This is a list of Every idea I've written down

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

I just had sex spinal tap

measure signals coming from your spinal cord to detect orgasm w/ machine learning. Then your fucking app can post to facebook automatically saying "I just had sex".

a billion years of suffering, finally quieted by a noble oil spill

pig egg extraction

put human stem cells into a pig embryo, get the pig to grow human eggs / human reproductive systems, use the pig as an artificial womb. Also can get high quality <5 year old eggs from post memopausal women bu making their stem cells grow new eggs. In general, we should do a lot more transgenic xenobiologu!

cortex-doubling

could we do something like the cortex-transplanting experiments except with an aim to greatly increase the size of the brain's cortex– take a whole cortex from one embryo and just "shove it in" to the other animal?

use optical methods to scan in a vynl recored

(no term)

chilled cubes of quartz instead of ice to cool down a drink :: or troll people with lukewarm "ice" water. Aristotle said that quartz was permementaly frozen ice, why not take advantage. And why didn't Aristotle invent child psychology?

seedless fruits

could we make sedless fruits by breeding for increasingly asymettric seed distribution? That way, we could breed until the seeds are on the surface of the fruit, then untill they're at the stem, then until they're off on their own branch near the fruit. could be cool!

can dogs hear our muscles contracting?

muscles make an infrasonice sound when they contarct. In general, might this be an unintended side channel when it comes to animal experiments.

(no term)

authenticity and responsibility display similar mental glitches :: oh, you mirdered someone by presing a button– then you're not repossible. If you print out an artwork, then it's not "authentic". In both cases we take the requirement for hands to be involved too far and cant't see through a layer of indirection

(no term)

better fixatives with aldehyde dehydrogenaze inhibitors? :: the idea is to disable the aldehyde dehydrogenaze enzymes that might react with aldehydes and retart progress. This might be irrelevant given how many fixative molucules might be used during fixation, but these systems might be coupled with negative downstream effects? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldehyde_dehydrogenase for more details.

(no term)

batch multiple credit card transactions for a coffee shop :: if you get a foffee, then get another thing later on the same credit card, then the coffee shop should batch these transactions together at the end of the day to avoid multiple fees.

a man has to have balls to cut off his own balls

kerning art

an extention to LaTeX that puts really subtle smiley facse and shit into the whitespacing of a document

glare analysis

take a computer model of a building, use ray-tracing to simulate there light goes during different times of the day, and see if the light will bother anyone in "standard" positions, such as desks, counters, etc.

almost-silent whispers in the brain

a set of silent synapses are triggered in such a way to create a wealth of important memories, none of which are accessable to the person!

(no term)

jumping forward in time, by changing your brain :: and also, the state-space evolution of a brain has loops, etc

"draw your own computer" – an MIT IAP class

you take an 8.5x11 sheet of paper and draw out a simple CPU on it (with connections for a decent RAM chip, and two serial ports). You'd use a fine pen and a magnifying glass, draw from a template, and the class would go over the circuits you're drawing as you draw them. Then you do some VERY BASIC photolithography to make it real! Then you write in a nice game of ZORK or something! Possibly this could be a two-three day class depending on how complicated the drawing has to be.

(no term)

knife with gallium core and M&M resin on the outside :: "melts in your enemies' guts, not your scabbard"

pizza lathe printer

spin pizza, apply toppings. make it be intriciate. like a tomato sauce spirograph. "spirograph pizza"

"conception" of memory

this is almost a kabbalistic mystery, that the molecules used in conception might be the same used to conceive a memory: from Kadell: In Xenopus oocytes, maternal RNA is silent until activated by the

cytoplas- mic polyadenylation element binding protein (CPEB) (Richter 1999). In Aplysia a new iso- form of CPEB (ApCPEB) with novel properties was found in neurons. Blocking this isoform at a marked (active) synapse prevented the main- tenance but not the initiation of long-term syn- aptic facilitation (Si et al. 2003a,b).

mind erasure, all cells live

trypsin in the brain – dissociate neurons without killing them.

(no term)

delicate flavors pumped through your blood and into your tounge and organs :: the infinite snack pump

imagemagick converter for ffmpeg

make it so that you can execute any imagemagick command on every frame of a video by using ffmpeg.

dyln duel decks – elbows vs. NO

knife garnish

the "easy" and "hard" problems of mathematics

the "easy" problem is to jsut do things like prove the rieman hypothesis. The "hard" problem is to show why 2 is 2 and not some other number, and what makes this 2 different form that 2. You know, to really explain it.

naming convention for marriage

hyphenate your names with a new family last name, then the kids just get the family name. Then other people can call you "Mr. family-name", etc. By Dylan Holmes.

light of the mind

a researcher is experimenting with transgenic viruses to do optogenetic experiments, accidentally infects himself. Then from then on, his neurons actually glow with light inside his skull.

