[Introduction]

For the seventh consecutive December, the magazine looks back on the
passing year through a special lens: ideas. Editors and writers trawl
the oceans of ingenuity, hoping to snag in our nets the many curious,
inspired, perplexing and sometimes outright illegal innovations of
the past 12 months. Then we lay them out on the dock, flipping and
flopping and gasping for air, and toss back all but those that are
fresh enough for our particular cut of intellectual sushi. For better
or worse, these are 70 of the ideas that helped make 2007 what it was. Enjoy.

MARIJUANA MANSIONS

Marijuana growers have long faced a dilemma. If they grow pot
outdoors, weather conditions are unpredictable, and plants can be
spotted from the air or accidentally discovered. Yet if they set up
an indoor operation in a sleepy town, their suspicious activity tends
to draw attention. The new and counterintuitive solution of some
growers in California is to move into a busy, upscale suburban
neighborhood and establish a "marijuana mansion," as the street-life
magazine Don Diva recently termed it.

A home that costs a half-million dollars or more is essentially
converted into a weed factory: rooms are packed with hydroponically
grown plants; fans and air ducts are installed for moisture control
and to remove the skunky odor; the electricity box is rewired to
steal electricity from power lines. With precision light and
temperature control, the growers, who don't live in the houses but
check in a few times a week, can harvest more (and more potent) pot.

According to Lt. Greg Garland of the sheriff's department in San
Bernardino County, where more than 50 pot houses have been raided
this year, the growers favor newer communities in outlying suburbs
because they get more space for the money, and residents pay scant
attention to their neighbors. "In these communities, both the husband
and wife work; they're busy coming and going," Garland says. "One man
we spoke to lived next to a grower for a year and wasn't even sure
what color the guy's car was."

Curiously, the subprime mortgage fiasco helped make the phenomenon
possible: many pot houses were purchased by first-time homeowners
using interest-only loans, and with speculators buying houses to flip
them, it wasn't uncommon for a home to sit empty for months.
Authorities have started to alert the public to the signs of a pot
house, a telltale one being a dry lawn. But, ever adaptive, the
growers are hiring gardeners -- just like their suburban neighbors.