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k Ure, 2012 May be reproduced and distributed without permission provided it's done for free. The full book will be available from lulu.com Right-handed leather Softer leather-like material resistant to biodegradation Life science Leather has been processed to reduce its biodegradability. This also makes it tougher. However, it occurs to me that there might be another way of making a very skin-like material which was nonbiodegradable for a different reason and also softer and more elastic. Leather is presumably made of something like a mat of keratin and collagen, i.e. two fibrous proteins with other components of skin removed, and then of course tanned and otherwise treated with various substances to remove fats, water, elastin and so forth. My idea is to take the D-forms of amino acids, i.e. ones which are not so common in biochemistry, and produce three protein- like polymers, similar to but simpler than collagen, keratin and elastin. The keratin-like polymer consists of seven-segment units where the first and fourth units are D-alanine separated by alternate two and three units of some other Damino acid, which mimics the structure of alpha-keratin. These are arrangeable in helices of several orders - i.e. there is a helix of this polymer which is then twisted together with another similar helix, those two filaments are twisted together and these altogether form a quadruple helix, which would be left-handed. This substance itself could form a useful horn-like, i.e. plastic- like, polymer which could replace wool, be used for wigs or be made into sheets or more bulky items as a kind of plastic. The next polymer is the collagen-like one. This consists of a triple helix made up of D-proline and modified hydroxylated prolines and lysines. Then there's a problem: collagen is largely glycine, which is not chiral. I suggest getting round this problem by synthesising a modified glycine where one or both of the hydrogens off the carbon is replaced by fluorine and/or chlorine. Fibres of these ought to form into a triple helix, with the unfortunate complication that i have no idea what the halogenation would do - i'm just blindly hoping that it would sort of make the glyciney stuff behave like real glycine without being metabolisable. This collageny stuff could be added to calcium phosphate or other things to make it more resilient to strain, just as it is in bones and teeth. There also needs to be some kind of nonbiodegradable elastane, of which there are plenty of examples, for instance neoprene. How to make the stuff? Well, assemble all the necessary info on strands of mRNA, make artificial ribosomes and tRNA, all the necessary machinery to keep that lot going and well, to be honest, probably sit in a corner and cry because it's probably going to be impossible. Anyway, once you've done that bit you're going to have two almost non-biodegradable fibrous proteins which can either be used separately as if they're synthetic fibres to replace wool, hair and horn, and put together in some kind of mat with the elastane and combined with a bit of water and maybe silicone oil, might, might, just produce an artificial skin-like substance suitable for clothing and maybe as a dressing for wounds. Grammatical text compression and translation Use data compression and decompression for translation Language Rather than picking out recurring patterns in the actual strings of characters and replacing them to compress text, take text in a natural language and compress it using morphemes. For instance, the

word "took" is the preterite of "take" just as "fetched" is that of "fetch", but they could not be compressed similarly because their form is different. Similarly, most simple present verbs in the third person singular end in "s", but this is already implied by the use of a pronoun such as "she/it/he". If such features of English were used as one of the techniques used by text compression, the grammar of the piece of text could be separated from the language it is in and used to compress it. Moreover, different techniques of restoring the text to a readable form could be employed to convert it to a different language. I envisage something like a tokenised version of Esperanto. It wouldn't be possible to translate everything like this, but linguistic universals or features shared between a large number of widely-spoken languages, such as marked plural nouns, could be translated. There would be problems with words such as "know", "free", "do" and "make". Compression of this kind would be lossy in a semantic sense, but this could be cut down by reversing the process after translation into an arbitrary foreign language and back again, then comparing the results. Rival technocrat parties Elect the technocrat you want Politics I have more than a sneaking admiration for technocracy, but it occurs to me that what is meant by technocracy in the Italian sense is not what i mean by it. One problem with government policy as it stands, regardless of political system or ideology, implicit or explicit, is that it seems only rarely to be based on good evidence. An example close to my heart would be that compulsory education age in England is too low for children to learn best the kind of things they are explicitly expected to learn in schools, and that psychological research, i think, supports this. However, what i've just said is a political position because i'm emphasising the importance of that kind of education over an economic view that parents