Extend the low energy Interplanetary Transport Network for interstellar transport.
Idea: use the IPTN to get to a Sun-Jupiter Lagrange point, and use that to launch out of the solar system to Alpha Centauri. Use the binary star system of Alpha Centauri to launch to anywhere (Because of its binary nature, I'm guessing it has Lagrange-like unstable points.)
Or, further away, the white dwarves Sirius B or Procyon B offer extremely deep gravitational wells for powerful slingshots.
Because of the risk of theft, most people will never get to hold a gold brick. But it should not be too hard to build a mechanical simulation of one, for example for a museum display. Take an object of the right shape and gold electroplate it. Attach it with strings coming out the bottom to pulleys and weights (like an exercise machine) to simulate the right weight.
You could go the tungsten route, but that much tungsten is valuable enough to steal.
How would the Internet be different if the "port" field in packets were 128 bits wide instead of 16?
Take the text of a bill before Congress and analyze it automatically using natural language processing and other artificial intelligence techniques attempting to predict its future economic and social effects, unintended consequences and perverse incentives.
Use as training data previous passed Acts of Congress and the historical outcome of each Act's effects.
Of course, the intelligence need not be artificial. Human think tanks can play, too. Comparing the past predictions of a think tank with the actual outcome, produce accuracy grades of various think tanks.
What is it that causes the mass of men to look beyond their lives of quiet desperation, beyond their immediate well-being, and become inspired, or even incensed, to take action to support an abstract principle or distant cause?
Paine, Stowe...
Suppose you wished to selectively breed canaries for use in coal mines to alert miners of the presence of poisonous gas. The fittest canaries die from the lowest concentrations of gas, to give the miners as much advance warning as possible. Unfortunately, those fittest canaries are now dead, unable to breed.
Siblings.
Unconscious but revivable.
People talk loudly into cell phones, annoying others nearby, but the technology exists (has existed for a very long time!) so that they don't have to. Pick up quiet speech with a microphone placed close to the mouth, even in a loud environment.
People also l talk loud so they can hear themselves speak. This can be done in a loud environment by echoing what the microphone picks up through the earpiece.
Old landline phones did these just fine. Create a cell phone that does these. For nostalgic effect, or for highly practical reasons, one might reuse the form factor of old handset phones.
Submarine patents should be eliminated. Patents take effect when published.
If someone else comes up with the same invention in between the time when the patent is applied for and approved, it is proof that the invention is not sufficiently novel and ingenious to be granted a patent.
A simple way to provide every process with its own scratch space is for the operating system to call mktemp -d before spawning a new process, and set the TMP environment variable to it for the process. And the process is free to use or ignore the variable.
For shells, the value of the child is provided to the parent.
A more complicated way to do it involves the OS restricting a process to only its temp space, and maybe its parent's if the parent has granted permission. And probably child processes.
The LED glows red when a memory instruction is being executed and green when an ALU instruction is. A human will not be able perceive individual instructions going by at gigahertz, but will be able to perceive the tint of the instruction mix.
Another color for FPU/SSE?
Number each of the dots of one color, e.g., Red 1 through Red 6, so that each dot has a unique name.
A twister choreography is a set of specific directions: Player X places which limb onto which dot. Instead of relying on random chance to tie the players in knots, we rely on a choreographer to have designed an interesting sequence.
Artistically, it is a living sculpture of human bodies, encoded in Twister directions.
With additional kinds of instructions, it is a choreographed form of contact improv dance.
I am skeptical about, though have not investigated, the hubbub over trans-unsaturated fats.
How much more unhealthy (expected decrease in life expectancy per gram consumed) are they compared to cis-unsaturated fats?
Compared to fully saturated fats?
Compared to the equivalent quantity of sugar that the body will convert naturally into body fat?
America's age 21 drinking law is interesting from a democratic standpoint: 18 to 21 year olds are too young to drink, yet old enough to vote, to participate in the political process to change the drinking age if they wished. Probably every 18-21 year old has either been affected or knows someone who has been affected by the law (perhaps being denied entry into a 21+ venue).
Perhaps a majority of 18 to 21 year olds actually do believe the drinking age should remain 21.
Or perhaps this is like a canary in a coal mine: a sign that there is something deeply wrong with our political process.
The way to attempt to change it (probably the way to do anything in politics) is to target a closely contested election. 18-21 year olds generally rarely vote, so if they can be induced to vote on an issue that they care about, they can tip a closely contested election. Ask candidates in such an election where they stand. Perhaps one will dare break ranks to support lowering the drinking age in order to win the votes of this potentially decisive voting bloc. Perhaps both will, in which case it simply becomes an issue of holding either winner to their campaign promise.
An interesting exercise in rocket science: consider a craft that shuttles between the Moon and Earth transporting Helium-3. Mass of the craft, energy efficiency of rocket fuel (you cannot recover the energy spent in escaping the Earth's and Moon's gravity), mass of Helium being transported. Under what conditions is it energy efficient (energy from fusion exceeds transport energy)? Under what conditions is it cost efficient?
Inspired by the 2009 film Moon.
With products like WiebeTech Hotplug, one wonders what the next step of this perpetual escalating war will be.
One possibility is a device securely connected to the wall power supply so that the connection point between the plug and the wall socket cannot be accessed without disrupting a tamper detection switch.
A simple, though probably not too effective, technique to prevent to wall socket cover from being removed is to have the power plug plug into both sockets obscuring access to the plate screw which is normally in the center between the two plugs. (And superglue the plugs to the wall.)
Differently shaped connectors, inspired by the cylindrical DC power connectors and Apple magnetic laptop power seem more difficult to hot swap than one with all the leads exposed.
Another possibility is for the computer to detect the phase change when such a device is used.
Another possibility is to lobby the legislature to make such a device illegal to use by law enforcement, perhaps under the argument of "reasonable expectation of privacy".
How often is this device, or similar techniques, successfully used by law enforcement?
It you wish to record your entire life 24/7 in video, how much would it cost in terms of storage?
We leave it an unsolved problem of how to do this more practically than a camera crew constantly following you around.
Let us assume a video compression rate of 80 kilobytes per second. This comes from fitting a movie onto a CD-ROM, say with XviD. This works out to about 2.5 terabytes per year, which is feasible: perhaps $1000 per year?
We live in interesting times when this is affordable and possible.
Suppose you have an object appraised to estimate its market value under certain conditions. Then you sell the object under those conditions. In this way, you can measure the accuracy of the appraiser. Averaged out over many appraisals and sales, it should be possible to determine an appraiser's accuracy rating, something which a good appraiser would want to publicize to distinguish him or herself from a bad appraiser.
Inspired by Antiques Roadshow.
I have yet to see a programming language do units and dimensional analysis right. I don't know what it would look like. Types?
Mathcad did a reasonable job for an interactive tool.
The next step would try to do vectors and tensors independent of their origin or basis.
