The New York Times Magazine is filled with ideas from 2008. One is a device for doing carbon penance:
Annina Rüst, a Swiss-born artist-inventor, wanted to help relieve these anxieties by giving people a tangible reminder of their own energy use, as well as an outlet for the feelings of complicity, shame and powerlessness that surround the question of global warming.
So she built a translucent leg band that keeps track of your electricity consumption. When it detects, via a special power monitor, that electric current levels have exceeded a certain threshold, the wireless device slowly drives six stainless-steel thorns into the flesh of your leg. “It’s therapy for environmental guilt,” says Rüst, who modeled her “personal techno-garter” on the spiked bands worn as a means of self-mortification by a monk in Dan Brown’s novel “The Da Vinci Code.” (Brown derived the idea from the bands worn by some celibate members of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei.)
To peruse all the ideas, start here. The ideas are in ABC order with A to L across the top and M to Z across the bottom. To reach the self-mortification item hover on C and click “Carbon Penance”.
There are many other ideas. One that caught me was “Less Privacy Means Less Discrimination.” Another, under “W”, is about the glass cliff — the idea that “women [are] set up to fail — by being appointed to positions of power only in hopeless situations.” By the way, if you count from the start of this recession — i.e., the start of 2008 — it’s men who have been more likely to lose their jobs. But if you count from September the result is reversed. Let’s agree that it isn’t a male recession or a female recession — it’s a recession.