should be able to work in the money economy as much as possible in order to promote economic growth, although in the long term there would presumably be a longterm economic benefit to the more competent adults turned out by an education system which starts at the age of six or later rather than five. Several assumptions have been made in this argument. One is of course that economic growth is a good thing. Another is probably a naive stab in the dark for me regarding economic theory along the lines of Friedman versus Keynes or something. If the country is run by educational technocrats, one set of decisions would be made. If it's run by economic technocrats, another set of decisions would happen. Both would be based on well-founded research and experience, and could be incompatible. However, as it happens it's even worse than this: economists (for example) disagree on lots of points, and in fact most points are controversial and sometimes divide along ideological lines. An advantage, however, of technocratic government is because it's undemocratic there's no need to worry about unpopular decisions. Therefore, i suggest the following political system: A general election be held to vote for the right kind of technocrat. These technocrats are to be divided along ideological lines within their areas of expertise and between areas of expertise themselves, so for example we get to elect criminologists, economists, sociologists or psychologists by a proportional representation type system, and within each discipline we decide whether, say, we want a psychodynamic, cognitive or neurological approach to psychology-based policy, or a Keynesian, monetarist or other approach to economics, and so forth. The government thus elected then stays in power for four dozen of your Earth years in order that the technocrats' careers be completely played out before they get to suffer the consequences of unpopular policies, and it's the professions that get elected rather than the individuals. Alternatively, maybe we should just let the lizards take over. Scissors sizzurs psyzzas

Sizurs sozurs sozurs large make cisirs sizzirz "scissors". Language There are over two gross and two dozen ways of spelling the word "scissors". The first two letters can be spelt sc, s, ps, or c, the first vowel i, o (as in women) or y, the ss as ss, s, z or zz, the final syllable minus the s as or, ir, ur, er or a, and the last letter s or z. Basic English has less than six gross words. There are therefore enough ways of spelling scissors for that single word to form the basis of a written language, thus: i) Many redundant features should be omitted, so there would be no articles, copula ("be"), gender, declension except for the possessive/genitive -'s or -s', only one preposition, a single demonstrative, no relative conjunction or pronoun and conjunctions can be expressed using the equivalent of NAND with the appropriate string of items or phrases, though there is a word for "no/not/is not". No future tense and "have" expressed using the genitive. Cardinal numerals are binary and expressed using the words for one and zero. The past tense and past participles are the same, expressed by a prefix. ii) Pronouns are analysed into person and number, but as "I/we" versus all other pronouns, so each pronoun consists of two words. Other words are analysed similarly, so there are words for what, that, some, no, each/every, one, thing, kind, place, way, reason, time and quantity, which when combined are equivalent to words such as "why" (="for what reason"), "somewhere"(="in some place" (note that that "in" is whatever the word for the single preposition is). This is copied from Esperanto. iii) Again from Esperanto, many other words are built up from morphemes which modify meaning. These include ones carrying the notions "opposite", "separation", "mis-", "repeated or continuous action", "-ness", "substance", "collection", "possibility", "place of", "tendency", "obligation", "single unit of", "offspring", "cause to", "instrument", "worthy of" and "holder". So far, this makes a dozen and five words from (iii), a dozen and four from (ii) and six from (i), using up a total of three dozen and three spellings of the word scissors. The other two hundred-odd spellings of the word are allocated to roughly the next gross and a half most frequent words in English which can't be analysed using the morphemes mentioned already. Here's a brief vocabulary: Scissors - general preposition. Cisas "nand", "is incompatible with", "not both...and". Cisaz - no, not, is not. Cisers - zero. Ciserz - one, including the pronoun. Cisirs - past tense marker. Cisirz - plural marker. Cisors - "I". Cisorz - you, she, it, he, they, this, that, these, those, thing. (and so on). So, if i wanted to express the sentence "my name is (what my name is)", it would come out as something like "Cisors' psyzzaz scissors sozurs cisers cisers cisers sozurs sozurs", which translates literally as "My name along manner one zero zero one one". Two other things: a) There is no word for "scissors". Instead the concept of scissors is expressed by a phrase which translates as "two joined handled cutting instruments". b) None of the words are actually pronounced "scissors", so the word "scissors" is never actually spoken. If the language is spoken, the words act like Chinese characters, so they aren't said as scissors, but in some other way. Besides all that, the rarer words are the same as in English, provided the notions are simple, so in other words there is no word for "knife", because it would be "cisorz cyssors cuts", i.e. "thing which cuts" or something similar. Nevertheless, the majority of words in a given text would consist of the word "scissors" spelt in a variety of ways. Lossy glossy Language I think glossolalia differs from natural language by not having log-normal distribution of sounds, syllables et caetera. Though i don't think it's language, this made me wonder if it could be thought of as losslessly compressed English, Spanish or whatever. Why would the angels have our linguistic

