Here are links I found interesting on December 27, 2012:
- We’re Puny, Insignificant, and Doomed – and That’s the Good News – "For all we know, we may be the only living beings in the universe, or at least the only ones with consciousness. How remarkable that on this remote planet, we’ve got the ability to ask questions, to write blog posts, to seek cures for cancer. If all we have is one another, our brief life spans, and the things we’re able to discover and create, then we’ve got the power and responsibility to make our lives meaningful."
- Why must the nation grieve with God? – "We are told the Lord works in mysterious ways but, for many people, to suggest there might be an intelligent deity who could rationally act in such a fashion and that that deity is worth praying to and thanking for 'calling them home' seems beyond the pale." Why can't more people see this? Who are they worshiping and why?
- The Linkblog Cancer – "There’s a cancer spreading through the indie tech blogger community: the blockquote + link post." I absolutely detest blogs that rely on this method of generating "content." What they're doing is taking advantage of the hard work of other content creators to generate hits to their own blogs. Shame on them!
- This Is How Facebook Tried to Make Money Off You – "For better or worse, this will go down as the year that Facebook really put a dollar sign in front of its users."
- What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web? – "Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the 'hive mind,' as the web world’s been called, before it engulfs us all, destroys political discourse, economic stability, the dignity of personhood and leads to 'social catastrophe.'"
- Enough! – "Between the humiliating and chaotic collapse of Speaker Boehner's already ludicrously extreme Plan B and Wayne La Pierre's deranged proposal to put government agents in schools with guns, the Republican slide into total epistemic closure and political marginalization has now become a free-fall. This party, not to mince words, is unfit for government." Yeah, and?
- The Room for iPad – "A physical puzzler, wrapped in a mystery game, inside a beautifully tactile 3D world." Also, a welcome break from the word games I've been playing on my iPad.
Afterwards, I used the 
And that’s where things got weird. It showed me the location on the map, but no matter how far I zoomed out, I could not see the dot representing our current location. And then I realized that the body of water on the map was a lot bigger than the lake we’d driven by.
I tapped the arrow beside the location on the map. And that’s when I discovered that the map was showing us a location in New Zealand.