I’ve managed to write 86 posts so far since June 18th, the first of the Stanifesto. Some expert use of arithmetic will quickly reveal that the 18th is 14 days away and 86 is 14 shy of 100. You guessed it, I’m going to try and hit 100 before I hit 1. And that means blogging every day for the next two weeks.

Given that each Stanifesto post quite honestly takes a solid three hours including research, writing, editing, and making the thumbnails, that means that I’m promising 42 hours—almost two whole days—of work to you just to make the Stanifesto birthday party a memorable one.

How can you help? I’m glad you asked. First, the Stanifesto currently has only 83 comments. That’s less than one per post. Let’s see if we can break 100 on comments as well. Anytime you see a post without a comment in the next two weeks, jump in and share your two cents. Even if it’s to disagree with me or to suggest a more interesting topic (who knows, I might take your suggestion).

Blogging over the last year has changed me, but not in the way I had feared. I was worried about becoming one of those guys who never quite experiences life because he’s too busy thinking about how to capture it for others. I’ve mostly resisted that and instead used this blog as an opportunity to go deeper into experiences that I’ve had, to think about them more critically and challenge my initial reactions, and to explain them when possible to people who might not communicate with me regularly.

Though I started with the theme “Communication & Culture”, I quickly realized that this was really too broad to be useful, as it didn’t really limit me in any way, shape, or form. I mean, what doesn’t fall into one of those two categories? A quick look at my tag cloud suggests that the themes that keep coming up here are: activism, design, internet, language, and politics. I’m comfortable with that dynamic and, honestly, more accurate description of the Stanifesto.

This is post 87. 13 to go.

My friend Jonathan was turning thirty and throwing a big party. That was the reason I was going originally. When word got out I was to be in New York for Earth Day weekend, my place of work arranged for me to run our booth at Earth Day New York.

I left my apartment in the Lower Haight at 9:45am on Friday. I finally reached my hotel at midnight that night. The first day was not a statistical outlier, as (according to my rough estimate) almost half of the time on my “vacation” was spent in transit. Mass transit, mostly. For instance, to get from my first hotel to my second, I took a shuttle then a monorail then a train then a subway. Not a day went by where I didn’t spend at least three hours trying to get somewhere else.

My New York navigational muscle is largely vestigial so I had to take the word of any map, schedule, or signpost that happened to point me in a direction. Besides being overwhelmed by the fact that everything is in Helvetica (one of my favorite typefaces before this trip), the scale is also troubling. I was waiting for a train for quite some time before I realized that both tracks on the platform were going the same direction—there was an entirely different platform for uptown traffic.

The ultimate insult visited upon me occurred Sunday morning, after I had managed to find a cab to meet a friend for brunch. Just as I hailed one, a couple behind me hailed one and we both gave the same address. It seems that they were off to brunch at the same restaurant (named for one of the three Wise Men, everyone kept saying). It being Earth Day and my already feeling guilty for taking a cab instead of… uh… I dunno, recumbent tricycle… I offered to pay for their fare.

As nice as this may sound, New York has a way of hardening us woo-woo West Coast people. I will never split a cab with someone else again. They were pleasant enough, chatting about how they heard this place had a great brunch and did I know it was named after one of the three Wise Men (why does no one mention the MAGI SuperComputer?) and how they had a big birthday bash the night before as well. Then, as we all stumbled out onto the curb and said our goodbyes and nice-to-meet-yous, the cab drove off.

With my luggage.

And when I say “my luggage” I really mean “my luggage and its contents, which included quite a few work-related items not the least of which were the names, contact, and billing information for over 100 new members as well as several hundred dollars in cash donations”. A pretty big oops. In my defense, it’s not like I was the first person to ever leave something important in a cab. In fact, New York is so big that there’s more than one police precinct dedicated to “Lost & Found”. Yes, really. After a few calls with people who sounded exactly how New York police officers are supposed to sound, I managed to track down my stuff.

Seriously, New York. We get it. You’re hardcore. Next week, I’m going to drive to Mexico.

New Year’s Eve itself I spent mostly on a train. I finally got back to my house a little stinky from three days aboard the California Zephyr, so I hit the shower. At the stroke of midnight, I shared a Times Square moment with my cat and roommate, donning festive hats and whirling noisemakers for approximately 8 seconds before returning to what we were doing.

As the buzz of the New Year is coming to an end, the real work must begin in earnest. As I mentioned before, I normally actually do whatever it is that I resolve to do on New Year’s. In the past I have decided to go vegetarian, leave Indiana, and throw a rave. Done, done, and done.

My 2000 resolution, coming true.

