recent ideas at the top of the
    4.14 -list. The ones at the bottom of the list are heavily influenced by my
    4.15 -time at MIT.
    4.16 -
    4.17 -If you find some of these interesting and would like to collaborate on
    4.18 -them with me or discuss them in more detail, I'd love to hear from
    4.19 -you. You can email me at ideas@aurellem.org.
    4.20 -
    4.21 -If you want to use one of these ideas as your own and run with it,
    4.22 -please feel free. I'd love to hear about it if you do.
    4.23 +This is a list of *Every* idea I've written down
    4.24  
    4.25  #+begin_quote
    4.26  There's no end to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care about
    4.27  getting credit.
    4.28  #+end_quote
    4.29  
    4.30 +- becomming alive :: upload faces challenges to grow into they type of
    4.31 +     person that can join the greater society -- a god. They have to
    4.32 +     go though quests that replicate all the things that humanity had
    4.33 +     to accomplish, like going to the moon, by themselves.
    4.34 +
    4.35 +- population distorted map of USA :: to see states sizes in terms of #
    4.36 +     of people. (already exists!
    4.37 +     http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cart/doc/) 
    4.38 +
    4.39 +- butterfly drone :: if big butterflies used to exist, then maybe we
    4.40 +     could make butterfly-inspired drones!
    4.41 +
    4.42 +- methylation sex symmetry breaking :: So, human cells have
    4.43 +     methylation patterns that encode male/female origin. If you
    4.44 +     combine two male patterns, the fetus grows "too fast" and
    4.45 +     dies. Two female patterns causes the fetus to enter a "vegatable"
    4.46 +     state and fail to develop. Evolutionary biologists will say that
    4.47 +     this reflects the asymmetry of energy investement for creating
    4.48 +     offspring. If that's true, then species that cast-spawn will lack
    4.49 +     this symmetry, and give clues about how to remove it in
    4.50 +     humans. If even cast spawners like sea urchins have it, then that
    4.51 +     means there's something deeper going on!
    4.52 +
    4.53 +- reverse cannulation perfusion :: you put the organ you want to
    4.54 +     perfuse in an airtight chamber with a pool of the stuff you want
    4.55 +     to perfuse. You cannulate some veins and lead tubes form to
    4.56 +     outside of the chamber. You pump in air and perfusate, and the
    4.57 +     increasing air pressure in the chamber forces perfusate through
    4.58 +     the organ. For times when you don't want to cannulate the inputs
    4.59 +     -- they can be ragged, or there can be many of them. You still
    4.60 +     have to guide the veins to the outside of the chamber, but
    4.61 +     depending on the use case this might be far easier than
    4.62 +     tradational cannulation. 
    4.63 +
    4.64 +- very slow physiological pressure perfusion :: less extreme example
    4.65 +     of the "pausing" trick -- just keep the perfusion running and
    4.66 +     don't put the perfusion target into the liquid as deep.
    4.67 +
    4.68  - whole brain perfusion embedding :: Do the standard EM embedding
    4.69       protocol, but skip the osmium step, and use the "perfusion
    4.70       pausing" method to prevent overextraction during the dehydration
    4.71 @@ -101,8 +124,6 @@
    4.72  
    4.73  - perfusion coking :: EOM
    4.74  
    4.75 -- whatever :: asdfsadasda asda
    4.76 -
    4.77  - timestamp verification :: you sign your message, and it has a
    4.78       timestamp at the top, with a +- percision number.  Then you send
    4.79       it over to the public timestamp server, which only signs the