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The Year In Ideas 85

Posted by timothy from the lightbulb-glowing dept.
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."
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The Year In Ideas More

The Year In Ideas

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  • Speed Dating? (Score:3, Funny)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Sunday December 09, 2001 @09:17AM (#2678338) Homepage
    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... (Score:5, Informative)

    by cygnusx ( 193092 ) on Sunday December 09, 2001 @09:17AM (#2678339)
    is here: http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/ [nytimes.com]
  • ..if you want to meet lots of people in a very short time frame.

    "What did you do tonight?"
    "Oh, I just had 375 dates in one evening, nothing special."

    Wow...

    • 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.

      • > > all about as romantic as a job fair
        > now that is a bothersome image. - Socializing with all the romance of a job fair.

        Makes sense if you have things you want to cross off the list Right Away, though.

        Me: "Do you want kids someday?"
        She: "Of course, doesn't everyo..."
        Me: "NEXT!"
        She: "You mean you don't want kids?"
        Me: "When I imagine my future, it never involves waking up to screaming at 0300h and being up to my armpits in babyshi..."
        She: "NEXT!"

        I could go through 20 non-starters in an hour, which could save years off the search for a mate the conventional way.

    • "Oh, I just had 375 dates in one evening, nothing special."

      375 dates in one evening, at a conservative three minutes a date, would need 18.75 hours...

      Maybe on Pluto... but it's a bit cold there to get romantic... ;-)

  • Gross mischaracterisation (Score:5, Funny)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Sunday December 09, 2001 @09:36AM (#2678361)
    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.
    • If you're not a socially inept nerd, good for you. A sizable bunch of people on /. are, however.

      This still doesn't seem like a good answer. I'd turn off most girls in seven minutes easily.

      • If you're not a socially inept nerd, good for you. A sizable bunch of people on /. are, however.
        Still, a legion of socially inept nerds armed with linux-powered tricorders that scan for single women who like Lego is probably a good start
        (unless of course you are a single woman and you like lego).

        This still doesn't seem like a good answer.
        You're right, it really should be a mindstorm powered tricorder built from lego and developed on linux.

  • The Right not to be born (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alen ( 225700 ) on Sunday December 09, 2001 @09:39AM (#2678365)
    This was my favorite. You can read about it here [nytimes.com]. 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 (Score:3, Troll)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I know I wouldn't want to be born French, either!
    • 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."
    • But if you win your case, the by being awarded damages the state is acknowledging that you exist, which is a breach of your human rights.
      The only correct course for the french government is to say "Who said that?".

    • What about suicide? (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by alen ( 225700 )
      Since you have a right not to exist, I guess Dr. Kevorkian will have a field day in France.
    • This was an outrageous lawsuit.

      The defense of an honest mistake would seem most appropriate.

      The mother had no way of accurately predicting that the birth would result in net misery instead of net happiness. She may have also been uncertain about her legal obligations to protect potential misery.

      If you want to create a law that forces mothers to consider potential misery when deciding to keep their baby or not, and then holds them responsible if some threshold of hapiness is not created... well thats one thing. Going after the fact, making up laws and civil responsibilities one could not reasonably be aware they had at the time, is wrong.

      I think there has to be some malicious self-interest or negligeance involved. Im upset when people sue their rescuers for their mistakes too.
    • As I understand it, this concerns only the right of the "wronged" (read: born) individual to sue the state for not having made abortion a viable option to his or her mother. Why this concerns me is because if they support this, it is conceivable that they will support the right of a "wronged" person to sue his or her parents for not choosing an abortion, given the quality of that person's life. This sort of mindset is grossly injust. It leads to the feeling that you haven't got the right to bring a child into this world unless its life shall be entirely devoid of suffering.
      • Exactly! You don't have the right to create a life whenever you wish. You must consider what you are doing and what good will be the life to the newly created being. It is irresponsible to be a parent, if you have bad genetic inheritance, bad physical conditions, bad habits, no parental skills, no resources to raise a child.

        And so:

        When you conceive a child, you must think what life will it have.
        When you create a clone, you must think what life will it have.
        When you program an AI, you must think what life will it have.

        Noone has the right to mess with the life, with the spirit and with the intellegence. The creator must be reponsible for his actions.
        • I can't agree with a single thing you claimed.

          That people with poor genetics should not breed is claiming that it is our responsibility to obey natural selection, even if it doesn't weed us out...well...naturally.


          That people in poor physical condition should not breed is saying much the same - that if a person with a disability is not weeded out naturally, it is their responsibility to not mate anyhow.


          That somebody with bad habits should not breed is ridiculous. By whose standards would you judge? I think that smacking one's lips when one eats is a "bad habit." You may say that habits of the cablibre of smoking merit this prohibition. It is arbitrary and thus inadmissable.


