A piano-like musical instrument, but each keypress defines an interval from the previous note. Middle button is a zeroth. Essentially the mathematical first differences of a piano. Long arpeggio phrases become easy to play even on a small keyboard.
Possibly two independent keyboards for independent melody and countermelody.
A way to reset the base note for the next interval to some saved note.
If both players have computers, one can have neat interfaces not possible on the traditional physical board.
A player can analyze by actually moving pieces around before committing a move and sending it. Create such an interface. Previously, one had to do it in one's head.
And kriegspiel.
These are almost certainly not new ideas, though still stymied by not being able to connect two computers without a central server.
People who work with customers often experience "burn-out". Measure the amount of, or degree of progression toward, burnout quantitatively.
Could be used to fire burned-out employees, to avoid them from hurting customers. Set compensation for highly stressful jobs.
Wirelessly connect two computers in proximity without need of an additional switch. Motivation is multiplayer game.
Nowadays we really we want it between smartphones.
Let it work in isolation (neither has internet), but also work if both are on internet, but not interfering with either's connection. The latter might make implementing this over wifi nontrivial if the "main" internet is already using the wifi, perhaps hogging every address.
Bluetooth?
The problem is as old, but still not solved!
A great many people end up never using what they learned in their college major. Often, this is predictable: people who don't know what to do with their life choose to major in something "easy". Probably a great many unused humanities degrees. They go on for a secondary more practical degree, or on-the-job training.
If you're going to do a "useless" major, perhaps merely to signal (imperfect information) that you are able accomplish learning, what should it be? Perhaps something, while likely not useful for employment, could be useful for life in general.
* Music? (As performance) Other art? (As creating)
* Economics? It is to understand the functioning of the world, and not get scammed out of your money.
* Computer programming? Perhaps to be distinguished from the more rigorous "computer science" or "computer engineering"? Computers do play an increasingly important role in our lives?
* Shop? Perhaps distinguished from "mechanical engineering"? Physical things are important.
Educators must make these degrees attractive even to those who (nowadays) think they can't do it. Slowly, over 4 years.
Code data into a rectangular array of black and white pixels with no 3x3 block entirely of the same color.
Dividing the area into 3x3 blocks, setting 8 bits exactly to data and 1 bit as "parity" to avoid same-colored blocks does not work: two 3x3 areas can overlap at a parity block corner. Perhaps the parity bit can also signify whether the data is inverted.
No 2x2 block
No 5-pixel cross
Inspired by 2D barcodes like QR, which want to avoid vast fields of the same color. This is probably a solved problem.
Devise an easily computable and invertible mapping from length-2n bit strings with exactly n bits set, to integers from 1 to Binomial(2n,n).
A problem in search of an application. Perhaps coding.
Devise a method to robustly encode information in a pattern of dots. Inspiration is steganography. A zen garden with stones.
Let the method be robust against transformation and deformation. This allows the dots to be hand-drawn. One possible encoding is in the geometric arrangement: what dots are inside what triangles, etc. Probably want error-correcting codes. Computer vision machine decoding.
Lay out a triangular lattice of dots. Encode 1 bit by possibly placing a dot within a triangle. Though this is probably too obvious for steganography. (I think square doesn't work because of ambiguity of all bits set. Nor hexagon.)
For example, buy a consumer device to electronically monitor temperature. There are an unlimited number of things a consumer might want to do next with the temperature: display it (on various display devices), record it, broadcast it, use it to control another device.
But consumer devices aren't designed this way in general, designed to be one component in a larger system that the consumer assembles. Specialist devices are, but they are often more expensive due to lack of economies of scale.
This seems to be a problem. Why? I don't think the root cause is consumers wanting it this way, which could easily be disproven by demonstrating that "custom composable" make consumers more happy. In principle, connecting things can be made easy by designers.
I suspect it is the lack of standardized interfaces, and patent and licensing restrictions on proprietary interfaces.
But perhaps Arduino or Raspberry Pi are vanguards are of a new age about to dawn.
Does attitude towards, or amount of, masturbation correlate with interesting things? Attitude toward and amount of casual sex ("it's a large warm sex toy."). Style and technique of sex ("Mere orgasm I can do myself; let's do something more interesting.").
More ambitious would be to discover correlation with behavior seemingly unrelated to sex. Is it difficult to obtain truthful information about masturbation?
Beware of inferring causality from correlation.
