Comment by carapace

I'd love to, but from experience I can tell you, you just get skeptics and crackpots and scammers and suckers crawling out of the woodwork and gumming up the scientific/inventive process. That, combined with the apathy of the general public, means that it's just hard to get a real conversation going in a "non tin foil way / silver bullet way".

It also means that a lot of great ideas go nowhere, or take 50-100 years to get adopted. Your experience with malaria is an example. My condolences btw, that sounds terrible.

In any event, there's Rex Research: http://rexresearch.com/1index.htm (IGNORE HOW IT LOOKS!!!) This fellow has been collecting inventions and other weird stuff for decades, since before the internet. He used to run little ads in the back of Popular Science and others like that. Yes, the site looks a little... creative, and much of the stuff he lists is just crackpottery, but the stuff that isn't is mind-blowing.

Just one example, one of my favorite devices: the Hilsch-Ranque Vortex Tube. It's a "Maxwell's Demon" (although it does not violate Thermodynamics. Of course.)

> The vortex tube, also known as the Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube, is a mechanical device that separates a compressed gas into hot and cold streams. It has no moving parts.

http://rexresearch.com/ranque/ranque.htm

You can actually buy these to go on the end of a compressor and provide "spot cold" for cooling off whatever. I emailed a company that sells them once to ask what would happen if you set it up in a feedback loop so that the cold output was chilling the input line, but they were uninterested.

Oh hey, time marches on and it now has a wikipedia page! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube

Anyhow, like I said, I'd like to blog about this stuff but most of the people who would be into it would either haters or credulous fools. Speaking of which, youtube has lots of videos of people talking about and sometimes even demonstrating things. But again, you have to wade through all kinds of bullshit and scammers and hoaxers and skeptics and credulous fools to actually find the handful of people who take this stuff seriously but can maintain a proper detached scientific attitude to actually investigate it. YMMV