universals? So, consider the following process, which is not compression: Write a text in Basic English. This text will probably have log-normal vocabulary distribution: relatively few words will be much more frequent than the majority of words in the text, and there will be a "long tail". This is, i think, a normal feature of natural language. Remove all articles, occurrences of the present tense of "be", replace all gendered pronouns with "it", convert all possessives to "of" forms, express all plural nouns and all verbs in the continuous aspect by duplication, and always use "more" and "most" instead of "-er" and "-est" (except for "more" and "most"!). This may smooth the frequency distribution a bit. Encode the words as ten-bit binary numbers. Make this into a sting of bits and slice it into byte-sized segments. Count the frequency of the bytes and re-encode the same text again, reversing the byte frequency, so for example if the most frequent byte turns out to be ten and the rarest eleven, swap them over. Scramble this text pseudorandomly. Intersperse the numbers alternately, so that only odd- numbered bytes correspond to sense. Convert the bytes back into words by using a series of one gross, nine dozen and four consonant-vowel or consonant-diphthong syllables. Read out the result. This is only contingently compression - it could be longer instead if preferred. Therefore, if Huffman coding is essentially compressive it wouldn't be relevant. Chinese syllables can end in consonants. Think of normal language as opposed to the one we're using now. Japanese is an example of a normal language. Whereas i could concentrate on merely simplifying the English language, which might be worthwhile if not liable to widespread adoption, the reasons for the modifications i suggest are not to simplify so much as smooth out frequency distributions. As it stands, English uses "he", "she" and "it" a lot, "my", "your" and "her" a lot, and so on. If every genitive occurrence of "her" was replaced by "of it", that would increase the frequency of "it" and "of" while confining "her" to the objective usage. This is why i want to repeat words for the continuous tenses and plurals - it would increase the frequency of words which are rarer than pronouns, conjunctions and the like. The problem with the frequency distribution of this idea as it stands is that it would probably be bimodal rather than having a flat distribution graph. Making the verbs and nouns more frequent and certain other common words rarer blunts the peaks and pushes them closer. It would be a genuine form of communication because with some kind of table included it could be translated back into a rather odd form of English. The pseudorandom bit can be extracted - it's only either odd or even syllables. Whereas i'm confident that glossolalia is not a natural language (though it communicates certain things other than words, and what it communicates would depend on one's religious or sociological beliefs), the fact that the frequency distribution is not like any human language, or even birdsong or whale song i think, that doesn't necessarily imply it's not a language. I can easily imagine a species which precompresses its language, says what it needs to say and has it uncompressed by a hearer of the same species, and that signal needn't have that kind of frequency distribution at all. So this is more about possible alien languages than real or pretend human or angelic tongues. Screaming, laughing, weeping radio station Radio station which only broadcasts laughter, crying, screaming, burping, farting... Other A radio station with neither music nor speech, which broadcasts programmes consisting only of non-verbal noises made by people. Half an hour of laughter instead of comedy, an hour of screaming instead of horror and so on. The listener goes through various phases while listening, and is for example first amused by the laughter, then irritated, then mocked and finally terrified. You turn the radio on in the middle of the night when one can't sleep to be greeted by seemingly endless shrieks of terror, or trying to soothe a baby to find that instead of music, one has tuned into the

