Posts from — December 2009

See also: my 2008 list.

Here’s my 2009 list, not in any particular order. Cities written in bold are ones I hadn’t been before (as far as I know).

• San Francisco, CA
• Mountain View, CA
• Oakland, CA
• Berkeley, CA
• New York, NY
• Stamford, CT
• Avon, CT
• Boston, MA
• Plymouth, MA
• Bethlehem, PA
• Jersey City, NJ
• Tahoe, CA
• Pittsburgh, PA
• Fresno, CA
• Santiago, Chile
• Viña del Mar, Chile
• Santiago, Chile
• Vaparaiso, Chile
• Punta de Choros, Chile
• La Serena, Chile
• Valle de Elqui, Chile
  
• Dallas, TX
• Barcelona, Spain
• Paris, France
• Madrid, Spain
• Toledo, Spain
• Cordoba, Spain
• Granada, Spain
• Badger, CA (King’s Canyon National Park)
• San Diego, CA

(Criteria is that I have to spend a night or a significant portion of a day in the city for it to count. Suburbs rounded up to the nearest city at my discretion)

This has been an amazing year of travel for me. I don’t forsee matching that in 2010, but who knows.

Some places I’d like to go next year, off the top of my head:

• Washington, DC
• Portland, OR
• Las Vegas, NV
• Italy
• UK
• Ireland
• Santa Monica, CA

All these are possibilities in addition to trips to Avon, Pittsburgh, Bethlehem, Boston, and maybe New York. I haven’t actually made any travel plans for 2010, though.

I realize it sounds ridiculous, but this review is one of the funnies, most interesting things I’ve watched in a while. If you’ve seen The Phantom Menace, you should watch this. Some parts are NSFW. Here’s the first segment:

Watch the whole thing

There are also reviews of several Star Trek movies on the guy’s youtube channel. They’re also good, but definitely not as good as the Star Wars one.

The nexus of local news and Jesus “sightings”:

At 4:16 in this video, a couple of quotes:

“Maybe it’s a sign that people who ride motorcycles should believe in God”

“We live in turbulent times now… you’re seeing more and more of this. Maybe it’s a sign that we’d better all start taking care of each other”

I realize that this isn’t a particularly rare conclusion to draw from one of these incidents, but for this sort of conjecture to be reported dispassionately in the news is a bit comical. If an omnipotent God wanted to send either of these messages, a blurry picture would be a horrible way to get this message across. Why not just write it in huge letters in the sky? Why not just have everyone hear a booming voice telling them to take better care of each other? (the voice would speak in each person’s native language, of course) Either of these options would be far more effective both in terms of the number of people affected and the degree to which it convinces them. They’re also really obvious.

(video via andrew sullivan)

The Saint Petersburg Times’ PolitiFact.com picked its Lie of the Year, and the distinction goes to retired government employee Sarah Palin, for “death panels”:

Her assertion — that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care — spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, “Death panels? Really?”

I can’t think of a more influential but demonstrably false statement from this year, can you?

I had missed this brief Planet Monday podcast about the economics of gift giving. It’s worth a listen if you’re at all interested in economics. Basically, gift giving is wasteful because the person buying the gift can’t do a good job of estimating the value of the gift on behalf of the recipient. The author of the paper being discussed eventually promotes charitable donations as a gift since there is no loss in economic efficiency and it doesn’t have the same stigma of giving cash. I couldn’t figure out what didn’t seem quite right about this solution until I discussed it with Abe yesterday. I think a major deficiency of donation giving is that one of the positive outcomes of altruism is the good feeling you get when you’re actively helping out. If someone donates on you behalf, they are really the person being altruistic, so the positive feeling is limited on your end.

I think I came up with a solution this morning, though: charity gift cards. It’s not for a donation at just one charity, but it gives you a bunch of options to choose from. That way, the gift giver is paying for the donation, but the recipient gets to perform the actual allocation, more directly involving them in the process. I wonder if this sort of thing already exists.

In case you haven’t heard it already, here’s “Always in the Season” by Pomplamoose. I like the instruments they added!

Alicia Keys performed “Empire State of Mind Pt. II Broken Down” on The Colbert Report, and Stephen added in a rap about moving to suburbia. I think the song is really good, but Colbert’s addition makes it that much better:

Stephen’s dancing at the end is pretty awesome, too. Alicia Keys’ voice should not be manipulated by computers, she sounds much better here than in recording with Jay-Z.

Actual blogging coming back soon.. seriously