Be Patient, Patient Reader

I know I promised I’d post a new idea every day until I die, but that doesn’t mean you have to rub my face in it. I’m actually working on some real big stuff for this site, and you’d be wise to just sit back and relax, and check back every 5 minutes until it happens. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I may have thought of a way to construct a computer to prove or disprove the existence of God. Sounds pretty cool, I know.

In the mean time, you’ll have re-read the old ideas. There’s like 100 really funny jokes you missed.

Paul

Invention: Reality Goggles

Reality is pretty cool, right? Probably, but how would you know? Sadly, all of our observations of reality are filtered through our various senses. Not that I don’t love senses. Senses let my brain know what’s going on. My brain – you know, the thing that uses my body like a marionette to move itself from place to place, loves food and sex and needs a way to find these things as efficiently as possible. If we didn’t need food and sex then we wouldn’t need to see, smell, hear, taste, or feel. The reason we don’t have a 6th sense is that it wouldn’t help us get more food or sex. Sorry, dead people.

You might think being human is pretty special. We have special brains, but the rest of us is very run of the mill. Take our eye-sight for example. We can’t see very far away or very close-up. We can’t see infrared, like mosquito’s can. The ‘visual’ part is only a tiny section of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. In fact, if we had better vision we could also see ultra-violet, microwave, x-ray, gamma, radar, FM, shortwave, AM, etc. Seeing radio would be pretty cool, but probably very confusing – but, even more importantly it wouldn’t even help us find more food or sex.

Depressingly, we will never have any idea what reality is really like, because by definition, reality is the totality of existence, sans our experience of it. Reality is all of the stuff that exists, doing whatever it is it’s doing and has been doing, for all of eternity.

But, what if there was a special pair of goggles that allowed you to see things the way they really are?

Invention: Human 2.0 – Flexible Bones

You’ve no doubt heard that sticks and stones may break your bones. Well, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There must be literally dozens of other things that can break your bones. A crow bar, a rock, a car, anything heavy and hard falling out of the sky, you falling out of the sky. That’s all I can think of right now, but you get what I’m saying.

Bones would be a lot better if they weren’t gruesomely snapping in half all of the time. Imagine if your bones were still rigid and strong, but could bend under pressure without ever breaking. (As a kid did you ever soak a chicken leg-bone in vinegar for a few days?) Now, imagine falling out of maybe a 4 story window. No sweat with your Flexi-Bones. Imagine, you’re late for work – no time for the elevator – just jump out the window. Don’t like looking both ways before crossing the street? Who cares?

Of course, there’s a limit to the amount of deceleration your internal organs (including your tender brain) are able to take. I don’t know what those limits are, but if I were to guess I’d say you’re pressing your luck landing on your head from over 5 stories up. And the same rules for staying out from under the wheels of garbage trucks still apply.

Invention: Population Control Drug

This may come as a bit of a shock, but so far as I can tell there is only one real problem in the world. From it stems every bad thing there ever was, practically: it is the main cause of hunger, environmental pollution of all kinds, clear cutting of rain forests, war, famine, the spread of disease, traffic jams, over-crowded subway trains, high housing costs, top soil depletion, sweat shops, Wal Mart, shortages of fresh water, the U.S.’s dependence on foreign oil, unemployment, and general feelings of desperation and melancholy.

We shouldn’t need to reduce, re-use, or recycle. Everything should be packaged in CFC based foam, that we can throw over our shoulders when we’re done with it. We don’t need hybrid-hydrogen-methane-pedal-powered cars. Gas burning ones are fine the way they are. And we don’t need ‘spare the air day’, or Los Angeles for that matter. All of this amazing fantasy could be easily realized if there were about 1,000 total people on the Earth. It’s a simple supply and demand problem – we just need less demand.

The pill that could solve all of these problems, and establish a hedonistic utopia, is a drug I’ll call Lemmyoxine. It does one thing: whoever takes it will be overcome by the urge to throw themselves into an active volcano.

Invention: Cow 2.0

Everyone loves to eat cow.   But, ask any cow how they feel about being slaughtered for human consumption, and they’ll always give the same answer: ‘Moo’.  This is what animal rights activists are for – they are the official translators of the bovine language.  As it turns out, the rough translation of the cow’s message is, ‘No thanks.’

Unfortunately for the cow this changes nothing, because as you know, humans can’t help but love eating cow.  Even people who choose not to partake in the consumption of tasty cow treats, secretly long for the tender juicy flesh.  It’s impossible to talk humans out of their love for cow, and equally futile trying to convince a cow that being slaughtered for food is a great way to go.  Fortunately, I have a solution for these irreconcilable differences: Cow 2.0 – genetically engineered to be way better than the original.

Major Features of Cow 2.0 

1. No sense of fear – who likes the idea of a cow getting all agitated and freaked out watching one of their pals get a metal spike driven through their brain? 
2. No sense of pain – prodding, branding, and slaughtering won’t be such a big deal.  They’ll love the attention.
3. Ability to regenerate muscle tissue after getting it sliced off – this turns the cow into a meat generating machine, so you don’t even need to kill it.

Bonus Features: 

1. Ability to shed its skin – akin to the way sheep can be sheared regularly, except here we’re pulling the cow’s actual skin off. 
2. Ability to eat its own waste – I don’t know how many times they’d be able to do this in a row, but it’d still save money/grain/water if they could do it a few times.  You’d also need to instill it with the desire to eats its own waste.

Invention: Silent Automobile Horn

The most obnoxious place in the world is a busy Manhattan intersection.  HONK! HONK!  If you know of a more obnoxious place, please tell me and I will disagree with you.  This is one of the those rare moments that movies are exactly like real life.  Another time I can think of is when that lady turns from a mannequin into a real person in the movie Mannequin, because I believe this happens.

