If red blood cells are rendered impermeabale to EG when Cu is present, then maybe you can destroy RBCs by a mixture of EG and Cu? (By osmotically crushing them?)

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? It's true that linguistically, there's no way to communicate thsi concept to someone who can't smell. We mind-project this real linguistic separation into reality and get qualia, thinking that because it's beyond the reach of language it's also beyond physical reality as well!

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"! Would want to also pair with suitable encryption!

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

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.

Copper (and potentially other metallic ions) can reduce cryoprotectant permeability, so chelation might help to make them more permeable. Perhaps this could be why dog brains are more premeable to glycerol than most other animals?

A tomato is a fruit but its a vegetable inside.

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.

Bubbles and water droplets moving from place to place are great analoges for "holes" in transistors. You could totally build a computer with nonlinear bubble accumulators.

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

Chimeric organism with XX and XX patterns from two males and two females. On average, it has the correct methylation pattern. Would it work? Could half of the cells then be programmed to die at a later stage after the organism has "bootstrapped"?

Group of fixed proteins in a network which is used as medicine. Hemoglobin, for false blood, maybe?

Website where you enter your pgp signed encrypted file, then swear by all the gods that you'll haunt me (Robert McIntyre) with the decryption password when you die, along with whatever other messages you have. protocol – I video, throw rock (to prove you're not just faking), get password. Like James Randi's prize.

Icebane

A hiku about buffer overflows, with garbage C code inside.

The son of a nobleman and steeped in the knightly tradition since birth, he rides across the land with his family greatsword, "Privilege", defending the principles of chivalry, and his codes of honor.

WHITE KNIGHT: (rides up to a peasant on his magnificent white stallion) Hold, Peasant! You would eat bread while sitting on the ground? Where is your honor, that you would not eat like a man, sitting at the dinner table?

Peasant: I haven't got any dinner table…

WHITE KNIGHT: (decapitates peasant with Privlege, without even dismounting from his horse) Another day spent defending the honor of everyone!

Basically, the White Knight is such an asshole.

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.

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.

This is a brain bank that has brains well-enough preserved that the minds inside are still viable.

This really needs to be a thing and would be great for the scientific community. I want an online thing like yelp or something that lets you comment on scientific papers and rate them for clairty, etc.

I was fascinated by a soda machine that shut itself off by filling a carefully balanced cup, which fell away from the fill-switch once the cup had become heavy enough. Makes me think of minsky's "ultimate machine" or Dylan's autosearch engine.

According to the book "Moral Tribes", people can more rationally think about death when it exists in a "non-primary action path". Perhaps this could be a good way to explain cryonics / organ donation?

You make up new unit names for "2 centimeters", "4 centimeters", "16 centimeters", as well as "1/2 centimeters", "1/4 centimeters", etc. Names might be duocentimeter, quatrocentimeter, hemidemisemiliter, 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!)

Putting aside the philosophical problems around mind-uploading for a moment, imagine that you were already a computer program running on a suitable robotic body. Let's say that the program is based off a detailed emulation of your brain – no one really understands exactly how the program is doing its computations, only that it faithfully recreates the original biological computations. At this point, you might want to be able to exist in multiple places at once while still maintining a coherent unity of identity, but how do you do it? You can't modifiy your mind to handle multiple bodies at once, because this would require extensive understanding of exactly how your program is doing its computations in order to scale it to multiple bodies. But you can't just copy yourself either, because the copies will eventually diverge leading to a loss of unity of identity. You can't easily merge copies together after they've "diverged" because again, you'd have to come up with a coherent theory of mind to merge the datastructures. One simple way to do merges is this: First, you need to acchitect the robot bodies to record every single bit that's passing through all sensory nerves throughout a small time interval that's insufficient to create significant divergence. For sake of argument I'll assume that you do this each day. This stream of data represents the ultimate "life recording" and can be easily accomplished either in simulation of physical reality by using custom sensory organs, like in CORTEX. This set of information, if played back to a copy of you in the exact mental state right before the start of recording, would perfectaly match with the choices of the individual and serve as an adequate replacement for the world, even though it contains almost no information compared to the world! Once you can do the "full life records," then the procedure works like this: At the morning of Day 1 you "checkout" the one copy of you from yesterday and make around 10 copies which each live out their day. Each copy records a full "life recording" for the day. Then one copy is chosen as the "trunk" and the rest as branches. The trunk replays the life-recordings of the branches in accelerated time over the night, and the branches are then deleted leaving only one individual that remembers 10 consecutive days spent in different contexts. Then you repeat the process for Day 2 and so on. I'll call this the "small delta-T approximation" method for mind-merging. It works as long as the timeframe is not too long an is limited by how fast you can faithfully replay life recordings. You don't have to be "offline" for any amount of time while doing this: You can also alternate two sets of 10, one for the day and one for the night, and have the night and day trunks be generated from the last day / night group's trunk, respectively. This trades having to "sleep" for the day/night crews not being able to remember what happened last night/day respectively. The more you know about how brains work, the faster you can integrate previous experience and the more copies you can sustain. This methods means that you never lose any experience, but if you're willing to lose some nonessential experiences, a more extreme version of this might be to make a copy of yourself that accomplishes a task and then reports anything of note in a written report.

