Ideas: February 2024 Release
The motivation
The ideas section is a place to offload and share various ideas I’ve come up. Although these are only the ideas that have already been implemented, tested, something I’m not interested in doing, or technically incomplete (meaning there’s various technical progress that needs to be accomplished before it’s applicable), however, it has definitely been conceived by me independently. It serves to share the kind of practical imagination I have but also to share the journey into the future:
Organ specific chimera
The core idea is that you have say a human heart growing in a pig body, hence the organ specific chimera. Many chimeras have been produced, basically by introducing implant stem cells into the blastocyst embryo and allowing it to grow to maturation. However in a organ specific chimera, the host has a specific organ genetically knocked out, allowing the donor cells to grow and take the place of the organ.
However, this had already been done initially here. What they found was that the idea does work, they tested it between two mice, knocking out the host pancreas, and found the donor cells took up ~80% of the pancreas in the final healthy chimera. However, what they also found was that the larger the gap between the two species, the less the donor cells contributed to the final chimera. There was a youtube video that shared that researchers have tried growing human kidneys (using human iPSCs) in pigs, and resulted in proto-kidneys with about half human content.
This method does have bioethical concerns, but overall, this is a possible future in growing replacement organs which I believe will come before other methods like 3D printing kidneys.
Housing musical chairs
There is a housing crunch as of right now, and one of the issues tying up housing supply is that if you sell your house what if you can’t buy a new one. So what if it was setup so that you selling your house and buying a new one is orchestrated by a third-party company. And it might not seem like much, but it’s kind of like a checkers board where every spot is filled up, there’s no way for pieces of move. However, if you can switch positions between pieces, now the whole board can end up in a totally different arrangement.
Corruption bounties
There are already bounties for insider trading that has proven successfully. Why don’t we expand on that idea, and apply it to all forms of corruption. It just seems like a huge check against corruption because corruption then becomes as successful as only it’s weakest link. The bounty could be a cash payout along with protection.
Streamlined journalism payments
There really should be a unified way to paying for quality articles across various news and magazine outlets, and the news and magazine outlets are the ones to do it. Design wise I just don’t want to have to manage dozens of $4 a month subscriptions to get my news. Apple news does this, but it’s siloed within the news app rather than an open solution similar to Stripe.
EV charging batteries
What if EV charging stations were all connected to a giant battery to smooth out power demands, and make it so that they don’t need improvements in electricity infrastructure in order to be built. Plus those batteries could end up feeding electricity back to the grid when necessary.
Direct ground water aquifer recharge
So ground water aquifers, if shallow, can take days to recharge in rainy weather, but deep aquifers can take up to centuries to recharge. However, why don’t we just skip the ever so slow percolation of water down into those deep aquifers, and drill holes directly in them to pump water down for storage? Well it turns out people are already doing that, however given the recent spat of droughts, people are starting to invests more into it, given that these aquifers represent huge natural form of water storage.
Desalination and waste water combination
Desalination has an inherent habit of producing super salty leftover water called brine, this brine if dumped back into the environment can cause substantial damage. However, what if we basically separate out fresh water from salt water (desalination), use the fresh water, recombine the waste water with the brine, and then end up with what you started with ocean water. Well, it turns out people are doing this where it’s possible, and it’s a great way to solve a potentially controversial problem.
Atomic recycler
As we dig up and use up various elements in the earth’s crust and then proceed to ultimately dump it into landfills, we’re going to run out of places to dig and run out of elements to use in our technologies and products. In fact, landfills would eventually become the future mines for these elements. So what I propose is that we take all the trash and find some way to just rip all the molecules apart into component atoms and sort it based off the kind of element it is. Maybe it’s turning it into plasma and using something like a mass spectrometer, or maybe it’s something else. But the idea is compelling, if not potentially necessary in the long term.
Infinite capacity battery
So I’ve been thinking about energy storage, since renewables like wind and solar energy are produced intermittently depending on the time of day and weather, and we need some way of storing huge amounts of energy in order make the switch to totally clean energy. (Technically I think this may be solved through underground stores of hydrogen combined with steam turbines). However, it got me thinking in all the various ways you can store energy, and there was one idea that stood out, a light based battery. Light does not take up space and has no mass, which means if you can find a way to trap light, the capacity of the battery could be as big as you’d want it. This could pave the way not only for clean energy storage but interstellar space ships along with a whole new world of electronics/transportation/etc. This one does have quite a few technical hurdles, but it’s a tantalizing possibility.