I hate noise.  Especially sudden noise.  HONK!  Life has enough distractions that when I finally experience a moment where one thought can organically flow into another, and suddenly and finally that one last riddle of life is at my fingertip—HONK! HONK! HONK!  What?

So, imagine you’ve got a special speaker in your car, only used for one purpose: hearing other horns.  And when you push your own horn a signal is sent out to a receiver in all nearby vehicles, triggering their own horn speaker.  Every car has the speaker, and every car has a receiver/transmitter.  This way, drivers can honk at each other all day long, but us pacifistic pedestrians can walk down the street in peace.

Maybe you’d also need a special (regular) horn that actually makes noise so pedestrians can hear it, in case of emergency…but, I’d rather risk it.

Invention: Bullet Melting Vest

Don’t worry – as I know nothing about chemistry or physics, this explanation will be very simple.

Take your average bullet made out of, say, some kind of metal.  Now, take this vest made from a ‘special’ material that’s chemically-reactive to bullet-metal.  The idea is that once the bullet and the vest come in contact, a very fast chemical reaction takes place that dissolves the bullet.  You know how certain metals explode when they come in contact with water?  Well, this is exactly not like that.  It’s more like if the bullet was made from soft fudge.

I’m not sure what the illustration is for.

Invention: Lefty Pen

Every Lefty knows that writing in English was invented by a Righty.  Righties probably wonder why Lefty handwriting tends to look terrible, and why Lefties always look awkward and lame while using a writing implement.

Here’s how writing works, for the preschoolers reading this: you hold a pencil (or crayon or sidewalk chalk) in your right hand, and pull your arm to the right, away from you, towards the end of a line.  Repeat until all lines are full and the teacher hands you a new page.  Yeah, sounds great – if you’re a Righty.  Because of Righty-bias, Lefties have to push the pencil towards the right – their hand covering what they’re writing the whole time.  Thus Lefties are in a continuous fog.

Get it?  Righties pull, Lefties push.  It’s hard to explain exactly why this means that Lefty handwriting has to look stupid, but it does.  If, however, Lefties could start on the right side of a page, and write towards the left, then Lefty writing would be beautiful and flawless.  That’s never going to happen because everyone would need a mirror to read Lefty handwriting.

Most Lefties have also had the experience of ball-point pens getting screwed-up.  The classic black Uni Ball pen is a good example of this.  A Lefty can use one of these pens for a little while, but eventually all of that pushing-motion scrapes up paper and dirties up the ball-rolling thing, or something.  I don’t really know exactly what’s going on, but it’s a serious problem that needs a remedy.

Hence: Lefty Pen

Shown at the angle a Lefty would be using it – the idea here is that the ball-point hits the surface the way it would if a Righty were using a regular pen.

Invention: Sunglasses that make you feel like you’re totally fucked-up, dude

I try not to think too much about what’s ‘possible’ or ‘not possible’ using ‘today’s technology’.  In fact, I don’t care if something is possible within the laws that govern the universe.

These electronic glasses allow you to see the world through any number of ‘filtered’ ways.  Beyond simple tinting, they could manipulate the physical appearance of reality.  Think of it as Photoshop filters for life.  Imagine the world looking as if it were a Van Gough painting.  Imagine patterns of tiny dancing skeletons all over the place.  Why do you need to drop acid if you can have your glasses do it for you? 

Notes:

This could be done ‘today’ by having stereo video cameras mounted on the glasses, feeding into a computer and software running real-time calculations on the image-data and projecting the results back onto small LCD screens in front of the eyes.  Of course this would all have to be done in real-time.  And obviously, it’d be a lot cooler if they looked like regular aviator sunglasses and not a dorky gadget on your face.

Browser Plug-in: Visual Browsing History Map

This would be a map showing you the history of your web-browsing for a particular session.  You could click on any of the thumbnails to revisit a site you’ve already been to.  It’s a visual chronology of your browsing, which also keeps track of back-button presses.

Notice point 2 – this is a google search results page

The top-most 3 represents a link you chose from a google search. (these would all be thumbnails of the actual pages visited)

Then you hit the ‘back’ button, and clicked the middle 3 (another link from the google search).

From there you clicked another link – the top-most 4You didn’t like that page, so you hit ‘back’ twice – leaving you back at 2.

From there you clicked another google link (the bottom 3), then another page…ok you get it.

Invention: Wi-fi Headphones

Imagine a pair of headphones that have built in wi-fi (they can connect to the internet). This could create a number of ways to listen to audio wirelessly. You could listen to internet radio for example.

But here’s what I would want to do:
1. Leave my computer on at home (with iTunes shared or Red Chair softwares Audigen, or something)
2. The headphones constantly search for an open wi-fi hot spot
3. When a wi-fi hotspot is found the headphones connect to my home computer’s music collection.
4. I use a little remote control gadget attached to the headphones to peruse my music collection.

This way you could have a huge collection of music at home, and be able to listen to it anywhere you go, and not be dependent on an expensive hard-drive-based-gadget (ie. Ipod). There could also be a buffering system where the devices downloads the songs to internal memory, so if you temporarily lose signal you’ll still be able to listen without interruption.

Futuristically, you could even share other types of media, like photos or even movies, all over wi-fi (though you’d need a little video screen with wi-fi, rather than, or in addition to, the headphones), and it could all be coming from a Media Center-type PC/hard drive in your living room. The idea is to leave all you media at home.

Invention: Eat Steak One-Handed With a Knork

The Knork (nork)

Not exactly an invention…

just a good idea.