(no term)

microwaves to accelerate cryoprotectant uptake :: works for osmium during embedding, so why not for cryoprotectants?

breed very small dogs, bats, mice, etc

for neuroscience research. I wonder how many generations it would take to surpass the 2g limit of the bumblebe bats? Then the reduced species would be ideal for whole-brain scanning. Depending on the tech curves, it may indeed be more feasible to start with something like an Etruscan shrew, bred it for 100 generations to be a quarter of the size, and then proceed with brain scanning, rather than starting directly!

sun dogs at the final stand

"It was always a one way trip," said the Hero of the Sun. The rest of the heros could only watch as he made his final stand. Amidst the dark, icy gloom, he summoned one last powerful bit of sun-magic, sacrificing himself to hold back the forces of darkness. From hundreds of miles away, the sky brightened with an artificial dawn, and the sky shown with the hero's name: .

With this playing in the background.

space elevator based on string

You have a small dumb robot that walks up and down strings while carrying something. You launch a "spider" robot from a satelite with a bunch of string, tethering one end on earth and one end in grosynchronus orbit. Then you successively make the string bigger.

lavender oats – oatmeal w/ tea – turns out it doesn't work all that well

all the atoms in a head, all the stories that can be

boltzman brain april fools

exochemotherapy

let's say you have lung cancer, or some other cancer you might need to treat with radiation. Perhaps it could be good to remove the organ from the body (while still having it attached), and apply radiatio, etc.

glutaraldehyde as biological glue to bind implants

the blank lonliness of singularity

I think that at least for me, I've always been missing the important spiritual aspect of duality. Duality here means that you exist as two or more copies at the same time. There so much I want to focus on, especilly the orthogonal worlds of science and society, that my natural state of orginazation would be to both hole myself up in a lab and work on discovering truth, AND work on talking with peopls and making a great network of friends. I want to be able to really talk with myself!

low voltage em imaging + fib sem directly of ASC brains

dildo-shaped earplugs

just put dicks in both your ears. Make them double ended. In general, use earplugs as a platform for making neat things mounted to your ears, like foam flowers or ribbons or whatever.

ASC as a police evidence preservation technique

multi metal fixation w/ formamide

osmium copper zinc uranium formamide

blood like cars that knows where to go

maybe with flagellas

post antibiotic recolonization from preserved blood

application of poly magnet for perfusion connections

explicit lobbying and influences from companies — helps make behaviour more predictable and can help to paradoxcically make the lobbying money stronger

glutaraldehyde as a callous hardener

twit-shank-select

and if you actually had a really cool day, then you request that you become the trunk. Gaurantees that you have much more statistically interesting days, every day!

twit-shank

much easer, ""minimum viable product"-style mind-merge. Just tweet any significant shit you did that day, then kill yourself. Trunk-you reads the tweet and continues with his day.

names that sound stupid today but would be good ancient Greek names

"telethon", "mentos", "mentor". Behold TELETHON, he was a great warrior and runner!

if only we had gold much more abundant than lead

wood engineered to contain a lot of gold sequestered in the tissues

mtg life counter app that's more like paper

good word for a prostitute : conslutant

old paper book on acid paper preserved in SPURS resin

blood ink

you can just buy a bottle of hemoglobin and make ink. maybe linseed oil and hemoglobin would work? throw in some sort of crosslinker or something to keep the hemoglobin red?

trash horse

soul of the day

a full life recording

omega the forsaken

grade so bad you fail that class and all its prerequisites

eye ring right angle mirror

creatures with say six eyes shaped in a ring on their head. They mentallly shift their attention from one pair of eyes to another to really preceive 3D shapes. However, if you pit a right angle mirrr in the back of their head, they can sudetnly incorporate two pairs of eyes simultaneously, perceiving the world in 3.XD, where they see what they call "true depth", where 2D representations of 3D space look hopelessly fake and the coeld has a sort of profound depth to it.

antibiotic multiplicity

we shouldn't use use one antibiotic, or cycle them or any of that nonsense. If someone has a problem, give them ALL the antibiotics at once, getting exponentially better chances of killing everything. Say you have two antibiotics with a 0.1 chance of becomming useless everytime you use it to cure someone. The antibiotics are independent molecular mechanisms so it takes two chance mutations to confer immunity. If you use one till it's useless, then the other one, then it takes around 20 times before you're out of antibiotics. If you use both its more like 200 times!

are animals chronically tired

I wonder if animals get enough sleep? Maybe not – after all, they wouldn't necesairly be able to go for 8 hours even if they needed it. And the quality of sleep would be very bad if you're always on edge. I think that a lot of animals look tired a lot of the time. Perhaps in addition to our ability to cook food as a surrogate for our digestive system, our ability to sleep in a confortable, safe place for 8+ hours enabled similar economies for our mental systems! The "comfy" theory of human intelligence/evolution.

live to a billion seconds

it's 31 years, 251 days, 13 hours, 34 minutes, 54.7843 seconds or something

hyperlinked physical writing

you scan in some (handwritten) text and make some of the words hyperlinks. looks incongrous. or an old newspaper clipping from like the 1930's as a pdf, and it has a random hyperlink in it!