Given a tessellation of a plane, define a function whose value at a given point is the distance to the nearest boundary edge.
For a given slice through the plane, path integrate the function along the line, averaged over length. What is the minimum "difficulty" slice? It probably coincides with many edges. What tessellation maximizes the minimum slice?
What happens when a black hole plows through a cloud of WIMP dark matter? Dark matter is assumed to be able to pass through most things, but not a black hole: the black hole must gain some mass of the dark matter the falls directly in.
Will an accretion disc form? Can accreting dark matter lose angular momentum by friction, so eventually fall in?
Will a neutrino pass through a neutron star?
This could be measured in a supernova in a binary eclipsing system with a neutron star.
R. F. Sawyer, Neutrino opacity of neutron-star matter
Also dark matter (WIMP).
Share an intimate experience with someone you don't lust after, someone neutral. Then, share an intimate experience with someone you do lust after. Does the former experience decrease the pleasure of the latter, because it's no longer as "special"?
Counterintuitively, I think the answer is "no", extrapolating from my experience with partner dancing. I even think it's a "strong no", where the former experience actually enhances the pleasure of the latter. This could be investigated with fMRI and other biological measurements. If it is "yes" for some people and "no" for others, what causes the difference?
Are people making the correct decision? Powerful social forces possibly prevent them.
Another life-sized chess idea. Players move pushcarts representing pieces on a field or court.
One possible blindfold-chess-like variation is the carts are identical except marked with piece symbols only on top: too high for the players to see, but the spectators in the raised stadium seats can see.
Instead of valuable materials buried (at least) a fixed absolute distance below the surface, let it be buried a distance from the surface, taking into account uneven terrain. For example, inside a mountain: possibly not even "below sea level", but as difficult to access (in distance to dig).
More ambitiously, use a more realistic geologic model for placing materials with uplift, faults, volcanism, sedimentation, biological forces (for coal), etc.
The other half of "earth science" would be more realistic weather (and weathering forces).
Without sight of a board, two players pass a game score back and forth, filling in the next move. Not exactly blindfold, because being able to see all the moves so far allows reconstructing the position.
Semi blindfold simul: the master sits in one place. The players shuttle back and forth to their boards carrying their own game scores. Boards may proceed at different speeds. Players might not even be required to treat their own board like a game; they can physically analyze on it if they wish.
Something fancier involving tablets to avoid illegal moves.
Behavioral scientists and lay people easily produce many artificial scenarios and anecdotes of people behaving irrationally. I've contributed. However, just to cover both sides, consider the possibility that people, by and large, do behave rationally, choosing the optimal action, even for seemingly extremely difficult decisions.
The speculated mechanism is that social structures develop to aid rational decision making "in the real world", an aspect not captured in psychology experiments. If so, irrationality happens only where such structures are inhibited from developing.
The instruction to drink heavily at Purim surely has the side effect of some sex between people that would not have occurred if everyone were sober. Have Jewish religious scholars through the ages written about and come to any conclusions about this phenomenon? Of course, this is tremendously relevant today with alcohol often playing a significant role in rape, particularly date rape.
On one hand, I speculate that the very powerful social structures to control who has sex with whom remain in place, perhaps even especially reinforced (How? This is relevant today.) for Purim; on the other hand, alcohol, especially with literally everyone drinking, can cause any social barrier to fail.
Drink so heavily you can no longer distinguish right from wrong, Mordecai from Haman.
Update: Megillah 7b addresses social structures to prevent homicide failing because of Purim.
Leaving a slow-running shower head submerged in vinegar overnight did not make the flow better. I guess it didn't have alkaline encrustations.
2:30 to fill a bucket.
What is the minimum sized square into which all the Bananagrams tiles may be fit, forming valid words? (Or Scrabble.) Or circle.
One could ask rectangle or convex hull but I suspect the answer would be a long thin rectangle.
Could be a good idea for a contest. Break ties by maximizing the density inside the (N-2)-by-(N-2) inner square, then further smaller squares if necessary. Prefer density towards the center, as that can be potentially easier to improve.
A similar metric for circle, decreasing the circle radius to intersect lattice points, probably provides finer-grained tie breaking. Is the center of a minimum disc covering a subset of lattice points guaranteed to lie on a lattice point or half-lattice point? OEIS A057961 and related.
