The Year in Ideas, 2007 DEC 10 2007
The NY Times Magazine is out with its annual Year in Ideas issue. 2007 was the year of green -- green energy, green manufacturing, and even a green Nobel Prize for Al Gore -- and environmentalism featured heavily on the Times' list. But I found some of the other items on the list more interesting.
Ambiguity Promotes Liking. Sometimes the more you learn about a person or a situation, the more likely you are to be disappointed:
Why? For starters, initial information is open to interpretation. "And people are so motivated to find somebody they like that they read things into the profiles," Norton says. If a man writes that he likes the outdoors, his would-be mate imagines her perfect skiing companion, but when she learns more, she discovers "the outdoors" refers to nude beaches. And "once you see one dissimilarity, everything you learn afterward gets colored by that," Norton says.
I'm an optimistic pessimist by nature; I believe everything in my life will eventually average out for the better but I assume the worst of individual situations for the reasons proposed in the article above. That way, when I assume something isn't going to work out, I'm rarely disappointed.
The Best Way to Deflect an Asteroid involves a technique called "mirror bees".
The best method, called "mirror bees," entails sending a group of small satellites equipped with mirrors 30 to 100 feet wide into space to "swarm" around an asteroid and trail it, Vasile explains. The mirrors would be tilted to reflect sunlight onto the asteroid, vaporizing one spot and releasing a stream of gases that would slowly move it off course. Vasile says this method is especially appealing because it could be scaled easily: 25 to 5,000 satellites could be used, depending on the size of the rock.
What an elegant and easily implemented solution. But Armageddon and Deep Impact would have been a whole lot less entertaining using Dr. Vasile's approach.
The Cat-Lady Conundrum. More than 60 million Americans are infected with Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that most people get from their cats. And it's not exactly harmless:
Jaroslav Flegr, an evolutionary biologist at Charles University in the Czech Republic, is looking into it. He has spent years studying Toxo's impact on human behavior. (He found, for example, that people infected with Toxo have slower reflexes and are 2.5 times as likely to get into car accidents.)
This may explain why I can't seem to get past "Easy" on Guitar Hero.
The Honeycomb Vase is actually made by bees. One unintended consequence of having a vase made out of beeswax is that flowers last longer in it:
Libertiny is convinced that flowers last longer in them, because beeswax contains propolis, an antibacterial agent that protects against biological decay. "We found out by accident," he explains. "We had a bouquet, which was too big for the beeswax vase, so we put half of the flowers in a glass vase. We noticed the difference after a week or so.
Prison Poker. This is a flat out brilliantly simple idea:
[Officer Tommy Ray] made his own deck of cards, each bearing information about a different local criminal case that had gone cold. He distributed the decks in the Polk County jail. His hunch was that prisoners would gossip about the cases during card games, and somehow clues or breaks would emerge and make their way to the authorities. The plan worked. Two months in, as a result of a tip from a card-playing informant, two men were charged with a 2004 murder in a case that had gone cold.
The Gomboc is the world's first Self-Righting Object.
It leans off to one side, rocks to and fro as if gathering strength and then, presto, tips itself back into a "standing" position as if by magic. It doesn't have a hidden counterweight inside that helps it perform this trick, like an inflatable punching-bag doll that uses ballast to bob upright after you whack it. No, the Gomboc is something new: the world's first self-righting object.
Update: The Gomboc is available for sale but it doesn't come cheap. The €80 version is basically a paperweight with a Gomboc shape carved out of it. It's €1000+ for a real Gomboc, which is ridiculous. (thx, nick)