The Year In Ideas

matthewg writes: "This week's New York Times Magazine (free registration required) consists primarily of a special feature, The Year In Ideas. Subtitled 'An encyclopedia of innovations, conceptual leaps, harebrained schemes, cultural tremors, & hindsight reckonings that made a difference in 2001,' the feature describes 80 different "notions, inventions, conceptual swerves and philosophical leaps that mattered this year and may well continue to matter in years to come" in between a couple of paragraphs and half a page. Complete with illustrations which range from informative to whimsical, it covers a lot of interesting ideas, many of which will probably be new to you. The article's subjects include such Slashdot-fodder as software as speech, steganography Goes Digital, and collaborative composition, as well as a plethora of intriguing new ideas, such as new ideas in basic rights and global warming lawsuits. And, of course, the solution to every Slashdotter's woes."

Comments

The Right not to be born

[alen]

This was my favorite. You can read about it here . Apparently in France you now have a right not to exist and can sue for damages. What are those crazy Europeans going to make up next?

Re:The Right not to be born

[exceed]

I agree, this is rather odd. How can an unborn child, not having any knowledge of his/her rights or even know what rights -are- have the right to be unborn? This is just a nicer way (and kind of a loophole) to say "The Mother's right to have an abortion."

Here's an idea the New York Times can explore...

[corebreech]

It's called telling the truth.

One of the novel concepts of the last year, the truth was recently proposed as a way of more accurately conveying information.

Some naysayers point out that telling the truth necessarily means not being able to tell lies, as has been the custom, but defenders of the truth counter that the lies were never all that attractive in the first place.

Moreover, lies make inefficient use of bandwidth, leading some to suggest that the truth is perhaps the most effective form of data compression available.

Cryptographers have also expressed interest in this new concept, suggesting that since so many people are unaccustomed to hearing the truth they wouldn't be able to understand a message if it were true.

However, leaders on Capitol Hill expressed alarm that the people should have access to such technology. The fear is that were the truth to be used by hostile forces we would be put in a position where we might be forced to respond with the truth. The ramifications of such a exchange are simply too horrible to contemplate.

I like the one about the Afghani guys E-mail

[sam_handelman]

Pardon me while I ramble.

One E-Mail Message Can Change the World struck me as a particular interesting case-in-point (which I hadn't yet heard about because I don't watch opera and live in the cultural backwater that is Manhattan.) Obviously, the code is speech one is more near and dear to all of our slashdotting hearts, but the NYT doesn't have much to say (other than, yes, we've made our case to that reporter's satisfaction) that we haven't heard yet. The one about the afghani guys e-mail raises what really are the interesting questions - since it seems that "commerce" isn't going to choke our medium of culture and communication to shallow and materialistic braindeath - what sorts of things can all our internetworked computers accomplish, and how do they really change things, from the standpoint of culture and communication.

Incidentally, The Lie Detector That Scans Your Brain is utter hogwash. Pseudoscience quackery phrenology revisited crap crap crap. I don't even know where to start. Okay, we're tuning this thing, and we have this guy (under no particular stress) alternately tell the truth and lie. Then, we have this guy, and if he's caught lying his life is destroyed - he spends 15 years in the can - and we compare the activity in the entire brains of these two subjects when they talk, to try and figure out when the really stressed guy is lying. Okay, I'm a bio grad student, but is the problem not obvious? The intense stress alters neurology in the entirety of the brain. The airport security mounted brainscanners are an endearingly dystopic proposition, but are unfortunately totally impractical. You're going to pull people into security based on brain scans taken from them without a background? You're going to train special techs, and then pay them, to stand there and look at the brainscan of every person who enters the airport? You're going to trust a computer to do it? Please.

The reporter who wrote transcending equations obviously has no background in math. I think he read some of the other new york times articles on the proposals of solid state physicists and got confused. Ah well.

Hate

[T1girl]

If you're in that big a hurry, why bother? And who wants to self-select for sober realists, pragmatists, etc. I'd prefer the "giddy happenstance" option and whatever leads from there. The timeframe could extend very happily to the rest of your life under the right circumstances.