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The Year In Ideas
No_Weak_Heart writes "The New York Times Magazine (registration required) presents its annual compendium of ideas. The list ranges from acoustic keyboard eavesdropping to land-mine-detecting plants to water that isn't wet. What catches your fancy? And what do you think is missing?"
Here's a login and password.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Here's the New York Times link generator. Enter a regular URL and it returns a permanent, no-registration needed link. It's very handy, but certain sections are not supported.
"The Best Way to Skip a Stone" isn't silly. In fact, skipping stones was the basis of the concept of Dambuster bombs back in WW2.
One rather bizarre note appears here . "If the bomb breaches the dam, code word is Nigger but if it does not breach, code word is Gonner."
In any case, skipping objects off water is hardly a new area of research and does not belong on a list of things "new and innovative" as it is neither. But it is not at all silly.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Last I checked, that has already been invented. They call it "ice".
The only new thing in the patent is that the wave cam comes in pieces, rather than being made as one big unit.
Hey, Slashdot editors, use this:
;). Just copy and paste the NY Times URL and it'll come out with a partner URL (no need for registration, similar to Google News links).
http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink
No more searching for google caches, fake logins, or *gasp* actually registering
For those curious, it's not water that isn't wet. It's a water-like fire-supression substitute called Novec 1230. You may have seen it on some of the morning talk shows. It's a carbon-based liquid molecule that looks and feels a lot like water, but you can soak most electronic devices in it and they will still work. It puts out fires just as effectively, but it vaporizes quickly, drying 25 times faster than water. It's non-carcinogenic, it breaks down completely within 5 days and doesn't do any damage to the ozone layer. It's rapidly becoming adopted as the fire supression system of choice for many businesses. Bruce
I don't know if any of these are really new ideas but they seem to have come up a lot in 2004.
- Affordable space tourism for the masses
- Podcasting. ipod+time shifting+rss
- The Seriousness of Fake news. It seems like even the mainstream news channels like CNN have started to incorporate comedians and irony in their shows. Jon Stewart interviews John Kerry, and the daily show book is a best seller. Many articles are written about why people are so turned off the real news channels.
- Global Economic Crash imminent. The declining US dollar is at risk of being dumped by Asia and losing its status as world currency to the Euro - potentially trigger global economic crisis. Another scenario involves the 'peak oil' theory and the increasing price of oil.
- Fighting Terrorism using Drug War tactics. An interview with John Kerry in the NY Times magazine reveiled that his view of terrorism as a problem you fight locally in a similar fashion to drug cartels and not as a global war fought at the level of nations.
- Sex Slavery in America. A controversial piece of investigative journalism in the NY Times posited that sex slavery is widespread in the US.