Beginning with the standard resolutions, I resolve to better manage my time and money. I further resolve to do it using cool programs only available for the Mac so that 1) it doesn’t feel like work and 2) my PC friends are not only jealous of how well I manage my time and money but would be forced to buy a Mac in order to keep up. I am a Jones, afterall; keeping up with me is the Usonian way of life.

GTD is powerful enough, but MidnightBeep’s Inbox is taking my practice to that next level. It’s less lightweight than kGTD, which I had been using previously, but so far I’ve found the added rigamarole forces me to think my projects through a little more.

On the money front, I’m using IGG’s iBank. It has everything I was looking for (most notably a pie chart telling me how much I spend on Soy Mochas), but also gives me projections on how much I’ll be worth 5 years from now. It’s possible that I haven’t configured it properly yet, but otherwise I’ll be sitting on $65k. Ladies, that qualifies me as a “strong buy”. Plus, all of this money will be in the friendly and capable hands of San Francisco’s brand new New Resource Bank, so my money can be the root of rooftop solar home equity projects instead of, you know, evil.

My final New Year’s Resolution declared me instead of me declaring it (which sounds like one of those “In Soviet Russia…” jokes). I was hitting the snooze bar on my alarm clock—which I’ve done consistently since my mom stopped waking me up—and I noticed that my alarm clock didn’t have a snooze bar. It quite clearly has a “drowse” bar.

Sometimes we hit the ones we love.

This gave me great pause, as I’ve had this same alarm clock since high school. How could I have never, in 10 years not noticed that I had a drowse bar? Something must be done about this oversight. Thus, my final resolution is this, “to try to observe the world with new eyes each day, taking as little as possible for granted.”

So far, I’ve noticed some very interesting things. First, almost all of my pants are 2 inches too short. So it’s off to thrift stores with them. Second, dentists are a very strange cultural phenomenon. Why do we pay people to shove sharp metal objects in our mouth? Finally, Apple has some sort of cellphone now. How long have they had that?

I urge everyone to take a look at your world today and try to find something that surprises you. Post your findings below.

My mother thinks I’m being silly, so this blog post is partly for her, but partly for anyone else who would wonder why I would choose to take a 52 hour train ride inside of a 5 hour plane ride. The reasons are largely, though not entirely, environmental. There are two big considerations in taking a train over flying—consumption and emissions; essentially, “what goes in” and “what comes out”.

For consumption, it can be difficult to compare the wide variety of modes of transportation. This one uses gasoline, that one uses electricity, this carries just one person, that one carries 70. We need to level the playing field a little bit. One way to do that is to talk about BTU/passenger-mile. A BTU is a simple unit of energy. Fuels such as gasoline or coal contain energy; a gallon of gasoline contains about 115,000 BTU, a pound of coal contains about 12,000 BTU, etc. Of course, converting fuel into turning wheels or spinning jets is not 100% efficient and a lot of these BTU are wasted (the internal combustion engine in your car only gets about 30%). That’s why we need BTU per passenger-miles, as in “How many BTU does it take to take one person the distance of one mile in this vehicle?” With that explanation, let’s see some data.

Data courtesy of the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, except the long walk which I calculated burning 100 Calories per mile walked (I’d be somewhat encumbered with Xmas presents).

By taking a train over flying, I save 5,359,200 BTU, or almost 50 gallons of gasoline. That’s just one person. A single train car on the California Zephyr would save close to 2,000 gallons!

Let’s talk about emissions. Carbon = bad. People have tried to get around this fact lots of different ways, including denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. So what now?

Data courtesy of WRI and TravelMatters. Walking still wins.

There are other reasons, for sure. The seats are bigger, they don’t harass you at the security checkpoints (I always have to restrain myself from saying, “how many terrorists did you catch today?” at airports), and the view is tremendous. On the line I’m riding, they specifically time the train schedule so that the most breathtaking views occur during daylight hours. At the end of the day, we just can’t continue to fly as much as we do on this planet—something’s got to give and I don’t want that to mean not seeing my family gathered around the tree.

Oh yeah, and Amtrak has developed a hybrid locomotive. Eat that JetBlue!

It reminds me of how Bush has lived up to his promise of being “a United and not a Divider” by doing more for global democracy than any previous president, namely uniting the world against him. In fact, despite hiding behind the flag (or in front of it, in the case of photo ops), Bush’s seeming contempt for America has ignited in me a patriotism that I thought long extinguished.