super emulsified transparent manyonase

osmium as a EM catalyst

cause you can recover it see 1978

the mind sword of osmium

uploading, use osmium as a catalyst, make cool sword that's processed a billion human minds

hay fever straws

normally you call them "sneezes" but if you have hay fever then you should call them "straws." :P

the same blue sky

when I look at the sky, and there's no clouds, then I'm connected the eternity of all the creatures who looked up and saw the same sky. I wonder if you could look up at the sky, then look back down and be in a different time, a different place.

fear of number quantity

people can be scared of one thing, two things, etc, but what about 51 things. this might reveal the limits of object counting. How do there numbers distribute around the population? Is there a spike at numbers like 13?

water-resistant suit and CPA tube

so classy, to pop out of a cryo chamber and have the water fall off your suit like in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Udw0RriGrI

perfuse cryoprotectants into hibernating ground squirrell

active biological camaflogue

inspired by the mormyrid electric fish paper by mumble. What if you were an octopus that could change skin color, and then you combine your vision, skin, and motor outputs to compute what the skin should look like as you move your arms around; you could be perfectaly invisible, and wouldn't have to have the skin be "dumb". Very fast changes in light with no pattern would reveal this "bio-computed camaflogue", though, because the skin wouldn't be able to predict things as well.

vitrified lab

imagine a lab contained entirely in the glass from which fibre optic cables are made. It's be neat! there'd be no air!

curare in a fixative

might stop fixation tremors.

hidden eyes of god

it's the year 2020 and the first human brains are beginning to be preserved and scanned as part of the human connectome project. As scientists look at electron micrographs of preserved human brain tissue, they see all the expected brain structures: neurons, synapses, mitochnodria, myelin…. and something that's never been seen before: an intiricate filigree of strutures like the neural weaves from Banks' culture series. Human brain tissue from even 50 years ago like Einsteins' does not have the weave, and he weave is only in around 30% of the population. Obviously computational in nature and way advanced beyond anything humanity can build, these secret structures reveal an unsettling truth: something is watching us, from within our own minds…

encrypted priority server

neuro-speakers

speakers are the ultimate insturment, most like the human voice. submime. attach to brain and then we can finally sing.

book with meanings to onlky one person at one time

like adam kraft's thing about neural nets with images that look nothing like the object but get classified as that object anyway. You could possibly do the same with a human visual system – imagine a book that looks nothing like static. You look at the pages, and they seem like nonsense, but you also get a strong impression of a scene and meaning, possibly stronger and more direct than a really good painting. And no one else can see it, and you sleep a night, and can't see it yourself in the morning. Like the "communicating with LSD people" thing as well.

ligand nonpolar osmium lipid stain for perfuse EM

classified documents and mind uploading

an important value for forgetting!

furnace random number generator

how does a lobotomy not cause fatal brain embolisms!?

spinal cord made of light; moon

transit time of light from moon to earth is same as transit time of signals through spinal cord. So you could have your mind on the moon and your body on earth and it would feel the same!

semantic darkmode browser extension

some websites are naturally dark themed (like aurellem.org) while others are light themed (like google). At night I like dark themes and during daylight I like light themes. You can just invert your screen to convert light to dark, but when tabbing through multiple browser tabs you end up occasionally spraying your screen with bright colors. So, have a little button that inverts a single web page for firefox! Or, you can have a tiny bit of preprocessing (you just measure the overall white vs dark pixels) and then invert the page depending on that.

optogenetic readout during cruoprotection

basically a "lightbulb above the head" to measure activity of selected neurons.

carbon dating and immortality

if you've been alive for a million years, you'll carbon-dat as being as old as yesterday.

gas tenderization

use high pressure and gas diffusion to both denature proteins and infiltrate lots of gas into a piece of meat. Then rapidly decrease the pressure, and the meat will experience air bubbles similarly to bread rising, and might become tender and tasty!

learning damage from mind uploading

a person might be uploaded so that they can answer every question about their life and be able to perform actions they had previously learned, but due to incomplete simulation of long term chemical and structural dynamics, they might have a severe learning disability!

holy "spirit"

most blasphemous liquor

truck blindspot lights

lights that shine on the road and show where your vehicle's blind spots are.

eyelid screen

you can just close you eyes, but you're reading a book. it would be really cool and look like rapid eye movement. In this tech, the screen would replace your eyelid entirely. The other really neat thing about this concept is that your eyelid screen is a part of you. You might have some smooth muscles in it that works like a selection or cursor, and the scren can feel your eye rolling underneath and tell where you're looking, allowing for a very immersive experience. It's like an "all-in" virtual mode, still cleanly separating the real from the digital, telling others you're in your "virtual space", and still looking entirely human.

blockchain based experential memory

a hidden world of early life

I imagine that the bridge form the first life forms to even very simple single celled organisms was probably very interesting and a lot more diverse than we give it credit for. Unfortunately, I doubt that we're going to find any good evidence for such creatures, since they don't seem like the type of organisms that would preserve well. All sorts of really neat delf replicating molecules and assemblies of molecules, and we'd have no record of any of them. The only way to get an idea of these types of life will be to make them again in the lab.

