"I think exploration and adventure are essential to the happiness of every person, but I can't presume to present this as anything but my own opinion. Most people are pre-naturally more happy than I am, out the gate."

Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world. To offer a nonalphabetical option for navigating the entries, this year we have attached tags to each item indicating subject matter. We hope you enjoy.

ITunes sucks. There, we said it. Apple’s once very handy jukebox and music library manager has morphed into an unusable piece of crap that’s not even an app anymore, it’s just a kiosk for the iTunes Store.

For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn’t rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner. How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition—including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead—evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence.

While attitudes toward privacy can appear paradoxical, the seeming contradiction is really about something else: control. When people bare their bodies on Facebook or their souls in the digital confessional of Google’s search engine, they feel as if they are in charge. Not so, when the private embarrassments come to light unexpectedly. The subtle relationship between privacy and control has complicated things for marketers, too. Advertisers talk about having to move away from analog-era “push” tactics and embracing digital-age “pull” strategies, in which consumers are enticed into seeking information about a product or brand, rather than having ads foisted on them.

Researchers are increasingly using cell phones to better understand users' behavior and social interactions. The data collected from a phone's GPS chip or accelerometer, for example, can reveal trends that are relevant to modeling the spread of disease, determining personal health-care needs, improving time management, and even updating social-networks. The approach, known as reality mining, has also been suggested as a way to improve targeted advertising or make cell phones smarter: a device that knows its owner is in a meeting could automatically switch its ringer off, for example.

New electricity meters being rolled out to millions of homes and businesses are riddled with security bugs that could bring down the power grid, according to a security researcher who plans to demonstrate several attacks at a security conference next month.

Add this to your list of climate nightmare scenarios: In 2040, facing rising seas, the Qatari government starts polluting the stratosphere in order to cool the planet, precipitating an international crisis and possibly upsetting monsoon patterns.

Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?

One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any.

FDR was our radio president, JFK was our television president and Barack Obama will be our Internet President.

Wired wrote yesterday about a cell-phone modification that could bring on-the-spot disease detection and monitoring to even the most remote corners of the world. The phone has its lens removed and modified with an LED light source that reveals particular properties of the blood when lit. The camera sensor can then image the blood, creating a diagnostic lab all in a cell phone.

Better Place is working to build an electric car network, using technology available today. Our goals? Sustainable transportation,globa energy independence and freedom from oil.

Some of the (..) ideas are already familiar from the film Minority Report, whose characters performed forensic analysis using massive, gesturally driven displays. The similarity is no coincidence: one of Oblong's founders served as science advisor to Minority Report and based the design of those scenes directly on his earlier work at MIT.

Anand Agarawala presents BumpTop, a user interface that takes the usual desktop metaphor to a glorious, 3-D extreme, transforming file navigation into a freewheeling playground of crumpled documents and clipping-covered "walls."

The new rules for the new economy can be summarized as: Where ever attention flows, money will follow. Almost anything else except attention can be manufactured as a commodity. Luxury goods are only luxuries temporarily. They quickly are counterfeited and commodified. Premium brands are only premium because they garner a surplus of attention. Maintain an incoming flow of attention and money will follow. That is really all you need to know.

Did I get enough exercise today? How many calories did I burn? Am I getting good quality sleep? How many steps and miles did I walk today? The Fitbit Tracker helps you answer these questions.

You've got a computer that backs up vital documents, launches applications at the tap of a key, and effortlessly pulls down the information you need from the web—and yet you spend precious weekend time doing menial tasks like watering the lawn and getting rice ready for dinner. You can apply the same geeky spirit to your home as you do your computer desktop, and we've got a host of projects that take a short time to tackle and free you up for the fun stuff.

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

It's more than that: His team of engineers and scientists have created the first digital movie camera that matches the detail and richness of analog film. The Red One records motion in a whopping 4,096 lines of horizontal resolution—"4K" in filmmaker lingo—and 2,304 of vertical. For comparison, hi-def digital movies like Sin City and the Star Wars prequels top out at 1,920 by 1,080, just like your HDTV.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--ri

Photography was probably an inevitable invention - the surprise was that it took so long for it to develop, especially given that the scientific principles that are responsible for it - physical principles such as our understanding of lens and optics and

Head's argument is much like that of David Noble in Forces of Production: we had a choice about how to use new technology. We could use it to turn employees into ever-more-skilled craftspeople, allowing them to be more effective and creative in their jobs

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it.

“The intended effects of new technology are nothing compared to the unintended effects… the Internet is an accident. When you put a US Defense Department think tank together with a bunch of acid heads in California, you get this big thing. Nobody plan

Welcome to HDTVorg, an independent guide for all things high definition. Get the latest news and reviews for lcd, plasma, HDDVD products and more.

The message of Mark Hurst’s new book, Bit Literacy: In an age of infinite bits, time and attention are the scarce resources. The solution is to constantly manage your bits with the goal of reaching an “empty” state.

"Autofocus is a function that automatically focuses the camera lens on a subject when the shutter release button is at the half-pressed position."

AllThingsD.com is a Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet and media. It is a fusion of different media styles, different topics, different formats and different sources.

"Ik voel me connector tussen de bovenstroom en de onderstroom, waarbij ik probeer de bovenstroom (daar verkeren de meeste van ons de meeste tijd en daar vind je de vanzelfsprekendheid, het alledaagse, de systemen, de verkokering, de verzuiling, de verbrok

"My friend John was trying to think of a way to explain the problem with digital rights management to his dad and friend of ours who don't see what's wrong with it. He compiled a list of examples of DRM-related problems to help people understand what the

Gapminder turns boring statistics into something new and interesting, using visualizations and animateions. The Gapminder Goal: enable you to make sense of the world by having fun with statistics.

Since about ten years Theo Jansen is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventualy he wants to pu