Personal cooling unit
As climate change results in more extreme weather, hot weather in particular will be difficult to deal with. The only way to cool off is to use air conditioners that will likely use fossil fuels which only exacerbates climate change. So why not instead of cooling an entire area, you just cooled your body that should be much more efficient. This is the fundamental idea behind at least my vision for why this kind of product exists, not just convenience, but necessity. From my time studying as an EMT, I learned there are certain areas that have large blood flow, which was used to typically treat heat stroke, but would be ideal places to generally cool the body. These areas are neck, arm pits, and groin area. Of the choices the neck would be a good place to start. Blowing air to the area helps, but actually reducing the temperature is better. One of the ways to do this is with peltiers, the only downside is that they’re very inefficient like 5% of the energy put into it actually moves that much heat energy, but batteries do carry a lot of energy, so it’s still doable. So in a way it’s not to my surprise that someone came up with a product for it, one of them is Torras Coolify 3. It’s a cool product, one that I’ll probably try in the upcoming summer. However, I believe there are still other ideas and improvements in this product category that I’ll share in the future.
Smartphone improvements
So these are just some random design ideas for mobile OS: 1. Auto-transcripts for podcasts, similar to how Kindle has books and audiobooks that play together. This idea is already being implemented in the next release of iOS, but I was already playing with this idea by playing a podcast on my iphone while running dictation on my mac. 2. Mobile OSs could allow you to hear a voicemail as it’s being left, just like old-school answering machines. So that you can screen your calls and if it’s from someone you expect you can pick it up. This is rather than the current iOS implementation relying on voice transcription 3. Smartphones could have a 180 degree rear facing camera, so you can take a photo with a good camera knowing everything is within frame without having to point it, plus it’s a full 180 degree field of view picture or video that could be used like in VR/MR. Or incorporate a small mirror on the backside of the smartphone to help center the shot.
Next-gen wheelchair
I was thinking about how my mom is getting pretty old, and that unfortunately as she gets older she won’t be able to travel anymore as a result. However, what if we made “wheelchairs” dramatically better? What if we used Boston Dynamics dog as a wheelchair, the walking function would be used to go up/down stairs/over obstacles, and motors on the feet would be used for general travel? It’s an idea for making all the non-wheelchair accessible areas of the world suddenly available, and make getting old less of an isolating, trapping, and lonely experience.
Virtual Mailing addresses
It’s an idea very similar to how Apple allows you to create a virtual email addresses for every service you sign up for, never sharing your main email, and allowing you to block a service if you want. There’s also virtual credit cards on a similar idea. However, this idea is a virtual physical mailing address. A third-party service would handle translation of a virtual address into the corresponding physical address. Access would be provided only to the major shipping companies like USPS, FedEX, UPS, etc or companies where services rely on where you live. However, if you want to publicly share a virtual address that forwards to your physical address, I would imagine that could be setup on Google/Apple maps. Having virtual addresses would make something like moving easy, because you wouldn’t need to change your address on all the services you use, you just change it once where your virtual address forwards to. Finally a virtual address could be used to link to the GPS location, this would be useful for places around the globe that don’t have official street designations like slums (there was some company already doing this when I checked).
Concept touchscreen trackpad
Okay this is only a short concept that I’m not sure how well it’ll work out, but what if the laptop trackpad was also a touchscreen display? Maybe it could also be used with a stylus, and maybe it could be more useful than the ill-fated Apple touchbar.
Sleep guard
Device that watches over you while you sleep alerting you if there are any intruders. This could be useful for travelers. Could work using 360 degree cameras with an app that lets you highlight areas for movement like the door and windows.
Apple Health app
The current apple health app is terrible: 1. Your favorited health metrics are ordered alphabetically with no option to manually set the order. 2. For what’s supposed to be the summary, it’s incredibly long with all sorts of random highlights, other things you can setup, articles, and app advertisements. This is supposed to be a dashboard for your health. It should provide widgets for each of your health metrics with the ability to organize it to your liking. And given apple’s huge focus on the apple watch’s health features, this is the way it should work.