brain insurance

for the preserved brain

remote control ants / pidgeons

train/evolve them to want to follow an EM gradient or magnetic field. put a camera on.

musical neural inversion

get a simple model of emotional and auditory circuits, "invert" the model based on sound input, and generate music with constrating satisfaction. Might find some music that's simultaneously "alien" (lacking a top-down design) yet still deeply emotionally coherent and satisfying.

simulated fire

for those who say that simulated water can't get you wet, just see what happens if you attach your nerves to simulated output of FIRE. I gaurantee you're going to have a bad time.

use lasers to cut large plasticized brains

gravity telescope the size of the solar system

information bearing layer

to find the spatial / logical scale of the main information containing layer of an information storage device, look at where correlated change happens, and then to see if it's digital, look beyond that and see if the changes are uncorrelated.

sperm fitness correlation

it's evolutionary advantageous for a species' sperm to fail to function exactly when the fetus they would create would fail. But it's really hard to make this functoinal correlation happen because the sperm cell only expresses a small subset of the genome. To the extent that thei correlation effect exists, we can reverse it to find "interesting" genes. My guess — look for genes physiccally next to sperm coding genes.

spinal repeater/relay

a VERY fine mesh of directional paths, much finer than the width of a spinal axon, which can connect a bundle of nerves that has been cut together.

(no term)

auto book ::handwritten by machine; illuminated. Like old medieval books. Use a model of handwriting so the letters are different.

url resolver

pick the longest vaid url that's a rooted substring of the requested URL. unambigupously corrects for links that have things like periods and ending parens at the end of a link.

soul black marble

for existential threats, what if solu magic was true, and undertale whatever, destroy the world

heart preservation + heart bypass to allow time for healing

you cryopreserve a heart, then "recondition" it inside the patient while under bypass to allow time for it to heal.

intelligent microwave osmium perfusion w/ CAT scan

assembling new word-sounding words by concatenation and random deletion

amber brain preservation?

would this work, without having to do the heavy metal bits? Maybe chemical fixation with aldehydes followed by hot amber and then high pressure for several months?

zappy fat

electrocaloric effect

see https://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-matsci-062910-100341, wikipedia article

albino fruit

cryoprotectant that increases the nutritional value of food

faucet enerty

how much power do you get from an average faucet compared to the wall socket?

high pressure fixation

could this defeat the "myelin unraveling" problem? Maybe – if the "unraveling" is actually BUBBLES like you might get during the bends, caused by the fixation reaction!

eat fixed tissue

can you EAT glutaraldehyde preserved tissue, if you wash away all the free aldehydes and make sure that the reaction is complete? Can you also cook the tissue? Maybe it would be good! it would certainly be a very powerful preservative! maybe see http://www.aapd.org/assets/1/25/Karp-09-04.pdf

intelligence sorting

hyperbaric fixation

apparently with divers with the "bends", you get bubbles in the myelin in particular. Maybe hyperbaric fixation would be able to eliminate these bubbles!

blood + cryoprotectant

might be more gentle than normal things? Why not use it? (b/c you might need extracellular ion concentrations), also zeta potentials! But you could filter the blood, and get a lot from a slaughterhouse perhaps.

the matrix has a "lord of space" and a "muse of time"

ultra fast fluorocarbon cooling

perfuse brain w/ cryoprotectant, cool to -20°C. Then clear out everything w/ fluorocarbon (or something else that doesn't interact w/ cells and has very low viscosoty at low temperatures), and then immediately switch to fluorocarbon at around -135°C. Should very quickly cool the brain (even faster than persufflation!) and would also avoid the dehydration problems associated w/ persufflation. Even better, you have a mechanism for rapidly warming the brain – immediately switch to warm fluorocarbon. Everything is always still liquid and pressurized. Should buy you a couple % decrease in CPA toxicity.

gameboy IR link over wifi through emilation

living memory is the start of history

the natural dividing line is between living and dead history, and is created retroactively with the advent of brain preservation technology and then realized by mind uploading. It can still creep forward from death of individuals. We're still living in pre-history!

the memory of God is the soul

mind-uploading + christian theology ==> the soul falls out nicely from omniscience.

alternating stir plate

a magnetic stir bar that alternates back and forth. Is it more efficient?

rsync with md5 (or whatever) database

Now if you're rsync'ing something over to the server, if the file matches something already on the server, then it gets copied over from wherever it is on the server (then each block's signature is checked like with normal rsync, so that you get exactly the same behaviour).

mvln

uses a backing database to gaurantee that when you move a folder, that all the links that point to it can remain consistent across your system.

centrifugal drinking

spin the bottle around and tubes from the bottom convey drink up to the top. (don't know why I came up with this one…)

DRACOS at single cell stage

you splice the genes for DRACOS into a single human cell at the first stage of development. Then all the cells of the person that cell will eventually become will automatically produce DRACOS (and the DRACOS will be recognized as "self" by the immune system. This creates a powerful secondary immune system which will make the person immune to almost all viruses.

toilet + fume hood

because it's dumb to have the entire bathroom be a sort of fume hood.