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.

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 is the tradeoff 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.

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 to convey Jesus' divinity, and show off another miracle. It felt like they were setting up for it the entire movie, and they missed it!

You make chimeric sea urchins with human reproductive stem cells, so that the sea urchins produce sea urchin-like HUMAN sperm and eggs. Then you can have two human males / females reproduce without the methylation problem, by using the sea urchins as intermediades. And the normal ethical problems of human/animal chimeras are avoided because the sea urchins don't have brains to begin with.

You punch into your phone "I want to sign a contract" It gives you a gensym (or you enter a name) like: https://contracts.example.com/car-insurance-2015-09-26

Then you sign your name, date, and include the link on the contract under "PGP sig". Then you take a picture with your phone and enter your signing password. It gets uploaded to your website and the image gets PGP signed with your key. Now you have a timestamped archive of the contract, and anyone can verify it by looking at the physical contract itself!

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.

Let's say that you're immortal and monogamous. The longer you live with your partner, the more you build an internal model of them, and they you. Eventually these models may become complete, and then you two are actually one single recursive entity which references itself. As you offload more processing to the other (such as old couples actually do – "remember when we were at that place, what-was-his-name honey?"), then computationally you are a single mind distributed across two bodies. (There's a reason why old couples often die as a pair). You might decide to actually merge bodies eventually. But then, you were both monogamous, so the combined person will be monogamous (and lonely because it lacks a partner). So you get married again, rinse, wash, repeat. All the monogamous people within a certain "compatability group" eventually become one. Our "social center of mass" doesn't lie within our own bodies!

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.

It would really let you directly test theories of memory because you can test a person every second if you want to. I see a couple ways this could play out: you could report a dream that follows a linear narrative, with the story advancing a little bit each time (the "storytelling" hypothesis), you might say something totally different each time (the "garbage memory access" hypothesis), or something even weider like where you report exactly the same thing between seconds 0-20, then something totally different during seconds 20-40, etc.

Do the "misicibility" thing with an osmium alloy to get something even more dense. Basically osmium + something else might be denser then pure osmium.

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. Also, things you can do under hypnosis provide constraints on what the mind's capabilities are. Also, hypnosis iteslf is a worthwhile thing to study in its own right.

Upload faces challenges to grow into the 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.

If big butterflies used to exist, then maybe we could make butterfly-inspired drones!

Human sex cells have methylation patterns that encode male/female origin. If you combine two male patterns, the fetus grows "too fast" and dies. Two female patterns causes the fetus to enter a "vegatable" state and fail to develop. Evolutionary biologists say that this reflects the asymmetry of energy investement for creating offspring. If that's true, then species that cast-spawn will lack this asymmetry, and give clues about how to remove it in humans. If even cast spawners like sea urchins have it, then that means there's something deeper going on!

You take genetic material from two males and put it into an egg cell that has had all genetic material removed. Or, you take the genetic material from one egg and put it in another egg. This would allow homosexual couples to genetically reproduce. One technical challenge blocking this technique is that human gametes have methylation patterns that encode male/female origin, and only a male+female pattern gives rise to viable offspring. You could "recondition" male / female gametes to give them the opposite pattern, perhaps by incubating them in the appropriate environment. You also could try taking stem cells and making them form the appropriate structures in vitro.

Large molecules such as PVP are able to vitrify at around -20C, and at farily small concentrations. IF they could be introduced into cells, they would be quite useful as vitrification agents. However, it's difficult to get them in because they are so big. So instead, use smaller agents which combine together into polymers at low temperature. In particular, Fructose, trehalose, and glycerol seem to have the desired properties (though you need to make versions of fructose and trehalose that can penetrate).