I speculate that terrorism -- violent crime for a clear political purpose -- was Adam Lanza's motive. Countering many others' unfounded speculation that mental illness was the cause, I speculate -- just as unfoundedly, I suppose -- a mentally healthy individual rationally choosing an action to best advance his political cause of protesting highly stratified American society and deep class divisions.
Why choose an elementary school? An elementary school is a relatively difficult target with considerable security (as a result of Columbine, etc.) compared to other possible targets. A wealthy school district's small class sizes would require going from room to room to kill many people. In contrast, a movie theater would have had none of these difficulties, and it had already recently been proven to "work" (James Holmes), if the goal was merely to kill lots of people. No, it had to be certain young people who represent something.
The predominantly white, well-to-do ($100,000+ median household income) city of Newtown, CT is mostly populated by "white flight" out of New York City, wealthy parents seeking safer, nicer schools for their children. Lanza chose Sandy Hook Elementary School to protest this attitude of, instead of trying to fix the poverty problem in inner cities, just moving away: out of sight, out of mind, leading to no political motivation to fix it, if anything, political motivation not to fix it, selfishly not wanting tax dollars to be spent on someone else. The shooting was meant to be a wake-up call, to make people experience first-hand the dangerous, poverty-stricken, inner-city neighborhoods that they thought they had escaped and thought they could now safely ignore.
This speculation has an uncomfortable "Blame Canada!" feel to it: others say blame the gun lobby, blame mental health testing, blame school security, anything but blame ourselves.
If true, this motivation has significant repercussions for policy to prevent similar future attacks. Teaching responsible gun use will not work. Limiting access to guns will only slightly work against a rational, determined individual seeking to acquire them. School security could be overpowered by a group of terrorists united around this cause. Mental health screening will not work, unless there is a test for "patriot".
If we were to acknowledge this message, perhaps this act setting off social policies to decrease poverty and stratification, does it mean the terrorist has succeeded, which could motivate future terrorists? To prevent future terrorists, perhaps we should bury his message, make sure it never becomes public and never has a chance to affect policy.
6-by-6 grid of letters in a checkerboard of consonants and vowels. Form 6 words of the form CVCVCV by alternately reading rows left-to-right then right-to-left. Then, for redundancy (error detection), form six more words the same way vertically.
16 consonants BCDFGJKLMNPRSTVZ; 5 vowels AEIOU.
Apply the "English" substitutions c->ch (or maybe sh), g([ei])-> gh$1 (or maybe gu$1), e$->eh to induce the words to be pronounced consistently and distinctly. Stress always goes on the middle syllable.
Example:
| C | E | M | I | G | A |
| I | N | I | J | E | B |
| B | O | G | O | S | I |
| I | G | U | F | I | T |
| G | E | B | E | C | O |
| O | F | E | F | E | J |
Same idea as previous, to encode data into words. This method has 113 bits per block.
A more general approach to this problem is to construct an error-correcting code in this mixed radix (16, 5, 16, 5,...) number system.
Fill space with a tessellation of 2x1x1 bricks. For all possible slices, what is the minimum number of bricks you would have to cut through? This sort of defines the strength of the crystal along that shear plane. One would only need to consider slices on orthogonal integer planes. What tessellation is strongest?
A combination of cubes of width 2 and 1? Inspired by such a 2D tessellation of squares.
Given aggregate census information of a country partitioned into regions and the population of each region, construct a population density total function giving a density at any point.
A simple way to do this is to evenly distribute a region's population over the area. This might be enough for many purposes.
There are discontinuities at the boundaries. Construct a function that avoids such discontinuities, perhaps a union of plane segments. Construct a function the avoids discontinuities of the first derivative. Essentially, we want spline surfaces, though over weird areas and not defined the usual way with control points. I suspect the answer is a system of integro-differential equations to be solved numerically.
(Though in real life, discontinuity at a boundary might be fine if it represents a difficult to traverse physical boundary, perhaps a river.)
Such an artificially constructed surface is necessarily a lie. Provide another function that gives the uncertainty of the density function which can be used in further analyses: For example, suppose we wish to sum the population of only a portion of a region. Integrate the constructed surface over the area. However, the answer very uncertain. We do not know what the population density inside the region.
Write a story of a crime to take place on December 21, with that date deliberately chosen because people would be distracted by Mayan Apocalypse nonsense. Ironically, perhaps a major terrorist attack -- the world really does end that day for many people, but by purely human forces.