wind speed force

two wind socks one weighted. The angle between them tells you the force of the wind.

sshfs to mount root

you can mount your own root filesystem somewhere else using sshfs. Sort of "normalizes" file permissions without having to use root, and is weird. Could also bypass rm --preserve-root restrictions and delete entire filesystem.

sshfs root@localhost:/ my-root

not even a nop of damage

nop == no-op

twittwe vibratoe

value of cancer

what of value is lost with an easy cancer-cure?

blood

blood is the "wires" that connect organs to each other and impedance match the services that organs provide to other organs. A heart, per se, does not need blood but instead access to the filtering powers of a kidney; blood just connects the kidney cells to the heart cells. That's why "perfusing w/ blood" is entirely missing the point.

armored helmet

use fiber-optics to re-route vision and get better shield for eyes. curved plates, kozilek style.

open source contributions

way to make them public on your website easily.

active opto-glove

for ENHANCED touch! It's a magnyfing glass for your fingers!

glove screen

for driving directions, etc. Better than a watch!

osmium + sugar as a histo stain

the suger interacts with the osmium and retards its progress. you can see details on slices in a light microscope without any more staining, and the EMs are not adversely affected.

encryption camera

use public key on memory card. The camera writes files encrypted with this public key.

immaculate AIDS acquisition

minds and lightspeed

fastern minds have to deal with lightspeed limitations in their own cognitive architectures.

kill with fire

guy A fires fire blast, with a spell circle to maintain the magic. Opponent B just GRABS the magic and pulls MORE fire. Guy A's circle goes out of control and all his life force gets sucked out to supply more fire. B grabs the magic, crushes it, fires a concentrated red lightning bolt, and eats the rest. "You think that you can kill me, WITH FIRE!?"

magic ekiga

edible crayons

library chaining

hypnosis + that drug that makes you loose continuity

can the hypnosos plant things during this time?

forgotten services

use "ovbilion" somehow. Some sleeping drugs make you forget the hour or so before you go to bed. Use this to create forgotten services.

dibenzelene – mike darwin

sleepy perfusion

if brains naturally expand / contract depending on resting / awake state, we should investigate the EMs of brains fixed during "sleep" mode and those fixed during "awake" mode. (while still using anesthetic of course).

shit flavored dog treats

because dogs would probably like them.

fume hood incense

so make sure the fume hood is working

infinity coin

s.f. concept – billions are uploaded by using osmium as a "mind uploading catalyst". osmium is put ino the brain, they brain is scanned, and the osmium is recycled. Then you make coins out of the osmium that has gone through billions of these cycles.

mamilian dive reflex as a method of preparing organs for cryopreservation

spinal encryption

like an X server, except your body parts each run these servers. You all have clocks, and you have to sign your muscle commands with your private key in order to control your body.

suicide note as a mental excercise

from NPR, ted talk, teenagers, etc.

microscope clamp magnet ring thing

cup that fills from the bottom

(you put it on a thing and it starts filling

pronouncaeble liscense plates

(just avoid certain unpronounceable combinations of letters/numbers. It doesn't even change the search space much!)

instant-awake vs natural awakening

cognitive behavioural difference tells you important things about the waking process.

asethetics and personal identity

if you go to germany, you're not the same person anymore.

arch linux diff cache

should only download differences between the new package and the most rcent archive file. Can precalculate. Would make mirrors/upgrading so much faster.

low gravity perfusion

then you can use cappaliary action. From this: http://www.wired.com/2015/01/coffee-cup-designed-let-astronauts-sip-espresso-space/

rational advertiting

a new criteria for advertisting – given same ad structure for two different produces, what structure leads to the most people picking the "optimal" choice.

autoclone bootstrapping

to breed male with self: you make a clone of the male that's broken, male and female, the bootstrap with those gametes

position independent numbers

like latin for numbers. You'd use color, endings, relative size, etc to determine what place the number has. Very convientnt for order or magnitude calculations.

dead man switch activated linux user account

embowlement

condencending reference to embodiment

water staff

drinksy walking staff w/ water

melanin transfection

retention of neurotransmitters / other small molecules during fixation by use of an extracellular polymer such as PVP

machines

Knowing we are machines does not diminish us; instead it opens our minds to the awe-inspiring complexity that is the human mind. Those who prefer to attribute consciousness to a "soul" or other metaphysical process are the ones who diminish man to a mere cartoon caricature.

why does glut change osmotic setpoints in cells

perhaps either 1) It makes the membrane permeable to small molecules or 2) crosslinking proteins means less colagative effects.