Here are just a few things that I love about this country that Bush seems to hate:

1. Three different branches of government that provide checks and balances that hold one another accountable. An incredibly good idea for so many reasons, yet he’s constantly undermining the authority of other branches—or at least whining and calling them names when they dare do their job.
2. Democracy. Yes, as in “the will of the people”. As in “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” With a job approval rating of around 30%, the consent of the governed probably has little impact on any decisions in this White House. In fact, I’d bet they think “the governed” have no idea what’s best for this country—and many would agree with them in that belief. It is, however, un-American.
3. Our country is a safe place that treats people with dignity and fairness. The statue of justice is blind, remember? That’s a symbol that the law treats you equally whomever you may be, not a symbol that the law looks the other way while you’re wrongfully abducted and sent to a secret prison or are stuck in Guantanemo Bay for months without ever being charged for a crime.

There needs to be a word for the emotion of simultaneous hilarity and horror, a sort of personal schadenfreude, that could capture the terrific irony of the NeoConservatives being thought of as the party of American Values (much less the Party of Jesus). America is merely a delivery vehicle for power to them.

I recently had a conversation about all of this with my (more conservative than I) step-brother, who is currently teaching English in South Korea. He lives only 50 miles away from North Korea. Still, our last chat went something like this:

“Hey Stan, what’s up in the States. I never hear about anything other than new movies coming out,” he asks.

“I’m kinda bummed about this torture debate.” I say.

“Ha ha…” he laughs.

“No really,” I say.

“What do you mean? Who could possibly be for torture?” he asks.

It was a stunning example of how far we’ve slid in the four years he’s spent overseas. I’m going to have a chance to see him this Thanksgiving, when a bunch of American’s in Asia will be descending on his house (or tiny, tiny apartment rather) for the holidays. We have plenty to be thankful for, like the America we grew up in—and may have again one day.

My particular project was inspired by James Surowiecki’s amazing work on the wisdom of crowds. It seems that, given the right circumstances, crowds can be remarkably intelligent—quite contrary to popular opinion that, while a person is smart “people” are stupid. I’ve seen other people replicate the “jellybean jar” phenomenon and thought I would give it a try at my office.

Out comes a really big jar and lots of malted milkballs. One hundred seventy-six (176) of them in fact, though I was tempted throughout the process to, uhm, abbreviate the total. The general idea is that, despite the wide range of guesses from the staff on how many milkballs are in the jar, the average of our guesses should be very, very close. Hopefully (since that’s the point of the project) closer than any one guess.

Next I go office to office, stopping people in hallways as need be, and give them the pitch: “Fill out the piece of paper with your name and your guess, using any method you wish for guessing—other than removing the top and counting them one-by-one, however it is of the utmost importance that you discuss neither your guess nor your strategy with any other staff member.” Yes, it was a run-on sentence, but by the end of the morning, I had it down pretty well.

It turns out we had guesses as low as 86 and as high as 275. That’s quite a range. Still, when I averaged all the guesses together, I got 178—only two away from the correct number! That beats both the closest guess (at 168) and the “panel of experts”, meaning the average of the five closest guesses, (at 164). Yes, including the outlier “noise” actually made the guess more accurate.

When people are asked to make a decision, they do so with a certain amount of bias. If they discuss their decision with others, this bias spreads to others. However, in a diverse crowd operating as individuals, these biases cancel one another out, making the group more intelligent. I;’m sure that a memetic analysis would involve memes and anti-memes colliding and exploding.

The staff was overall very appreciative of the experiment/celebration and immediately saw its implications with how we both interact in group decision-making and how we receive feedback from our activist network. They were also quite happy that the lesson ended with the average being closer than any one guess, because that meant we got to split the malted milkballs.

Yesterday was the 4^th of July and time was running out. I had already attended an exhaustingly spectacular party (very cleverly scheduled for the night before, so everyone might sleep in) and thought that, somehow, I would probably end up at a barbecue or beneath a sky of fireworks. That never quite happened—it may have required some amount of effort greater than zero.

Night fell and I was alone. Random firecrackers broke the silence, like the plaintive oboe tuning an orchestra. Soon bottle-rockets joined. When I heard the first explosions, I went up the back stairs as high as possible. The big guys were being fired off all over, some beyond distant hills revealing only a colorful halo and a low rumble many seconds later, others were close enough to set off car alarms on my street but fiendishly obscured by Victorian architecture. Small arms fire (emitting showers of sparks and report) broke out in neighborhood backyards.

In short, I was in the middle of a war zone. I let myself sink into the moment. Such chaos! Had the Brits captured the port? Could we still outflank them on the north field? Would our powder supply hold? Doth our star-spangled banner yet wave?

Suddenly, I remembered that July 4^th, 1776 was actually just the writing of the Declaration of Independence, not our actual achieving of it (marked by the Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3^rd, 1783). Given that historical tidbit, the best way to celebrate our Independence day while remaining “true to the spirit” of the holiday, would be an irreverent blog post.