Smartphone satelLite communications
There are small bluetooth satellite communicators that can pair with your phone like this one that allow you to send SMS or emergency beacons globally. But why not skip the extra device and build it straight into a smartphone? The antenna isn’t crazy huge, it’s doable while not becoming design-wise an adverse addition. And soon after I figured that out, SpaceX and Apple came out with plans to incorporate satellite communications into regular smartphones. This is useful beyond just being stuck in the middle of nowhere, imagine a disaster hit your area and you don’t have cell service, or imagine traveling and the sim card you bought stops working. Well as long as you can find a view of the sky, you can still keep in touch and reach out for help if necessary. It changes smartphones into true universal communicators.
Conversations with ear protection
Often times people need to wear ear protection, but need to be able to talk with the people around them. However, ideally there’s a streamlined way of doing it. So how about using the signal strength of the people around you to determine how loud you can hear them. The further away the lower the volume. Just like if you weren’t wearing ear protection.
Massage robot
I have a lot of tense muscles in my back and yes I can use a foam roller or something else, but nothing beats actually putting pressure on a point and massaging it exactly the way you want. This is why a table with a massage gun attached to a 5 axis or something robot arm that you can manually control could feel really good. And again somewhat unsurprisingly, it showed up at the 2024 CES.
Better digital payments
So the current model of digital payments is where anyone who has your card info can charge you however much they want, and the only way to stop them is to stay on top of your transactions and balances and report fraud. Businesses should request a payment and you pay them specifically that. And at the same time, they can provide a much more detailed receipt of that transaction as well compared to the typically indecipherable single line of text.
Translation with beam-forming microphones
Basically the beam forming microphones will pick up what you’re saying along with what the person in front of you is saying, but as two separate channels. These two channels are then transcribed and translated in real-time at the same time and displayed on a smartphone. This means you can talk as if you were in a normal conversation, and have successful translation without having to worry about pausing each time you say something, if there’s a slight interruption from one of the speakers while you’re talking, or if someone starts talking loudly nearby.
Unified communications app
The core idea is that you could have a single app that combined video chat, screen sharing, phone calls, voicemails, text messages, emails, p2p file transfers, and maybe even more. The main draws are: 1. You’d have a single seamless history of what’s been said, which doesn’t seem all that important, but imagine how spread out this information is between the different apps on your phone. 2. You can seamlessly switch between these forms of communication as well. For example, you’re on the phone with the repair man and switching to a video call, text messaging customer support and switching to a screen share, calling social security and sending a file in the same conversation. Organizations could plug into this unified app similar to how Apple Pay or Google Pay works; they could be given call center software or better yet APIs given to call center software companies. You can have verified organizations and users, so that you don’t have scammers constantly calling you. Apple or Google could build this today, this would just be a power user app that’s opt-in only, and all the information from the unified app is reflected in the regular apps as well (so a text in the unified app shows up as a text in Messages). Given that software updates nowadays are hardly revolutionary, this could be pretty interesting.
Digital security review
Have you ever taken a really good look at the security dependencies that your digital life rests on? Well I did and it’s kind of a mess. So the core logins I checked were: emails, password manager, apple account (since I use iPhone and apple hardware), cellular service for SMS management, and authenticator code generators.
1Password is a very popular password manager that handles all your passwords and even generating authenticator codes. But what you probably didn’t know was that to log back into it after say replacing your device whether lost or stolen or destroyed in a fire or something, it actually requires an authenticator code from another app to log in.
Then here we get to authenticator codes. They used to reside only on a device but now they’re getting cloud backups. However, there’s still hick ups. Google Authenticator only produces mobile apps without any desktop apps, so you need a smartphone or tablet to use it. Authy by twilio the other popular authenticator is discontinuing it’s desktop app as well. And you better remember that password for your authenticator because otherwise you’ll be resetting your authenticator across all your services. And this is also an issue, the ability to reset your authenticator by using back ups like SMS removes a critical point about using the authenticator codes. If SMS is the backup, why bother with using an authenticator code to begin with. You might imagine this is a silly problem with small websites, but when I needed to redo my AWS authenticator it kicks it back to a phone call with a code. That’s right Amazon Web Services, which large websites/apps ultimately have the same level of security.
Then let’s get to SMS, how is that secured? Because even though there’s the widely held view that SMS is not a secure way to handle authentication, it is very convenient so everyone uses it anyways. Well I checked my cellular service security, which is AT&T: Password reset is either a text message to your phone number, an email to your email account, or security questions. The two factor authentication reset is an SMS code to any device under your AT&T account. And that’s an issue, if you have other devices on your account, that means someone could swipe their device and get access to your two factor SMS codes.
