As a kid I was a junkie for catalogs of high-tech whatsits like DAK and Hammacher-Schlemmer. ("A pen with a miniature clock on it! Wow! That would be so cool!") That was until I realized that they were pandering to my lust for jaw-dropping gimmickry but not to any of my other lusts or loves, and that I was developing what Jonathon Franzen would later call, quoting his father, "the taste for expensive things without the discipline to earn them."

So when I discovered A Guide to the Most Efficient Things in the World, I was overjoyed. Here are jaw-dropping contraptions and techniques that exist not merely to extract your hard-won cash in exchange for a few seconds of cheap wonder ("Wow! A chair that's also a stereo! OMG"); instead these gadgets offer the knowledge that you're destroying less stuff than you otherwise would: "Wow! Water that falls from the sky and becomes drinkable!"

(Thanks Jimfl!)