Hemocyanin based blood washout solution

for artificial blood, it can be hard to carry enough oxygen because haemoglobin needs to be in RBCs in order to effectively carry oxygen. However, hemocyanin, a copper based oxygen carrying protein, doesn't have this restriction, so it might make particurally good artificial blood. Might also be great for making oxygenated fixative solutions! In fact, hemocyanin is more efficient than hemoglobin for carrying oxygen at low temperatures, perfect for cooling/blood washout! Hemocyanin could also serve to establish oncotic pressure in a blood washout solution since it weighs 75 kilodaltons.

osmotic buffer

polymer which polymerizes / splits apart in order to maintain the osmolality of a solution.

shoes w/ embedded computers

and have little clickey things you operate with your big toe.

gb codec

ultrasonic cell disruptor to make foor

particle accelarator asd an awesome electron microscop

tolouadine blue pen

use biological stains as dyes for ink pens?

clock stop explination

you have a "visual buffer" which needs to fill up whenever you switch out from one scene to another. This is the clock stop illusion.

coffee ad space

Your coffee stock was brought to you by google, the only company that brings you comfort and love in your harsh and heartless corporate world. This is majestic guerrila marketing.

geo-synchro browsing

you get a bunch of proxy servers, and then you visit websites and synchronize the views from each of these proxies into one view. Then you can see the differences by conutry/region. This is a way to experience the "neutral" internet by averging the effects of ip-tracing.

periodic table of genders

arrange people by bahaviour, particular what sort of bonds they can form with other people.

ice cream protein synthesis

colored EM

different heavy metals might possibly have different intensities for different electron acceleration voltages. So this could be the basis for colored EM images!

expansion microscopy dual

this would be a process where you define a molecular scale object using larger microscopic components. Then nanotechnology goes through and replaces each "atomic macro block" with the appropriate atomic construct. That way you can use microscopic 3D printing and a special purpose form of nanotechnolical assembler to create any molecular arrangement.

anoxic glut

what happens when you try to fix tissues in an environment completely devoid of oxygen?

copper+EG

if RBCs are rendered impermeabale to EG when Cu is present, then maybe you can destroy RBCs by a mixture of EG and Cu?

(no term)

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qualia intuition explained

let's say that you lacked the sense of smell. How could you learn what "acrid" means without it. How could you explain it to someone, without analogy to other smells. We mind-project this real linguistic separation into reality and get qualia.

spinal relay

you have a small air-gapped repeater built into your spine in order to help with spinal injury, connect with prosthetics, and to monitor/control your body. Also, you could add the ability to save "macros"!

human cysts

there should be communities of people with varying enforced separations from the rest of society in order to gaurd against various catastrophies.

bioelectric synthesis

have a device which stores a lot of energy, and processes blood by creating sugar from waste produces over the day. You still need water, vitamins, minerals, etc, but this can handle the bulk of your energy demands and be recharged from the wall.

chelation as a method to improve cryoprotectant permeability

transgender fruit analogy

like tomatoes

video game controllers as actual controllers

console controlers like the n64 trident are excellent, durable tools for fine control. We should use them to control all sorts of things like robots by default. You should use it for your projects, since it's unlikely you'll be able to come up with something better. Compared to console controllers, the ones we use for robots/RC stuff are hopelessly clunky.

bubble computers

bubble duality, bubble computing

dark blood bag

blood bags in hospitals should be dark colored to protect the blood from damage from light.

chimeric homozygous sex chromosomes

chimeric organism with XX and XX patterns from two males and two females. On average, it has the correct methylation pattern. Would it work?

horseshoe blood fixative

would it work as a washout?

fixed protein packets

group of fixed proteins in a network which is used as medicine. Hemoglovin, maybe?

prove hauntings

website where you enter your pgp signed encrypted file and swear by all the gods that you'll haunt me with the password when you die, along with whatever other messages you have. protocol – I video, throw rock, get password.

earth air water

probably all intelligent species name their planet "dirt" in their language, unless the're aquatic or flying, then they'd name it "water" and "air" respectively.

ethylene glycol alt name

icebane

overflow hiaku

a hiku about buffer overflos, with garbage C code inside.

white knight

his sword is named "Privledge" (an inherited family sword) he rides along the land, defending the code of chivralirary and keeping the orthodozy of society from fading from the realm.

technological deflation

even the richest robber baron from the 1920's could not afford a cardiac bypass surgery, even with literally all the money they had. As technology advances, the price of bread may go up, but the capabilities which money gives you also dramatically increase.

mental integrity test

if your brain starts to decay, you might not notice the damage until it's too late. This would be a mental integrity test that you take every few weeks that measures your performance and compares it to a baseline. The tests are all designed to catch the early signs of degenerative brain diseases. For example, you might use performamce on a smell-memory assoaction test to detect early-onset Alzheimer's.

mind bank

(in contrast to "brain bank")

scientist online paper reviews

binary feedback

like with the soda machine

trolley cryonics

change the cryonics protocol around so that the death occurs in a non-primary action loop.

binary metric

you make up new unit names for "2 centimeters", "4 centimeters", "16 centimeters", etc. Then no one will be happy! BUT, it helps solve metric's problem of intermediate units. (a centimeter is too small, a meter is too large!)

do it once – upload

a simple merge procedure for uploads

cure for color blindness

could it be possible to administer some retroviruses via direct injection to the retina, to cause some of the cells in the retina to begin expressing different color pigments? The brain ought to easily sort out the rest and enable color vision. Furthremore, could we add some more colors to baesline human eyes? Theory – people who are color blind have better color spatial accuity for the colors they can see, because this it the tradeoff here involved with the retrovirus therapy. Re-purposing color detectors to see new colors at the expense of spatial acuity for the old set of colors.