So let’s consider a scenario where you’re traveling with your smartphone and laptop (probably your only mobile device and computer), and you lose them or it gets stolen. How do you get back in? Apple login can use a recovery key (which you may or may not have easy access to), authentication with another apple device (which you don’t have), or SMS (which you can’t do because you can’t login although I guess you could create a new apple account although you’d need a new SIM as well). How do you get a new SIM with your number on it, well I haven’t tried it so I don’t know, but it seems like it could be pretty convoluted because you basically need to prove you are you without any in-falsifiable proof (particularly if you’re the only person on that cellular account). And proving you are who are you are without that concrete proof creates a security hole for criminals to get in. Also if someone swipes your phone while it’s unlocked well now they have access to all your SMS codes until you lock out your phone.
Emails (well gmail since that’s what I use) they’re protected by either a cross-app login, SMS, back up codes, recovery email, and recovery phone. But it’s only as secure as it’s weakest link, SMS is like we’ve discussed interceptable, a recovery email could be hacked, and a recovery phone stolen.
As of time of writing, the recent update to iOS for “stolen device protection” is a step in the right direction in terms of realizing and neutralizing key security vulnerabilities. Before the update as long as someone looked over your shoulder and got your lock screen passcode, they could reset your iCloud recovery code, reset your iCloud account password, and have access to all the saved passwords under the iCloud password manager. So a very substantial amount of damage could be caused. But now with the requirement of more biometrics, more requirements, and overall changes, it’s a much better situation.
Security is seen as a balance between what’s secure and what’s convenient, but as you can see what we have today is a bit of a mess and I believe we can do better.
Modular Housing
Modular housing has the potential to rapidly accelerate the production of housing as well as driving down costs across the world. However, the business model approach of these modular manufacturers, at least from what it seems, is that they sell the completed housing directly. This is in competition with the rest of companies that produce housing currently. My proposal is to sell the modular parts directly to these companies, so that they can reap a portion of the benefits, giving them a competitive advantage, and greatly accelerate the adoption of modular building processes. Then for the modular manufactures, they can capitalize on economies of scale and further drive down costs. Overall, it seems like a much more synergistic approach to solving the problem.
Thermoregulating clothes
Imagine a jacket or pants that have an adjustable amount of insulation by using air. It could use a small quiet battery powered pump to fill up bladders in between the fabric when it’s cold and empty the bladders when it gets hot. This could all be regulated by the internal temperature that the user is experiencing. It’s a good idea I came up with, and it was so good it has already been incorporated in the SR-71 flight suit (SR-71 Link).
INNOVATIVE Unpublished IDEAS
Smart chemotherapeutics
Update (6/18/24): Recently discovered a chain of sources that shows this is already public, starting with this youtube video. But basically the idea is to use genetic engineering to reengineer tumor suppressor genes back into the cells after they’ve been mutated by the cancer. What makes this smart is that if you replace a healthy tumor suppressor gene in a healthy cell with another healthy tumor suppressor gene essentially nothing happens, only the cancer cells are affected by this. This represents an entirely different approach to dealing with cancer.
Research in genetic engineering
Research in the how and why of aging
Electronic voting
MR/AR sensory feedback
Next-gen computer interface
Next-gen quadcopter interface
Personal cooling unit alternative
Improvements to vehicle control and safety
Enhanced FaceID
Next-gen calculator
Update (6/10/24): Following Apple’s release of iPadOS 18, it included the next-gen calculator mentioned here called “Math Notes”. For me, it was internally called “Smart Paper”, because It’s basically an app that integrated a calculator into a sheet of digital paper. It’ll use computer vision to read the the mathematical equations/expressions/unit conversions/etc, and have them solved inline using something like Wolfram Alpha. Even inputting an equation or mathematical notation in general into a computer is normally a very painful process (if you’re curious, one example is to look up how to use LaTeX for mathematical notation). This reduces the need to manually transfer things from paper into a calculator and back to the paper allowing seamless integration of what is written and the desired transformation. This could be extended beyond the notation demonstrated by Apple at the moment into calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, partial derivatives, statistics, probability, etc. Overall, this software would be an invaluable improvement to a core tool for students, engineers, and scientists.