One of my favorite year-end lists comes from The New York Times Magazine, which for six years has been putting together a list of the most important and influential ideas of the year every December. Even if you read an impressive number of blogs, subscribe to FORTUNE magazine and occasionally pick up the random issue of Scientific American or Popular Science, there’s a good chance that you would have missed about half of the 70-75 ideas the Times comes up with each year. Anyway, here’s the intro to the 6th annual Year in Ideas from New York Times Magazine:

“This month, as in the past five Decembers, the magazine 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.”

Among the ideas worth checking out: empty-stomach intelligence, digital Maoism, psychological neoteny, the truth of workplace rumors, the LifeStraw, smart elevators, and my personal favorite: walk-in health care.