The New York Times Magazine is out with its annual "Year in Ideas" -- 78 little nuggets on the innovations of 2005, written by a host of NYT contributors including stalwarts like William Grimes touting the disgusting-sounding gellan, "a gum derived from bacterially fermented carbohydrates," and A.O. Scott on the Hollywood-izing of documentaries (to some, no doubt as distateful as bacterially fermented carbohydrates).

As mentioned below, this feature really oughta be read in magazine form rather than clicking through 78 times online (depending on your taste some entries are better left skimmed). Standouts included the creepy, creepy "trust spray"; the just-as-creepy zombie dogs; the what's-that-word-again?-oh-right-creepy "false memory diet"; the most annoying alarm clock ever (aka "Death to Clocky"); the genetic theory of Harry Potter (which we wrote about back in September courtesy of Collision Detection); and why the crawl at the bottom of the screen is distracting, annoying and stupefying (Lewis Black knew that ages ago on CNN).*

Also, apparently Joshua Marshall is the only blogger asking his readers for tips. Why, what will they think of next?

The Year in Ideas [NYT Mag]

*Interesting little factoid: the Harry Potter and William Grimes items are on the same page...and in the "crawl makes you stupid" item the two experts cited are named Grimes and Potter. Blog synchronicity strikes again!