What did you get this year?

My birthday present from my Dad:

The Sacredness of Questioning Everything by David Dark.

I think it's apropos.

On the subject of gifts: Economists are very curious about gift-giving, and the question they like to ask is "Why don't we just give people money?" I read an interesting explanation of this in The Armchair Economist (by Steven Landsburg): He rejects one of the common explanations, which is that people give gifts to show that they're willing to spend time shopping, by pointing out that since time is money, it would make just as much sense to give them the monetary value of the gift you would have got and the time you would have spent getting it (or better yet, give them the money and use the time by taking them out to lunch.)

He suggests that the opposite is the case. People buy gifts to show that they don't need to spend time shopping. What? It's simple, he says: the better you know someone, the less time you'll need to spend shopping for them. You won't have to spend hours thinking "Will he like this? Would it look better in blue? What's his size?" You'll know. So buying someone a gift is a way of showing someone that you know them so well that it's really not difficult at all to be their friend. I rather like this explanation (Even if I'm not so sure that time=money is a universally true statement.)