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 ... ... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]