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.

Less extreme example of the "perfusion pausing" trick – just keep the perfusion running and don't put the perfusion target into the liquid as deep.

One problem with doing perfusion of heads / organs where the veins freely leak fluid is that if you STOP the perfusion, you rapidly loose pressure in the organ as your perfusate leaks out. You can prevent this by submerging the organ/head/rat whatever in fluid at an appropriate deepness. You would have to slowly decrease the flow rate while simultaneously lowering the perfusing object into the fluid. To start again, reverse the process – reengage the peristaltic pump slowly while removing the organ from the fluid.

As surgery becomes more common, there develops a distinct selective pressure for individuals' organ layouts to look more like the medical textbooks!

Temporary / permament transparent skin. Allows for examination of organs / muscles and visual prevention of disease and detection or abnormalities / good things eg. excercise optimization.

Candy with a whole book written in it. Eat a book!

Just kill off the B-cells and friends that would cause problems in a organ-transplant / other situation. AIDS is good at killing these cells – maybe make it can be modified to just target the ones that will cause problems. Then you can premptively kill off that part of someone's immune system before a transplant. ALSO, you can kill off everyone's defenses against other blood types and make people effectively type AB+ w.r.t blood transfusions. Actually, why not give babies this treatment so that they're automatically compatable with all blood types? It would be like a blood transfusion vaccine. The immune system does this already when it's first growing; maybe it can be "retrained" to accept new things, or the mechanism of immune cell death be co-opted for these purposes.

Tetris that actively gives you the worst possible piece. Implemented! http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastet.html , https://github.com/johnny-morrice/solumns/releases

More things should have them! Chairs, tables, cups, hats, trashcans, basically anything is better with a pocket.

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.

We could rapidly MAKE giant dragonflies by evolving modern dragonflies in an very oxygen rich environment!

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

You do cardiac bypass on an animal like a pig, then pump in tasty, tasty perfusate (like marinade) into the animal's vasculature. Then, you switch out to saline and increase the temperature of the saline to rapidly and uniformly cook the animal. It could be the tastiest meat ever!

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.

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

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.

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! Dylan wrote a blog post on this subject!

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?

Get a grid of bacteria, each expressing a human taste/smell receptor linked to some sort of fluorscent activity or ion pump. Use a camera / electrical grid to transduce the smell / taste signal into bits! Inspired by gel-sight from MIT.

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.

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!

Take the human genome, and refactor it so that it doesn't use a particular codon at all. Then remove the support from our ribosomes for that codon. What does this do for us? It makes us immune to almost all viruses! There is at least one bacteria that already does this to great effect.

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!

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.

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.

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

you take a CPA that can be influenced by magnetic fields so that its degrees of freedom are limited. Then, you release the field, instantaly increasing the size of the state space of the system and dramatically decreasing the temperature enough to plunge the system past homogenous nucleation temperature and directly to the glass transition temperature, creating a doubly unstable glass at much lower CPA concentrations than possible at conventional CPA concentrations. A major technical limitation facing this technique is that it's a very minor effect – you can only get about 0.1C with most systems that have been studied so far.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

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 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!

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

Many stories that have immortal characters have the "immortal who wants to become mortal" trope. I want to story where the protagonist loses their immortality and feels angry and ashamed about losing something that's so absolutely crucial to their identity. A reverse of "death makes life worth living", they feel that living forever is what makes life worth living. Now they've "lost their sunrise" or their "connection to the timeless universe" or something. So they go on a quest to get it back, learning about themselves along the way, and regaining the precious thing they lost in the beginning. Which, it they can actually gain their immortality back, means that they never lost it in the first place!

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!

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

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.

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?

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

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!

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.

The homoclinic tangle (which I call the "rails of chaos") is very beautiful. We couldn't even visualize it before computers because it's so complicated! Someone should make a visualization of it. Here's my inital stab at it: The Rails of Chaos

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".

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.

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!"

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.

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

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.

People should eat more bugs because they're much more efficient, so why not do some major domestication research to make very appealing bugs? Beetles, in particular, seem to be excellent targets for domestication because they have extreme levels of genetic malleability. Remember that lobster was once seen as an animal only fit for prisoners to consume!