More elaborately, tell a tale that the Mayan Apocalypse hype was actually orchestrated behind the scenes by the perpetrators to facilitate the crime.
"A slut is someone who has sex with lots of people, just not with you." The resentment in that final phrase supposedly helps perpetuate the negative connotation of the word "slut". Here are two simplified models of behavior to statistically explain this paradox.
Given a sample of the population, a non-slut selects a fixed number of people, typically 1, to have sex with. As the sample size increases (perhaps over time, the non-slut meets more people), that number remains fixed, perhaps always selecting subjectively the most desirable partner within the sample.
A slut selects to have sex with those people exceeding his or her fixed subjective standard of requisite desirability; this statistically works out to a fixed proportion P of a sample (assuming i.i.d. sampling), as opposed to a fixed number for the non-slut. If the sample size were to increase without bound, then the slut would have sex with an unbounded number of people: P times infinity equals infinity.
However, the probability the slut will have sex with you remains constant, namely P. Assuming P is small (but fixed), then the probability that the slut will have sex with you remains small and unchanging, even though the slut is observed to be having sex with more and more people. You will observe the opening quote with probability 1-P, a high probability.
Even though it's not metric, powers of 10 do appear in some imperial units of length and area.
1 furlong = 10 chain = 1000 link
1 furlong^2 = 10 acre = 100 chain^2
1 Roman mile = 1000 (millia) strides (2 steps per stride). 5 yards in 5.68 steps. 7.04 yards in 8 steps.
5280 = 2^5 * 3 * 5 * 11, so the mile can be evenly divided in half many times like the gallon (quart, pint, cup, fluid ounce).
1 mile = 8 furlong = 1760 yard = 5280 feet = 63360 inch
1/2 mile = 4 furlong = 880 yard = 2640 feet = 31680 inch
1/4 mile = 2 furlong = 440 yard = 1320 feet = 15840 inch
1/8 mile = 1 furlong = 220 yard = 660 feet = 7920 inch
1/16 mile = 110 yard = 330 feet = 3960 inch
1/32 mile = 55 yard = 165 feet = 1980 inch
1/64 mile = 990 inch (82 ft 6 in)
1/128 mile = 495 inch (41 ft 3 in)
To continue the sequence, perhaps define a binary-inch (binch?) as 1/65536 mile ~= 0.9668 inch ~= 31/32 inch.
Tetrafurlong, bifurlong, furlong, semifurlong, demisemifurlong, hemidemisemifurlong.
But surveyors used 8 furlongs, 10 chains, 4 rod, 25 links = 7.92 inch.
The speed of light c converted into various units.
| Length / Time | second | minute | hour | day | week | fortnight | month | year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cm | 2.9979246e+10 | 1.7987547e+12 | 1.0792528e+14 | 2.5902068e+15 | 1.8131448e+16 | 3.6262896e+16 | 7.8837737e+16 | 9.4605284e+17 |
| inch | 1.1802853e+10 | 7.0817116e+11 | 4.249027e+13 | 1.0197665e+15 | 7.1383653e+15 | 1.4276731e+16 | 3.1038479e+16 | 3.7246175e+17 |
| foot | 9.8357106e+08 | 5.9014263e+10 | 3.5408558e+12 | 8.4980539e+13 | 5.9486377e+14 | 1.1897275e+15 | 2.5865399e+15 | 3.1038479e+16 |
| yard | 3.2785702e+08 | 1.9671421e+10 | 1.1802853e+12 | 2.8326846e+13 | 1.9828792e+14 | 3.9657585e+14 | 8.6217997e+14 | 1.034616e+16 |
| meter | 2.9979246e+08 | 1.7987547e+10 | 1.0792528e+12 | 2.5902068e+13 | 1.8131448e+14 | 3.6262896e+14 | 7.8837737e+14 | 9.4605284e+15 |
| furlong | 1490259.2 | 89415551 | 5.364933e+09 | 1.2875839e+11 | 9.0130875e+11 | 1.8026175e+12 | 3.9189999e+12 | 4.7027999e+13 |
| km | 299792.46 | 17987547 | 1.0792528e+09 | 2.5902068e+10 | 1.8131448e+11 | 3.6262896e+11 | 7.8837737e+11 | 9.4605284e+12 |
| mile | 186282.4 | 11176944 | 6.7061663e+08 | 1.6094799e+10 | 1.1266359e+11 | 2.2532719e+11 | 4.8987498e+11 | 5.8784998e+12 |
| AU | 0.0020039888 | 0.12023933 | 7.2143597 | 173.14463 | 1212.0124 | 2424.0249 | 5269.9772 | 63239.726 |
| parsec | 9.7156119e-09 | 5.8293671e-07 | 3.4976203e-05 | 0.00083942887 | 0.0058760021 | 0.011752004 | 0.02554957 | 0.30659485 |
year = tropical year; month = 1/12 year.
