Have you ever thought of something terribly stupid and laughed aloud as soon as you conceived of an idea because it is absolutely ridiculous?
I just did.
I’m not talking about something like making up an arbitrary phonetic script for Chinese, putting corn on pizza (actually been done, you know), or promoting the Edsel. I mean, something really stupid.
Something like:
Reading glasses for the blind.
Color-coded dog food (so the dog will know which kind they like).
Matching T-shirts for nudist colonies.
I thought that it would be cool if we could input these small computer chips into our brains and of course it would be connected to the web so if you didn’t know anything you could Google it.
And then I thought, well, that would make the section of your brain where you actually store knowledge much much smaller so that in the end it would probably disappear completely. And then I thought well, that would leave more space for other sections of the brain to develop more, and since I wasn’t sure about the different sections of the brain I googled that.
Then I started making these designs of how people’s bodies would probably mutate corresponding to whichever part of the brain would grow and take over the knowledge section.
Then I thought the government should probably limit the computer so that it could only take Google, otherwise people would be sitting in coffee shops but just chatting with their virtual friends. But then I thought well, sometimes I see these married people sitting together in coffee shops not even talking at all, so we might as well just go for the whole deal.
And then I thought stop thinking about this crap and get back to Ulysses.
not an idea, but a wierd thought. what if you were directly above the equator and you flushed a toilet and the water doesnt know to go clockwise or counter-clockwise?
would you be faced with a strange, double-swirling maelstrom of pee and poop?
[quote=“OrientExpress01”]not an idea, but a wierd thought. what if you were directly above the equator and you flushed a toilet and the water doesnt know to go clockwise or counter-clockwise? [/quote]It certainly is a weird thought that the rotation of water in a drain is effected by the location.
Seat covers and or clothes made of the “Odor Eater” material. (the stuff that Dr. Sholles [sp?] uses in their shoe liners). I came upon this idea because my brother used to work out, sweat like a pig, then without showering plop down in his office chair. Within a month the chair, and then within a couple of months his whole office, smelled like a locker room.
The Brian Solution was to make him a seat cover of odor eaters. And then I thought, why stop there, if his shorts/shirt/socks were all made of odor eaters the problem would be solved.
But his (then, now ex) wife came up with a better solution, he had to shower before coming back to work.
[quote=“Jaboney”][color=green]Glow in the dark trees[/color].
Insert a luciferase gene into a seed’s DNA, plant, add water.
Line the highways, save electricity. shrug Works in the lab. Sort of.[/quote]
GFP (green flourescent protein) would also be interesting. Then we would not only have fire-fly/plant hybrids, but also jellyfish/plants as well. In fact, there are tobacco plants that already have had the GFP DNA inserted for research purposes. They glow green in the dark and are even brighter green under UV light.
For the luciferase to work, you’d have to persuade the tree to produce luciferin as well, in large quanities, and preferably only in the leaves. You don’t need glow in the dark roots afterall!
If you could plug luciferin production into the light cycle of photosynthesis, you could hopefully get large amounts of it. As luciferase is an enzyme, you don’t need as much, and it would be preferable that it’s only produced at night. I would guess that some-how “wireing” it into the mitochondrial pathways would work quite well as it would only be produced when it was dark (mitochondria are not very active during the day as the chloroplasts produce more than enough ATP for the leaf’s requirements. Finally you would also need a mechanism to remove luciferase during the day so that you would be able to build up a stock of luciferin to see you through the night.
After all that, it might just be cheaper to leave the lights turned on
[quote=“mythrandore”]After all that, it might just be cheaper to leave the lights turned on :p[/quote]And if it did work, it’d probably screw up the nightcycles of all sorts of other organisms. In addition to tobacco, some researchers managed to make glow in the dark bunnies. Not much to look at except under very strict conditions, but useful when pulling out ovaries for lab work.