screaming baby marathon. Other programmes include constant coughing, farting, sneezing, burping and so on, and dramas involving stories told through non-verbal sounds only, such as creaking doors, birdsong, other sound effects and human noises. Birdsong was used on a DAB channel before the real channel content appeared. I understand there was also an aquarium TV channel which was originally planned to be an SF channel. Laughter would move through infectious and irritating to sinister and insane. It does make me wonder about the use of audio tracks to change people's moods in a less contentious way than subliminal suggestion. Silent dating It all goes wrong when people start to talk Rite of passage When going on a blind date, both parties should commit to saying nothing to each other, except to indicate whether they want to have another date at the end. This goes on for up to twelve dates. They are allowed to do anything else except communicate verbally. This has three advantages: both people are forced to develop their non-verbal communication, they will become steadily more fascinated with each other due to the lack of information about each other, and nothing hurtful will be said if it doesn't work out. Silence is difficult to interpret. Is it not possible that there would be less silence later if there was silence at the beginning? Silicone replacement therapy Replace most adipose tissue with silicone implants Life science I am not writing this because it's likely to promote health. I'm writing it because it's interesting. I am entirely at peace with the possibility of it leading to an early death. With that in mind: When women with silicone breast implants get old, the result is disturbing. I'm sure you've seen the pictures circulating on the internet. It seems to me that a more radical approach to silicone implants would bring something which might at a stretch be seen as benefits. Some adipose tissue is essential to health although there are a few people born with none, who have serious problems as a result. This minimum healthy quantity should be left. However, the breasts (female or male), greater and lesser omenta, buttocks and the layers lining the kidneys, limbs and face are not completely vital as a source of energy for the body. The other functions of fat include insulation and mechanical protection. I therefore suggest the removal of these areas of fat, which amount to an average of something like a fifth of the body weight in both sexes, and their replacement by ideally sized and shaped silicone implants. These would in fact make the body slightly heavier but this would not be observable. I further suggest that these implants contain a device which can heat them to body temperature by induction, containing a thermostat which cuts out at a healthy body temperature. This body modification would have several results. It would dramatically reduce the requirement for energy from food while creating the facility to warm the body electrically more efficiently than at present - less need to heat buildings. It would make it easier to avoid weight gain as there would be fewer places to put the fat. The body's response to insulin would change - at first, my impression was that this would increase the risk of diabetes but there is some evidence that removing the canine greater omentum improves responsiveness to insulin. There would be a rapid and convenient treatment for hypothermia. There would also be almost inevitably cardiomyopathy and fatty liver disease. However, since you would die young, you wouldn't reach the stage where everything but the implants would go saggy and make it look awful, so that's OK. Also, you could do the Fight Club thing and maybe sell soap made from celebrities or achieve a long period of self- sufficiency in the bathroom, and you could extract the glycerol from that and live off it for a while too. Since your life would be quite a bit shorter, this would be of a greater relative advantage than if you just left the fat inside languishing rather than using it for other purposes. Adipose tissue is mechanically protective and acts as a fat store but any gastric, duodenal or colonic perforation is bad news. One thing that's not clear to me is what results from perforation of the ileum or jejunum. Maybe in some mysterious way, increasing the silicone

content of a wider variety of humans would lead to androids in a sort of convergence: humans become more artificial through augmentation with synthetic compounds and computers become more intelligent in order to access information relating to them, notably through VR, video and so forth, until eventually they become one with the machines. Sin-free aperture Opening in food packaging which absolves it of calorific content Life science Some things absolve food of energy content, such as licking off a knife, eating when still raw or if a treat. This amalgamates them into one opening? Package food with two possible openings, through one of which the contents of the receptacle can be accessed in its usual, energy-rich form, providing the body with calories or joules. The other synthesises the mental processes which mysteriously reduce food's energy density to be used by those trying to lose weight. A margarine carton has a normal lid plus a second, peel-off bit on the side through which one can scoop surprisingly caloriefree margarine, or a sugar bag opens at either end, one normally, the other if one would prefer energetic unavailability. This might be achieved in a manner like alleged negative calories of celery. It takes as much energy to access the food through the sin-free aperture as gained from the food. To remove a single grain of sugar from the absolvatory opening, it takes one joule because a handle has to be cranked to open a tiny iris opening which will slam shut immediately after removal, a strong spring keeps the opening shut or the food must be dispensed into a small chamber before removal. The packets will carry two sets of nutritional information, one conventional, the other, possibly negative, subtracting work needed to remove the food. It also records other nutrients they would require to redress the balance of consuming those empty calories, so for example a small negative mass of calcium or various B vitamins. Can also be extended to certain other activities. Study transuranic chemistry