Passion of the Christ missed opportunity

in the Passion of the Christ, they do the entire show using Latin, Aramaic, etc, with subtitles. They should have had a part where Jesus does the sermon on the mount, he turns to the camera, and starts speaking in English, with no subtitles. It would have been 1.) biblically accurate and 2.) awesome. It would have been such a powerful example of Jesus' divinity, and it felt like they were setting up for it the entire movie, and they missed it!

xenobiotic methalation rewriting

physical pgp signatures

someone should put together the technologies so that you can digitally sign actual pieces of paper – some combination of signing a photograph of the contract using pgp, printing a barcode or OR code on the page which links to a website with the signed image, and a web of trust model so that people can authenticate as themselves. All this totally exists already, it's just not convienent.

meta eye

you wire in a third optical input to the human brain, but it doesn't tranduce light form the real world, bus instead is connected to the "internet of things" and shows you metadata about things you are looking at // serves as an interface to your own mind and body. Then eventually simply real things without metadata seem flat and fake compared to the objects in cities and other annotated areas. This third eye doesn't occupy any of your normal visual field but actually EXPANDS your visual field.

limits of monogamy

dream rewinding

how to record a complete dream without disturbing it or modifying your brain? you need to be an upload: split yourself, and one of you stays awake whike the other sleeps. then you detect a dream in progress by monotoring rapid eye movememt in your sleeping self, and you wake yourself up every few minutes and tell yoursef about the dream. Then sleeping-your restarts the dream, continuation passing style, forgetting everything that was just said, and you repeat this process until the dream is over. Then awake-you and sleeping-you merge each other by taking sleeping-you and replaying the memories of awake-you, and you write a final report on the dream using the "saccade" reports to jog your memory.

denser than osmium

do the "misicibility" thing with an osmium alloy to get something even more dense.

AI hypnosis

hypnosis might be good for studying AI, becuse it might probide a "debugger" for ananlyzing the human mind. I briefly tried this while at MIT, but it needs MUCH more work to be properly evaulated.

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, in a virtual world where they cannot die and never get tired.

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 and embedding steps. I think that you CAN perfuse resins into the brain, simply because you CAN perfuse viscous rubber when doing vascular casts.

perfusion pausing

(Turns out this won't actually work!) One problem with doing perfusion 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 the appropriate level. Use something inert like flurocarbon to avoid problems. 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.

evoultionary textbook mimiricy

as surgery becomes more common, there develops a distinct selective pressure for individuals organ layout to look more like the medical textbooks! :P

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.

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 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? The immune system has 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!

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!

anesthetic surgery courtesty video

as a matter of courtesy, whenever you go under anesthetic, the doctors should provide you with a video of the surgery / recovery after you are concious again. The recording should begin about 3 minutes before anesthetic, and continue until both you and the docor agree to stop recording, or you leave the hospital.

whirlpool of light

shine a laser out into space. But the planet is spinning! What you get is a spiral or light! And as this signal expands, does it eventually reveal it's wuantized nature?

perfusion coking

EOM

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

unitary reverse evolution of chaos+minds

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

microwave time

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

three-eyes

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

visual taste/smell assay

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

carabiner mushroom lock

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

children's tool shop

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

fluid display

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

immunoincompatibility

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

life cycle

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

car with no blind spots

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

partial cell death

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

cryonics color appeal

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

paramagnetic CPA

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

room temp noodles

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

personal carbon offset

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

undoing spermogenesis

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

mars life

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

problem with Aubrey de Grey's ideas

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

validating neurocryopreservation

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

freezing water purifier

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

ultra strength

allow a person to visualize their muscle recruitment patterns. Give them adrenaline and let them feel what it's like to have the normal limits removed. See if they can replicate the effects. Evidence that this might be possible: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1413.long

phone names

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

edible flowers

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

suicide cryonics

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

lead bone

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

the quest for life

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

world-map

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

stage magic rituals

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

isotope time dilation

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

marsupial stimulation

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

dynamic re-keying

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

death always implies damage

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

inner eye

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

chaos rails

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

context gobbler

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

cryonics middle ages

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

philosophy of the mirror

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

biosphere in a bottle

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

chaos lock

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

cryo-evolution

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

suicide parasite

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

What does the suicide parasite get out of it?

This might be answered by the whole thing being a glitch caused by cross-species contamination. Toxoplasma works this way.

What predictions does a disease model make

suicide should be more common among people who share a contagion vector. There should be suicides that don't make any sense : people who weren't really depressed, who had no reason to kill themselves. People who have killed themselves should have a higher incidence of some unknown parasite in their brains.

