In 2013, I wrote how crowdsourcing could help break out of the language bubble we all find ourselves in when we search online. How our search results only come from the language we write our search keywords in. But since then, machine translation between languages has greatly improved. So why are we still in our language bubbles?

There are some rays of hope. Google is reportedly able to return you results from other languages when there are no good hits in your primary language. I have to say, though, that I have never experienced this. Maybe because I usually search in English. I would guess that when you search in smaller languages, you sometimes get English results added.

But I want the opposite. I want to see ideas and thoughts and solutions that might be available in other languages, the languages I do not speak, when I search in English. I want diversity. I think all the pieces to build this are available. Why is this not already available? Am I overlooking any obstacle to this?

I do not know much about speech recognition. I do not know what is the state of the art. But years ago I was playing a bit with it and I would like to throw an idea our there, maybe somebody picks it up, maybe it turns out useful, or maybe it is already being used. Please tell me. It can be used for not just speech recognition, but any general audio pattern recognition, or any signal pattern recognition.

The basic idea is to observe that human hearing works by first cochlea doing physically a frequency transform. Hairs of different lengths resonate to frequencies in the audio input. Stronger a particular frequency is in the input, stronger will be a signal for that hair. A stronger signal in neurons does not mean a larger amplitude of the action potential, but more of them. So a stronger signal for a particular frequency means that more impulses will go over that neuron. More impulses mean a higher frequency of those impulses. So brain has to learn not directly from the input audio, but from changes of frequency of the signal for each frequency in the input audio. If brain is recognizing patterns from that, we should too.

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Can somebody create a filter which extracts only clean water from soda and other drinks? No sugar, no colors, no additives. Just pure water. It seems bottled water is more expensive than soda drinks, so, let’s just use a filter.

I am envisioning a new global economic system¹ where you do not provide service or goods to another person because they pay you, but because you evaluate how much, which and how they themselves have provided services and goods to others in the past. You announce your availability of a given service or goods to others, interested apply, and based on your values, beliefs, and information about their past contributions, you decide to whom you then provide given service or goods. Such economy promotes balance, is not impersonal and can properly award cultural, artistic, and sustainable services and goods.

If you know Couchsurfing, then this will be very familiar to you. In essence it is a generalization of Couchsurfing model, while thinking about necessary components to make it scalable and distributed.

It was written few years ago, before Bitcoin, which gives even more ideas how such economic system could be technically implemented.

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I do not understand why people have issues with sea level rising. I think we should just take the opportunity. Cheaply build tidal power plants on what is currently easy to build on land and then just wait for sea to come and power them up. Cheap energy. For whole world. No more wars.

Why, when choosing an airplane seat, you cannot say that you do not care where you seat, just that you seat next to somebody interesting (listing your interests)? Sitting next to somebody for 10 hours could be a great opportunity to exchange ideas, broaden horizons, and argue about the future of the planet.

I am still waiting for the laptop which would have an on demand transparent (see through) screen. This would be useful while working. But even more interesting would be that you could close the laptop down and then use the other side of the screen as a touch-screen based device. No flipping of the screen around necessary.

When searching in English you are reaching only English content on the web. But we could crowdsource search in other languages to native speakers. Where is crowdsearching when you need it?

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