          That people with no parental skills should not breed means that nobody should ever have a first child, since nobody is born with parental skills. Like any other important skill, they are developed.


          That people without resources should not breed...This I can half agree with. If somebody is unprepared to support a child, it is irresponsible of them to breed. But to claim that somebody who is prepared to sacrifice, despite having little, should not breed is to say that only the wealthy should have the right of procreation.


          You cannot make this case. A life fraught with burden is still a life worth having. There are situations in which is would be irresponsible to have a child, but your criteria are laughable.

  • Here's an idea the New York Times can explore... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by corebreech ( 469871 ) on Sunday December 09, 2001 @09:46AM (#2678374) Journal
    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.

  • (free registration required) (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    who cares anymore? So the NYT know I'm a mid-40s Afghan woman earning $500,000/yr. big deal.

  • The solution to every Slashdotters woes? (Score:4, Funny)

    by darkov ( 261309 ) on Sunday December 09, 2001 @09:58AM (#2678394)
    I thought it was was pr0n! This notion of speaking to the opposite sex is outrageous.
  • Ah, the idea that every person, regardless of creed, color, nation, toaster and porpoise can make total fools of themselves on DDR machines. That one makes my list!

    • Ah, the idea that every person, regardless of creed, color, nation, toaster and porpoise can make total fools of themselves on DDR machines

      • DDR, as in Deutsche "Democratic" Republic (that is, East Germany), is dead.
      • DDR, as in double-data-rate SDRAM, may soon be eclipsed by 1T-SRAM, a type of DRAM that very effectively hides refresh.
      • DDR, as in Dance Dance Revolution, is just a clone of Nintendo's Dance Aerobics [google.com].

  • Oh, Stanley? Oh, HAL? Aren't we supposed to be in the year of 2001: A Space Odyssey? The newspaper of record [nytimes.com] may not be savvy to the undercurrents of Technological Singularity, [caltech.edu] but futurists and prophets know that Kubrickian Artificial Intelligence [sourceforge.net] has arrived right on time to meet the dawn of the age of intelligent machines.

    In only a short while, Ray, we will see artificial intelligence for robots [scn.org] go through the JavaScript Tutorial Implementation [sourceforge.net] and beyond the Visual Basic Mind.VB [virtualentity.com] and Mind.JAVA manifestation [angelfire.com] into a pre-Cambrian explosion of artificially intelligent life forms. [sourceforge.net]

    SlashDot is a far better barometer of revolutionary new ideas than an adverttisement-driven media mag -- even the grand Old Lady of New York.

  • Does anyone have any personal favorite website that deals with digital steganography or image watermarking in any greater depth than the Times article did? I'm interested in finding out some more of the mathematics behind it.
  • Pardon me while I ramble.

    One E-Mail Message Can Change the World [nytimes.com] 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 [nytimes.com] 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 [nytimes.com] 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.
  • Does this mean that there will be no more new ideas this year? I guess i'll just take a vacation then.
  • I'm surprised the "Hygiene is a Hazard" article didn't get higher billing...

    (C'mon. You know you laughed...)

  • Passenger jets as bombs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by deafgreatdane ( 231492 ) on Sunday December 09, 2001 @11:46AM (#2678598)
    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
  • Considering the robust success of DDR [nytimes.com], I'm a little surprised that none of the arcade game manufacturers have taken the "use your hands and feet" concept and created a fighting game using the same technology.

    While the last thing American arcades need is yet another Street Fighter clone, this combination of concepts would almost certainly be different enough to draw in the most jaded fighter fan.

    • I'm a little surprised that none of the arcade game manufacturers have taken the "use your hands and feet" concept and created a fighting game using the same technology.

      This was tried on the Sega Genesis, and it failed [google.com].

    • A friend and I stopped in at the GameWorks in Seattle a year or two ago just to see what's going on in the games world (we're both in our 30s now, so arcade visits are no longer a regular part of our lives). Anyway, the one thing that really captivated us was a combat game that detected the motion of your limbs and used it to control the on-screen characters. Naturally we hopped aboard -- I wish we'd had a tape, because I'm sure we looked like total idiots! (I know I *felt* like a total idiot!)

      Unfortunately I don't remember the name of this device...

  • Open Source Celebrities (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bumperson ( 309668 ) on Sunday December 09, 2001 @12:46PM (#2678747)
    This idea [nytimes.com] 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.
  • Where do I go to sign up?
  • Prayer Works [nytimes.com]
    This year, researchers at Columbia University announced their rather startling finding that women in a fertility clinic were almost twice as likely to get pregnant when, unknown to them, total strangers were praying for their success.

    Has anybody heard about this study? I find this one rather hard to believe.

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