Would a ban on fast food restaurants in our cities and towns help lower the rate of heart disease? Would a program to collect Dog DNA from poop left on our streets and sidewalks help us target negligent owners? Could we harness our own bio-mechanical energy to charge our cell phones, even our cars? Does ‘redshirting’ children, holding them back so that they can enter grade school at an older age, wreak havoc on social security programs? Would local stock markets for regions no larger than Barrie, or Muskoka, help citizens allocate capital more efficiently to businesses that need financing? Could we switch our dietary habits from cow to kangaroo to help save the planet?
If you think I’ve just stolen and plagiarized part of the manuscript for the yet unpublished Freakanomics 2.0, you’d be wrong. These are the hypotheses and real life programs that earn brilliant and bizarre minds recognition in The New York Times’ “Year in Ideas.” If these few examples tickle your fancy, try “spray on condoms” on for size (not literally- these bespoke coital solutions are not yet widely available). Human ingenuity never ceases to amaze, eh?
One thing that stood out for me while reading these stories was how many of these truly remarkable ideas came from Canadians – three from Toronto academics and scientists alone. For The New York Times, where Canada’s parliamentary crisis earlier this month barely registered a blip on their radar, that is a pretty impressive showing from the Great White North, and I believe it speaks to the creative incubator that Toronto has become. Read the article and take notice of where many of these ideas began. There is perhaps no better indication of a “creative city” than the brilliant ideas it fosters and develops, and some of my favorite creative cities – San Francisco, Montreal, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, and Boston, as well as my hometown, the T-Dot, get plenty of love.
December 19th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Alex more Canadians need to replicate your praises and pride for our countries great ability to innovate. We’re too humble. We need to show off McGill and it’s world class research labs, our Toronto Think Tanks, and Simon Fraser’s Biomechanic Labs. Too often the only attention our nation receives is when Sean Avery or Todd Bertuzzi do something stupid. We can influence global creativity as well as the next town. Great post.
December 19th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Great piece Alex, I’m going to have to go check out the actual article, sounds pretty interesting. Aww, D.C. is one of your favorite cities, yay! This makes me want to come see Canada for myself and meet some more wacky Canadians.
December 22nd, 2008 at 3:57 am
Surely those ideas have been thought of before by Kenyans, Indonesians, Brazilians – but we don’t know because they don’t get published and then written about on American websites… I mean, I discovered Lacan’s concept of the “real” when I was 11 until I found out that Lacan had already discovered it before me. How was I to know?