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

Speed Dating?

[cperciva]

I think a better term would be "Eating Dinner in Hall". People walk into Hall, sit down randomly, spend five minutes talking to the person opposite while waiting for the food to arrive, and then leave immediately after they finish eating. (Believe me, the food isn't worth lingering over.)

The *full* list of ideas...

[cygnusx]

is here: http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/

Gross mischaracterisation

[rde]

So a speed date is the answer to all my woes, is it? Pah. Shows what you think of your readers. We're not all socially inept nerds, you know.

The real solution to all my woes is a linux-powered tricorder that scans for single women who like Lego.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I wouldn't want to be born French, either!

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.

The solution to every Slashdotters woes?

[darkov]

I thought it was was pr0n! This notion of speaking to the opposite sex is outrageous.

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.

Re:I like the one about the Afghani guys E-mail

[Jeremi]

Okay, I'm a bio grad student, but is the problem not obvious? The intense stress alters neurology in the entirety of the brain.

Not to worry, they thought of that. That's why they when they calibrated the machine, they had all their subjects wear a cage of starving rats on their face.

Speed Dating = Job Fair?

[Alien54]

t's all about as romantic as a job fair

now that is a bothersome image. - Socializing with all the romance of a job fair.

But if nothing else is working for your, then why not?

I can see this sort of working out if the atmosphere is right. Otherwise it would be a prime target for satire on SNL.

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.

Passenger jets as bombs

[deafgreatdane]

When I think of the last year and ideas that are "conceptual swerves ... that mattered this year and may well continue to matter in years to come", I think of the idea of taking passenger jets, and viewing them as big bombs. They have navigation systems, a destructive payload (mass and jet fuel), and very few places in the world have defences against them.

It sure changed the perspectives of millions of people, lot the least of which includes the thousands in the direct application of the idea.

We shouldn't limit the list of ideas to humanitarian advances.

-benJ

Open Source Celebrities

[bumperson]

This idea is interesting: The Open-Source Celebrity. According to the article:

• There you have it: celebrities, as we know them, are fictional characters. Sure, yes, there's a real person named Michael Stipe, who says actual things and goes to real restaurants and eats food and does other actual stuff. But there's also a character named ''Michael Stipe'' who exists as a kind of collectively agreed-upon fictive construct. Of course, this character is loosely based on the real-life Michael Stipe. For example, they look quite similar. But according to the Junod Doctrine, ''Michael Stipe'' - the character - is more real than Michael Stipe the person. Further, he exists in the public domain, like the Linux operating system. Everyone is free to tinker at will; we can ascribe actions, ambitions, desires and quotes to him as we see fit. He belongs to all of us. All celebrities do. And not in an obtuse, metaphorical, ''Princess Diana belonged to all of us'' kind of way, but in a direct, hands-on, dance-puppet-dance kind of way.