What if each person was intentionally split at birth into a normal embryo and a few "backup" cells which are then frozen. The backup cells are created just the same way as natural identical twins. The backups can be used to regenerate organs. etc. Also, it would be a good sci-fi concept, because you could have a culture where people reward people who were especially awesome are "reborn" from their backups. Imagine having a young Bach every generation, etc.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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. Then watch as the painting turns into a commentary on perception and popularity – a sort of eigenvector of perception! Will all paintings turn into the same thing eventually?

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.

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.

Edible candy screw with candy nuts that you can screw as well.

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!

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!

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.

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!

There are people who type up lectures at MIT while they are being given, so that hearing impared students can follow along. These recordings should be kept and given to OCW for subtitles. If the timestamps of keys are recorded, then it is easy to make subtitles.

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.

A toilet with a square basin made of mirror instead of porcelain. That way, you can see how good of a wipe job you have done / watch how your excretion system works.

given that a doctor is operating on a patient via telepresence, one cool things you can do is shine X-rays into the patient to view the insides during real time. (This doesn't expose either the doctor or patient to chronically damaging amounts of X-rays) If the system was coupled with a Bayesian model of the layout of the structure, and the x-rays were only fired whenever the uncertainty of the model reached a certain threshold, then the radiation damage and surgery risk could be minimized.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Use a carbon copy receipt instead of two stupid copies.

Easiest way to disguise oneself as a woman is to wear a burka.

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.

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.

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.

A faucet with discrete ticks instead of continuous.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's a "true mirror" in the MIT student center – it's two normal mirrors at right angles, like staring at a corner of a room. The light reflects so that it shows you what you actually look like, instead of your mirror image.

Use computer to drive wings with remote power/logic.

Public (distributed?) database of email->private-key pairs, to enable automatic encryption.

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).

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.

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

Works like light-tweezers to mechanically separate fluids with different indexes of refraction.

Socks laced with silver for the antimicrobial properties.

Device to distill urine through evaporation and easily dispose of urea crystals for use in desert – produce drinkable water and live an extra few days!

Web scraper which monitors various lotteries, looking for "special" gimmick changes in the rules (like 4x winnings on Wednesdays) and computes expected value…

Make an evolutionary algorithm to make old stuff using all four basic circuit elements.

Concrete that has embedded metal fibers so that it can conduct electricity.

Might be useful for some types of manufacturing/3D printing – how small can an induction melter be made, for example.

Hear a true pure tone by direct stimulation of the nerves of the ear. Like when Adelson "saw green".

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.

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?

use the screen capture routine to make a quiz program that constructs questions about the content you seemed to gloss over while reading. could be easy if the pdf came with embedded questions. Dylan: automatically generate word-cloud about the parts you found most interesting; help others who read the same stuff by drawing attention to the interesting parts.

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.

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!

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

Epoxy with sand/ some other solid material.

Make a samurai sword, but use osmiridum instead of martensite for the cutting part; it should be a better sword.

use the induction technology used to recharge electric toothbrushes with no metal links to send data without any metal at all!

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

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.

To allow better control of organic systems and an enhanced nervous system.

A way to retrieve memories more robustly.

If you stare at a red light, then you get a green after-image. If you immediately look at something green while still seeing the green after-image, you will experience a Green like none you've ever seen before – color so intense it's beyond the range of anything that exists in the world.

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?

Create precious metals or something else economically advantageous. Best transmutation I can come up with is mercury into gold, but it's not economically viable.

Inoculate food with tons of harmless bacteria so that there's no room for bad bacteria as a method of preservation

Pasteur - style holding jar with siphon as a way to store sterilized liquids at room temperature indefinitely w/o refrigeration.

Throw rude people out of restaurant as a matter of course – make ambiance much better.

Make something that mixes soap with fire hydrant water (and reduces the pressure a bit) and use it to clean windows of buildings.

Make an ocarina out of pure silver. Might have really good acoustic properties.

Pen which burns words on to the page, thus never needing any ink. Is there a way to make it runnable from body heat?

and label, and have it mailed to you / sell it from your own online store.

Solar panels that float on the ocean.

Great for daisy chaining people, binding them to environment, etc.

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.

They have some animals that can glow, but glowing fruit that you eat would be AWESOME!

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

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)

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.

Still want more? Visit the Raw Ideas page, but prepare for extreme half-bakedness.