Almost exactly 3919 gigafurlongs per month, a prime number. 5878.5 gigamile/year. 1.00000003c
1 year ~= sqrt(10^15) second
Let foo = (mega second)^2, then
1 year^2 ~= 1 kilo foo = 1 peta (s^2)
0.996 kilo foo
Inspired for a touchscreen keyboard for a wide tablet.
4 buttons on each side (8 total), labeled 0 through 7, to be operated by thumbs. Letters and other actions are button sequences, for example 8^3=512. Octal input of a Unicode value also possible as a last resort.
Middle area contains an undo-last-button-press button (not a backspace button, because this one allows backspacing a partial button sequence), redo last action (simulating repeatedly pressing a button on a full keyboard), echo of the partial button sequence so far. Undo-last across a full-character boundary only works if the program receiving keystrokes understands backspace, and there were no intervening cursor repositioning (perhaps by touching a point on the screen). Similarly, navigation actions, etc. Things can get hairy for control actions: you probably need application support for, say, undoing a cut action.
And a help button, possibly voice help.
While many Android alternate keyboard apps provide tons of Unicode characters to input, we often want keyboard buttons not representable by Unicode.
From the physical Droid keyboard:
Left and right shift (separately remappable by an app)
Caps lock
Arrow keys (D pad) up down left right
D pad center
Android seach
Android menu
Backspace
Delete back to beginning of line (alt-del)
Tab
Enter
From the Swype app:
Voice input
Select all
Pgup pgdn home end
Beginning of buffer, end of buffer
Select text (to be followed by cursor actions)
Cut copy paste
Delete char forward
Delete word back
Change input method
From the Full Keyboard app:
Dismiss keyboard
Pwd (Don't know what this is)
VolUp VolDn
Clear (?)
Camera
^A through ^Z
^@ ^[ (escape) ^\ ^] ^^ ^_
Possibly wanted, don't know if possible:
Do not add to user dictionary
ANSI control sequences
Control Meta Super Hyper
Windows keys
F1 through F12
Enter Unicode by code number
Everything else if you had attached a full physical keyboard perhaps with USB OTG or Bluetooth. Perhaps enter keyboard scan code number.
I've taken two possibly contradicting viewpoints regarding the effectiveness of censorship.
Preventing free expression of ideas (for example, with copyright) affects society. Put another way, censorship works.
Suppressing politically incorrect speech does nothing to change people's underlying attitudes and prejudices. Put another way, censorship does not work.
One possible reconciliation is that censorship does work, but the harm always outweighs the good. For example, free expression of politically incorrect speech would ultimately be more effective at correcting underlying attitudes and prejudices than suppressing it (which actually aids in them becoming locked in).
Consider wiring a house additionally for direct current electricity, to avoid bulky AC/DC power adapters everywhere. Two popular DC standards currently: USB and PoE (Power Over Ethernet). The connector on the latter is way more secure.
How bulky does a PoE to USB female adapter need to be?
Consider attempting to influence which documents get cached by nodes within a Freenet network with a self-reported value of the content. An insertion request is tagged with metadata which if a node trusts, translates to a weight in its internal datastore influencing how persistently the item will stay in its data store.
Hashcash or something better as a proof of work. Or proof of payment.
Or Bitcoin bribe, though I have no idea how this could work.
These would affect measuring document popularity.
One goal is to avoid spam in the network.
The alternative is to constantly reinsert.
Enumerate and measure the rate of occurrence of touchscreen sensor errors. Single taps, multiple taps, swipes, and drags being confused for one another. (And multi-touch.)
Use this to create a user interface (for example, on-screen keyboard) that functions somewhat like speech recognition: it probabilistically infers the user's actual action from the noisy touchscreen input data.
What building or structure has the highest center of mass? This penalizes tapering structures like Burj Khalifa in favor buildings with a (largely) constant cross section like Taipei 101. Probably a radio mast.
