DIG IN
The Sunday magazine cover of the New York Times offers up some really filling reading for this 
morning, wherever you are.
Titled "The Sixth Annual Year in Ideas", the piece,
"...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."
Reading through all 74 items, it is really striking how many of these items I was NOT AT ALL familiar with, whether it occurred this or any other year. And I'm a person who tries to go out of his way to find the new and different at every opportunity.
Some of course, I had encountered earlier in the year, and even posted on a few, like "Web-based micro-financing", as an example. Or "Boomerang Drone", which is a new twist on a subject I've posted on a few times.
As a result, for me anyway, the list is a delightful smorgasbord that will demand your total concentration at every entry, but reward you generally with a delectable idea morsel that most likely you hadn't tasted before.
For example, this entry on the "Ambient Walkman" is a case in point:
"The popularity of the iPod has given new urgency to an old criticism of the portable music player: namely, that it isolates the listener by tuning out the world around him. As one response to this problem, Noah Vawter, a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, has created a pair of headphones that tunes the listener back in.
The device, which Vawter calls 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. For instance, percussive sounds like footsteps and coughs are sequenced into a stuttering pattern, and all the noises are tuned so that they fuse into a coherent, slowly changing set of harmonies."
Cool, huh?
The links are listed below for your reading convenience. Enjoy your weekend.
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