through homopathy Homopathic ununpentium and the like Politics The thirty C dilution in homopathy involves aqueous "solutions" with statistically insignificant probabilities of containing a single molecule or atom of the substance involved. It's difficult to produce even a single atom of some transuranic elements, and while we're at it, francium, astatine and to some extent technetium suffer from similar problems. These two phenomena can be combined usefully. Create one transuranic atom in water and it will already be, to some extent, a homopathic preparation. Proceed to dilute further until you have a thirty C, then either study it or use it. For instance, determining pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics and toxicology would be straightforward - just take them as if they're conventional homopathic remedies. You could then extrapolate from that to determine other aspects of their chemistry. For instance, a transuranic element which reproduces the symptoms of lead poisoning might break down sulphydryl groups in proteins. It's up to you to decide if this is a joke. Single-character social networking t ICT

I am very wordy and can't use Twitter because of the eleven and two-thirds dozen character limit. Other social networking sites are longer, but so far as i know, it hasn't been done the other way. Therefore i propose a minimal social networking service - not site so much, since HTML is unnecessary for this - which involves each user updating their status using a single character. They can of course follow others. The idea is to sum up everything about what's happening in a single letter or symbol. For instance, if one is angry, one could post "+", meaning one is "cross". If one is drinking tea, post "t". Context is all though. "+" on another occasion could mean one feels positive. An astronomer might post "*" when they go out to look at the night sky, but a fan of Kiki Dee might post the same for entirely different reasons. Usernames are also single characters, meaning that friend networks have to be organised into Google Plus style "circles" of fewer than nine dozen individuals. Internet access is possible but not necessary for the service. It can also be accessed via a tamagochi/pager/digital watch-style device which enables one, in various ways, to send and receive one's single-character update via a radio signal to local users within a few nautical miles, or more widely depending on the frequency. The simplicity of the system enables the system to be used with extremely low-end hardware, probably not even requiring integrated circuits. It could also be included as a facility on the likes of pocket calculators or the devices i mentioned above. Slog laptop The corollary of the current trend in fun devices ICT Many devices enable one to do both fun stuff and tedious stuff together, examples being conventional desktop PCs and Macs. Other devices emphasise the fun, for instance games consoles, mini-tablets, mobile 'phones, and it's quite hard to get them to do things like let you write reports and similar long serious screeds, do your accounts, pay your bills and the like. Having devices oriented towards socialising and entertainment is fine - specialising in functions that way seems rather appropriate. However, if you have a problem with attention span, staying on-task and the like, you have no device which caters to your needs. You have the fun distraction and PCs and laptops which dangle the temptation of YouTube, this place, pictures of cats, music and so on in front of you, and it ruins your life because you cannot resist that temptation in the end, so bye-bye productivity. So, here's my idea: just as there are IT devices which filter out the slog, so should there be IT devices which filter out the fun. I envisage a boring old laptop which displays text in one-bit colour, has no graphics or sound (not even a beep or a click), no optical drive, no multimedia and no web capability. It has a socket for a memory stick, built-in applications on its firmware which let you edit text and maybe format it to a very limited degree, a spreadsheet with limited capabilities, a calculator, and a pure command-line based interface. It also has a wireless internet connection, but only so you can pay bills, file tax returns and send in forms - it will not do hyperlinks. Even textbased arcade games are impossible because it behaves like a glass teletype - no cursor control. It's a dull brown-green khaki colour and has a dull green on brown display. The reason for making it especially boring in the last few respects is to avoid the temptation to hack or tinker. I am slightly afraid, even as i type this, that i'm interested in the challenge of getting it to do something it shouldn't, and that i could've typed this very idea on it, which slightly interests me. An old conventional laptop or other device does not fill this role because such a computer would be worn out in one way or another - knackered battery, dodgy keyboard, and more importantly, the challenge of making it work in the modern world would be there. No. I want this to be dull, dull, dull. I need this. It should be fairly cheap, but not ridiculously so because the money saved on not making it "good" should be lavishly splashed out on making it ergonomic. In spite of being boring, it should be a pleasure to use, with a nice keyboard, good viewing angle and various features which

encourage good posture, lack of tingly finger things and so on. So it's a nice laptop but it's absolutely yawn-inspiring.