Creators of content want to measure what their readers read (etc.), perhaps for the purely benevolent purpose of creating more of what people like. Web cookies are the most common technique. However, this leads to a giant privacy mess.
Ironically and surprisingly, one of the most privacy-protecting content distribution technologies, Freenet, permits measuring the popularity of a document. It becomes cached by the network, so popularity can be measured by time it takes to fetch it.
The system could be gamed if there is enough incentive, for example if it were used as a public compensation (award) for creating popular content under weak copyright.
The internet has wanted for a very long time a system for micropayments: extremely small financial transactions (perhaps fractions of a cent) for small things. Most famously, it could combat spam (possibly with donations to charity).
A financial institution could single-handedly implement micropayments for transfers among its own accounts. To participate in micropayments, both the sender and recipient would have to have accounts there. One could then imagine scaling the system with interbank transfers, or simply have it that most people have accounts with many micropayment banks.
What is the minimum micropayment that an infrastructure can support? What is the actual cost in terms of computing that a financial transaction requires?
After the announcement of the official schedule for the season (but before the season starts), let contestants submit permutations to the official schedule.
After the regular season, the best schedule, retrospectively calculated, is the one that maximized the number of games between teams then not yet mathematically eliminated from the postseason.
Create a flight simulator flying a spaceship around objects massive enough to cause significant gravitational distortion of spacetime. The distortion of time makes quickly completing a time trial especially tricky.
Or space battle in a movie.
Consider a lecture hall with a much larger projection screen, enough to fill the entire visual field and then some. Assuming slides, all slides of a lecture can be displayed at once, unlike now, when after a slide goes by, the student can no longer see it even if it would be useful to see it again.
Or, depict a very large diagram or outline.
Given some notes and a scale, transpose the notes up or down a given number of scale steps. What we normally call transposition uses the chromatic scale.
Sometimes a transposing an accidental note is not be possible, for example, transposing D#/Eb up one scale degree on a C major scale.
Or maybe it is defined: E#/Fb, different notes depending on exactly how it was originally written. In a similar way, transposition along a pentatonic scale CDEGA might be fully defined, after rewriting all B as C-flat and F as E-sharp. What to do about B-flat? C-double-flat or A-sharp?
Inspired by trying to losslessly compress notated music.
Communities are the root of power. Power is the root of evil.
For a community not to turn evil, it must always bear this in mind and actively, vigilantly work to prevent itself from going evil.
Transparency, especially adversarial transparency, is one way. Constant change is another. Mere good intentions are never enough.
Write poetry, encode it in QR code, and publicly display it. Upon reading it with a barcode reader, the reader has instantly made copy that he or she can keep, which differs from all other presentations of art.
Of particular interest is poetry requiring only the 45-character "alphanumeric" character set for which QR is especially efficient. All capital letters, no comma, apostrophe, question mark, or semicolon. The available punctuation are eight characters $%*+-./:
Here is Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 in QR code, with liberal substitution of punctuation. Click to embiggen.
About 600 characters: SHALL I COMPARE THEE TO A SUMMER*S DAY % THOU ART MORE LOVELY AND MORE TEMPERATE :/ ROUGH WINDS DO SHAKE THE DARLING BUDS OF MAY / AND SUMMER*S LEASE HATH ALL TOO SHORT A DATE :/ SOMETIME TOO HOT THE EYE OF HEAVEN SHINES / AND OFTEN IS HIS GOLD COMPLEXION DIMM*D :/ AND EVERY FAIR FROM FAIR SOMETIME DECLINES / BY CHANCE OR NATURE*S CHANGING COURSE UNTRIMM*D :/ BUT THY ETERNAL SUMMER SHALL NOT FADE / NOR LOSE POSSESSION OF THAT FAIR THOU OW*ST :/ NOR SHALL DEATH BRAG THOU WANDER*ST IN HIS SHADE / WHEN IN ETERNAL LINES TO TIME THOU GROW*ST: SO LONG AS MEN CAN BREATHE OR EYES CAN SEE / SO LONG LIVES THIS / AND THIS GIVES LIFE TO THEE.
Gzip usually improves English text longer than about 110 characters. Bzip2 and LZMA (xz) do worse for such short inputs.
MIDI music may also be possible. Maybe vector graphics.
Enumerate all possible scales: subsets of the 12 chromatic scale degrees.
