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The Year in Ideas, 2006 | The New York Times Magazine

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The Year in Ideas, 2006 | The New York Times Magazine
Topic: Society 11:04 am EST, Dec 10, 2006

This month, as in the past five Decembers, the magazine looks back on the passing year from a distinctive vantage point: that of ideas. Our editors and writers have located the peaks and valleys of ingenuity — the human cognitive faculty deployed with intentions good and bad, purposes serious and silly, consequences momentous and morbid. The resulting intellectual mountain range extends across a wide territory. Now it’s yours for the traversing in a compendium of 74 ideas arranged from A to Z.

Included below are some external links for those wanting further information on the various ideas.

They call it reverse graffiti; oh, yeah; contrast with "graffiti without consequences", and traffic calming art ... Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ... Dmitri Medvedev controls one-fifth of the world’s natural gas reserves ... Rods from God, "rediscovered" in the Transformation Flight Plan -- look for "Hypervelocity Rod Bundles"; Aerotropolis: "Access, access, access is replacing location, location, location" ... and now we have traffic management for buildings ... traffic begets more traffic ... in real life, they say you can never escape 1) death or 2) taxes, but for the time being, Second Life has killed the second one.

"He had a penchant for pinks. He was always trying to sneak pinks ... Ambient Addition consists of two headphones with transparent earpieces, each equipped with a microphone and a speaker. The microphones sample the background noise in the immediate vicinity — wind blowing through the trees, traffic, a cellphone conversation. Then, with the help of a small digital signal-processing chip, the headphones make music from these sounds.

Considering all of the eyes in the MemeStreams logo, you'd think the site would get more donations ... The city of Atlanta purchased Bellwood Quarry, which will be transformed into a 300-acre park ... invisible spy drone, Phantom Sentinel (with videos) ... KiteShip ... if you want to come up with a good idea, or a sophisticated argument, or a work of art, you’re still better off going solo. ... data mining in the public interest ... worst offenders: Kuwait, Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria, Mozambique, Albania, Angola and Senegal. (Read the full paper, also here.) ... "You blow it up and you tootle around." ... Facing the LSAT? Go in mildly hungry ... (read the paper) ... In a free market, all costs should be subject to competition, so economists have long been stumped as to why you almost never see a hotel compete on minibar prices or a printer company advertise its low cartridge costs. (Read the paper) ... "Homophily raises the question for social-software designers of how much they should encourage homophily and how much they want to mix it up." ... Human and chimp ancestors, after diverging into separate species millions of years ago, came back together and interbred ... Resist the temptations of daily pleasure, and you’ll be happier in the long run. But what if that's wrong? ... While every MBA student knows it's dumb to base decisions on sunk costs, the eBay bidders did just that ...

Some Africans have mixed feelings about their newfound trendiness ... data-driven mobility models are a good thing ... Celebrities are 17 percent more narcissistic than the general public — with females ranking significantly higher than males. Interestingly, celebrities with the most skill (musicians) were the least narcissistic; those with no skill (reality-show stars) were "off the narcissism charts."

The solution to how to neutralize Gabe Pruitt came not from a game plan of X’s and O’s but from military-style psychological operations. (This is quite an impressive trick.) ...

One of the surest routes to friendship is disliking the same things about other people ... (read the paper) ... enveloping the diner in a cloud of woodsy, herbaceous steam ... a meta-study ...

Glenn Gould's re-performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s "Goldberg" Variations; that one is so 2005 ... a mother of three head-banging to death metal; (Decius and Jello may remember that story) ... and this one, about the Bore-O-Meter; see it here. I already told you about LifeStraw, too ... the online book cataloger LibraryThing’s UnSuggester, which identifies the book least likely to share a library with the book you mention.

The reverse panopticon is now Sousveillance ...

"Everything we think we know may be wrong." ... Bicycle Helmets Put You at Risk ... round salt doesn't stick ...

More to follow ...

The Year in Ideas, 2006 | The New York Times Magazine



 
 
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