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.

birth-clones

What if each person was intentionally split at birth into a normal embryo and a few "backup" cells which is 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.

cortex-search

use the repertoire of actions learned to limit the search space of possible actions.

learning to teleport

scifi idea, 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.

digital inter-library loan

libraries at universities already do inter-library loans for books, so why not do the same for access to stupid paywalled digital papers? All the universities could allow access to articles for registered students to all the files available through any participating university. This could be achieved by sending requests through proxies at participating universities. Each university would decide who at the university can access the proxy network. Access to the proxy network could be made easy using something like http://libx.org/.

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!

time verification

some standard way to verify that some piece of data was recorded at a specific time. Might involve a time server, a key for each time period, something like that.

tamper proof gold bars

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.

aurellem shirt

I should make an aurellem star symbol tee-shirt.

touch vision

inspired by GelSight, I want to reexamine cortex and see if I could implement touch as a very low range form of vision.

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 ladies who type up lectures while they are being given. 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 or mirror instead or porcelain. That way, you can see how good of a wipe job you have done / watch how your excretion system works.

test dummies

why don't we clone anencephalic humans and use then to test in vivo human organ systems and drugs? It would be ethical as long as there are women who are willing to host the clones, and it would be a tremendous resource for studying the human body. I see nothing wrong with it morally, since no one is suffering, and it stands to save many lives throughout more advanced technology.

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. 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.

fixed 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.

distributed graphics

Browser based graphics-card accelerated distributed computing API.

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.

predestined body learning

a good example of predestined learning might be the mirror neurons.

restaurant receipt

use a carbon copy receipt instead of two stupid copies.

anti google glass

glasses with mounted lasers and computer vision that targets the cameras in google glass and destroy them.

wearable towel

towel with clasp, velcro, whatever, that allows one to wear the towel more securely than just wrapping it tightly and hoping for the best.

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

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.

coffee with tea

rlm-tea contains 2% sugar, 10% cream, and 20% dylan coffee. dylan coffee contains 5% sugar, 20% cream, and 10% rlm-tea. Start your mornings with recursion!

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.

http://betsofbitco.in/

what a great place for an AI/person to prove themselves as a good predictor. I wish this could be automated.

true reflection

don't forget about that mirror in the student center!, it's two 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.

compression

brain-aware image compression algorithm

Credit card proxy

would be a company which works like paypal except for real world transactions

Flesh pillow

a pillow like the arm or torso of a human, complete with simulated temperature, bones, and heartbeat.

super screw

a screw which has only one or two threads and instead uses compression to fit into a hole (the whole shank of the screw is split into multiple pieces to accomplish this; the tip is a point, then the middle bulges out and gets compressed when screwed in.

light filter

(like light tweezers) to mechanically separate fluids with different index of refraction

chalk eraser project

maybe make a directional eraser, for easy release of chalk dust, like fur, and how it likes to rest in a certain direction.

silver socks

socks laced with silver for the antimicrobial properties.

UROP

magnet gear/metal teeth tape

Rod of Moses

device to distill urine through evaporation and easily dispose of urea crystals for use in desert – produce drinkable water.

UROP

Make the LED in line with the flow for the micro injector, so that it may transmit maximum flow. Motor that changes distance of internal magnet from windings depending on desired speed so as to obtain maximum power efficiency.

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.

power strip/timer programmable combination

meh

algorithms

which learn what their inputs are and in what order, and can adapt to changing circumstances – they remember previous arguments and adapt so as to respond to different connections.

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.

paper folding device

make it convenient to fold lots of papers in various ways.

concrete epoxy

epoxy with sand/ some other solid material.

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?

movie screening

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!

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.

super reading program

teaches people the ideal mental mask to apply during reading so as to read very fast.

explosive thermite epoxy putty

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

reading comprehension

use the above 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.

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!

reading

is a form of synsethesia

DNA printer

A machine which translates the text eg, "ACTGAC" into actual DNA

black generator

ferro-fluid magnetic field suspended micro generator to make electricity

alcohol battery

alcohol/fluid flow powered battery

folding razor blade sword

perfect pitch

learn perfect pitch using another sense in combination (sight or touch)

kaleidoscope projector

razor blade de-sharpener

for guilt free disposal

bricks

filled with luminescent plant material

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.

flossing thimble-guards

(these actually exist)

rules + lattice learning

integrate lattice learning with rules by generating hypothetical examples

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.

crowd preservation

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 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 the human's energy?

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.

Mouse

with a horizontal scroll wheel in addition to the vertical scroll wheel

logic maintenance system for big institutions

to make sure the things they are thinking about doing are not retarded

http://www.regulations.gov/

cool site

genetically engineered glowing fruit

sell seeds?

memory slide

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?

make a completely indestructible phone

no moving parts or display you should be able to slam it around all you want, and it will just work. brutally simple. aerogel around the battery, minimal interface - never gets too hot, and can be dropped into water. no holes – uses field effects for everything from the buttons to inductive charging and data transfer.

midi to ocarina "tabs" program

(online website? buy ocarinas from it too)

3d printing with sound pulses (or just patterns)

like the 8.03 lecture

lighter flint on spring

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

nuclear energy

Rebranding New+Clear Energy with informational campaign and public debate forum to enforce its transparent and open nature. France needn't be the world leader in nuclear energy. (Dylan)

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.