Reality Askew

I live in Arizona and was doing laundry the other day when it dawned on me, since it’s 115 degrees outside, why don’t they make a dryer that sucks the hot air in from outside to dry clothes?

So had brain fart the other day as I drove past one of those self storage places and thought, they store boxes and a common phrase is boxed in.  Why not have a play on words and call a company Boxed Inn.  So in essence an Inn for boxes.  <queue drums>

What if we could modify the molecular structure of tree leaves to create electricity instead of oxygen?  Of course this would be done in a lab before planting and then the tree would simply grow into an energy producing machine.  Then imagine if the new trees it produced would also produce electricity without any further intervention by humans.  You could theoretically produce farms of electricity producing trees.

So had this idea of a substance that could run between the layers of say armor on a tank.  It would remain in a gelatinous state until exposed to oxygen and then immediately harden.  So if a tank or armored vehicle were attacked, the holes would automatically fill in and become solid again.  To keep the system ready, you could simply refill the glue/gel reservoir.

This same system could be used on aircraft wings to repair damage to wings and control surfaces.  There could even be a laser matrix projected grid over the surface that the glue/gel would use as a guide for the repair.

Of course the implications for space would be great except for that whole oxygen catalyst thing.  Maybe the stuff for space would trigger on lack of oxygen or cold?

Sure we’ve all seen the movie The Matrix but if you want to watch a movie similarly good, then watch The 13th Floor.  But the premise isn’t all that fantastical if you think about it.  There are things in the world that don’t make sense and seem to defy logic.  I’m by no means the first to propose this by-the-way but want to add in one interesting point about it.  Why do we sleep?  Have you ever wondered why we spend over 30% of our existence disconnected from reality?  I intentionally used the word disconnected because my thought is that if we are all in a simulation how do you control the CPU cycles needed to maintain this level of detail?  One way would be to have half of the people “sleeping” for a third of the day cycle.  So back to my original question, why do we sleep? To be honest, if we are in a simulation I’m fine with that.  Unlike Neo in The Matrix I wouldn’t want the pill that woke me up.  What is the expression, ignorance is bliss? :)

In typical fashion I woke up this morning with an interesting thought; what if an alien race appeared and brought us a gift of technology, something such as teleportation.  What if it wasn’t a gift but a crashed ship and the only thing remaining were two teleportation chambers.  Scientists would have just enough technological know-how to replicate them, all the time patting themselves on the back for being so clever.  Humanity would trip over themselves to put teleportation devices on every corner of the world.  We would likely do this without fully understanding how it worked.  Sure teleportation would be amazing but it would likely take us several decades to fully understand how it worked, if ever. But what if this “gift” were in fact a Trojan horse of the worst kind.  Imagine every time you use the device the alien race were replacing a few atoms with their own.  Ever so gradually we would start becoming like them.  This change, gradually introduced over time, might be so slow it would be chocked up to some quirk in evolution.

One of my daughters was rehashing a vivid, if not disturbing, dream she had last night and it got me to thinking.  What if we could control our dreams or at least direct them in a certain direction.  So you would maybe place leads on your head or heck have a special pillow that would somehow influence or suggest to our minds what to dream about.  Hey honey tonight I think I’m going to sit on a beach in Maui watching a sunset all night.  Or maybe fly over the grand canyon.  If we could do that we might also be able to learn stuff while sleeping as well.  Go to sleep and learn piano, or calculus? :)  Why waste 6-8 hours of our lives when we could be enjoying it or actually getting something out of it.

How about a substance that would be super cooling but non-conductive.  Sort of like a liquid substance that could be poured into computers that would harden into a gelatinous type substance and then would provide cooling without shorting the electronics..

I watched the Space X explosion today and was sad that so much money, time and effort had been put into the launch only to have it end in a giant fireball.  It got me to thinking, why is it so expensive to launch a rocket into space?  I’ve hypothesized in the past about the possibility of using a magnetic rail (love magnets and lasers :)) to help accelerate a ship into orbit, but my idea this time is on the actual ship construction itself.  Why does it have to be so expensive if it’s just send supplies and why the torture of creating a reusable rocket that so far has yet to land where it’s supposed to?

My idea is simple, however it’s not new.  Why not make something like the model rockets I used to play around with in grade school?  Okay stop laughing and consider it for a second.  Why couldn’t you build the main rocket structure from some super condensed cardboard (paper) type material.  I would imagine layers of paper wrapped thousands of times to create a very solid structure.  As for the rockets, why not make giant solid fuel rockets, again like the ones model rockets use?  Combine these two and you could build a simple, cheap, disposable supply rocket.  As a note, it would be very disposable because it would simply burn up on reentry.

I was watching the movie Lone Survivor the other day where the Seal team was stuck in a major firefight in Afghanistan on some god forsaken hill.  The part that struck me was the damage those guys took from bullet wounds and kept going.  Simply amazing.

But my thought this morning (love those waking up ideas) was why can’t we develop some sort of light weight material that is either completely bullet proof or slows the bullet down significantly?  Sure the former would be best but might not be entirely possible.  The material I had in mind would be some sort of composite with overlapping layers on a molecular level.  I mean imagine taking something as strong as say a spiders web and figuring out how to do the same thing but infinitely smaller and tighter.  The ultimate goal would be to create a material like spandex that is light-weight but almost impervious to bullets and shrapnel.

Typical manufacturing concepts wouldn’t work given the composition of this.  Instead I would imagine it would have to be poured into a mold of some sort.  To maximize comfort/functionality you would likely do a body scan of the recipient and then the mold would be an exact fit.

What if you could also generate power from the wearers body heat and then convert that into electricity?  This could conceivably power anything from a communication/navigation device to  some sort of body regulating medical device.