Add the constraint that cyclic transformations are in the same equivalence class. So the major scale, the natural minor scale, and all 7 major modes are equivalent.
Organize by the largest gap between scale notes. Of particular interest are scales whose largest gap is at most a whole tone (e.g., major scale, ascending melodic minor scale, whole tone scale, octotonic scale, chromatic scale), or at most an augmented 2nd (harmonic minor scale, blues scale, pentatonic scale).
Also organize by the number of notes in the scale. Of particular interest are heptatonic scales. Heptatonia prima, secunda, and tertia (and their modes) are the heptatonic scales whose largest gap is a whole tone.
It is weird that opposition to laws increasing privacy and protecting civil liberties seems to come from organized well-funded lobbyists for law enforcement.
In theory, law enforcement ought to be indifferent to the law; they enforce whatever law is written, and it is up to the people to write a good law balancing concerns.
With well-funded lobbyists working for less civil liberties, and not really well-funded or organized opposition for protecting them, is good law actually being written?
Apartment rental is an imperfect information game, with the landlord possessing more information. In order to signal honesty about the description of the apartment, especially its faults, enlist a trusted third-party inspection service.
Such an inspection service, just starting out, can bootstrap a list of things to check for by asking current tenants. Was its inspection able at least to catch the things current tenants had discovered over time? (Note that current tenants are not trusted as an authoritative source of information; it must be verified by the inspector.)
Similar to used cars.
Create a device that can disable security cameras with paint balls. Unlike a handheld gun, it automatically aims using computer vision.
Against a surveillance state, this could be a powerful weapon, usable for good or for evil.
A laser might be a better alternative, with an advantage that one cannot forensically examine the paintball splatter to determine who (visible in the footage before the shot) fired it. Possibly combine the two ideas in succession; you probably want laser range finding anyway.
Given some galaxies, compute the probability that a supermassive black hole will be ejected and orphaned as a result of a galaxy collision, probably a multiple galaxy collision.
Such orphaned black holes, floating invisibly through intergalactic space but attracted to large conglomerations of matter such as other galaxies, are the stuff nightmares are made of. How invisible are they? The motivation is to estimate how many there are.
Interacting black holes can dissipate gravitational potential energy via gravitational waves, so there will be fewer ejections and more mergers than Newtonian gravitational modeling.
Update: Hypercompact stellar system
For two black holes to merge into one singularity, they must dissipate the infinite amount of gravitational potential energy present between point particles.
Inside of the event horizon is profoundly bizarre.
Black hole mergers almost certainly do occur, especially in galaxy collisions.
Distribute a file on one phone to many other phones nearby who have agreed to receive the distribution, using an ad hoc network possibly involving multiple hops. Do not rely on the existence of the cellular network.
The motivating application is the police confiscating cameras and cell phones of those seen recording police activity and jamming (or turning off, as SF BART did in anticipation of protests) the cell signal to thwart uploading the images and video before devices can be confiscated. With this technology, the information can still escape via a seemingly uninvolved bystander.
Possibly the mule's payload is encrypted to provide plausible deniability.
A mobile wifi hotspot might be a simpler solution, though has a single point of failure.
The Peregrine Gaming Glove is an intriguing product. Some thoughts.
Use key sequences to be able to type any key. Assuming 40 buttons, then 1600 two-key sequences. This will require OS assistance.
Two handed use with right-handed Frogpad.
Glove on one hand, typing into smartphone held in the other. No Bluetooth, but perhaps some hack with USB OTG.
As an interface for an electronic musical instrument.
Several open questions: Is it technically possible to type chords, i.e., for example, ring finger on palm, thumb to index finger simultaneously? What is the behavior when the glove detects a chord?
What is the required delay between consecutive keypresses? How many milliseconds of electrical contact are required to register a key press? Alternating the thumb between two adjacent fingers could achieve tremendously fast keystrokes, perhaps like binary. However, too low a timing threshold probably causes electrical bouncing, where a single press registers multiple contacts.
How precisely in time can a user push a key, and precisely release a key? This will matter for the musical instrument, but also probably matters in games. Part of the difficulty is the hand and flesh is soft and squishy.
They should open up the source code to the glove keymapping software. It would allowing for porting to operating systems. And applications which "live" reprogram the glove, perhaps automatically detecting which actions the user does frequently and offering to provide a hotkey for it. And allows the glove to work with small wearable computers, which often run operating systems other than Windows, and may not even have a display.
