Originally Posted by: PonyOnejust out of curiosity i tried what you suggested (seriously). i fail to see the magic.

IMHO, from my own personal experience, pretty much anything you figure out whilst on mind altering substances doesn't translate well to reality.

The idea is not really something that popped in my head via mushrooms, but something I'd been trying to figure out for a long time before that. What it's really about is conservation of writing materials such as paper, or helping out with people who are learning a new language.

Pony, I have a slightly better example that I thought of at work; Take about five cubes, and write one letter per cube. This could actually be useful in the right context, for example, translation. If your word is-

HOUSE

then the blocks perpendicular to the letters can easily say (with a Space at the end)

CASA
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Now I haven't come to conclusions as to some of the more difficult situations, like "Pants" and "Pantelones", where the letter difference is extreme, but I believe I could think of something for that.

Another cool thing about that would be learning another language. If you are really stumped on a word, then boom, you can see a similar word in your own language.

What I mainly thought of was this; The possibility that you could take two lines and stuff them into one; if you could do this, and do it well, you would efficiently revolutionize the way books are, and cut paper use nearly in half. While yes, ink use would be pretty close to the same, at least you'd be saving paper.

For example, if line one says

The blue dog has a headache

and line two says

Do you have any aspirin?

Let's pretend that each sentence takes up one full line of a page; If you make line two the base and line one the 2nd story, then you are flipping pages less, shifting your eyes up and down less, and carrying a much thinner coppy of War & Peace in your backpack.

I believe the most efficient way of working this idea is with high-tech computers. For example, when you're on a website that is "secret" and requires a password, you could fill a page full of information, and have a special word that needs to be highlighted; Once it's highlighted, the user would type in the password over the highlighted word, and if it's correct, you are then prompted for your real ID and password. This would help prevent possible identity theft and things of that nature.

You can have your stereotypical viewpoints as to the thoughts of people who've used mind-altering substances, but realize that by shutting an idea down before giving it a chance doesn't hurt me one bit; Now Pony tried it, and didn't really get it. That's cool, and the above wasn't aimed at Pony. It's one thing to not get it, and it's another thing to not consider trying it because of the circumstances of how it was thought up.

~Incidents