Vancouver Still Way Up There in Livability

The num­bers have been tal­lied once more for the cities through­out the world in terms of ‘liv­abil­ity’. Accord­ing to Busi­ness Week, “Mer­cer Consulting’s annual roundup of the global cities with the best qual­ity of life” says that the most 25 liv­able cities include:

1. Zurich, Switzer­land
2. Vienna, Aus­tria tied with Geneva, Switzerland
3. Van­cou­ver, Canada
4. Auck­land, New Zealand
5. Dus­sel­dorf, Germany
6. Munich, tied with Frank­furt, Germany
7. Bern, Switzer­land
8. Syd­ney, Australia
9. Copen­hagen, Denmark
10. Welling­ton, New Zealand
11. Ams­ter­dam, Netherlands
12. Brus­sels, Belgium
13. Toronto, Canada
14. Berlin, Ger­many
15. Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia tied with Luxembourg
16. Ottawa, Canada
17. Stock­holm, Sweden

Low­est rank­ing city of the 215 sur­veyed was Bagh­dad, Iraq. The high­est rank­ing US city was Hon­olulu, at num­ber 28. The arti­cle didn’t show any after 17 (or 20, again, depend­ing on how you count).

How and why are these rank­ings put together? Here’s what they said:

The rank­ings are based on a point scor­ing index, with Zurich scor­ing 108 and Bagh­dad scor­ing 13.5. Cities are com­pared to New York as the base city, with an index score of 100. The quality-of-living sur­vey cov­ers 215 cities and is con­ducted to help gov­ern­ments and major com­pa­nies place employ­ees on inter­na­tional assign­ments. The sur­vey also iden­ti­fies those cities with the high­est per­sonal safety rank­ing based on inter­nal sta­bil­ity, crime, effec­tive­ness of law enforce­ment, and rela­tion­ships with other countries.

I don’t know if this is sig­nif­i­cant in any way, but last year Van­cou­ver came in third, once again behind Zurich and Geneva, and was tied with Vienna. This year com­ing in 4^th (or third, depend­ing on whether you count the tie as one or 2) with the same 3 cities above us, and a score of 107.6 amounts to more or less the same standing.

I’ll be par­tic­u­larly inter­ested to see how this num­ber changes over the next few years, both before and after the 2010 Olympics.

The Undecided American Voter

I saw this car­toon by Bruce Beat­tie via Digg and had to repost it here. I can’t tell you the num­ber of times I’ve heard friends back in the States say ‘If the Repub­li­cans win this time, we’re join­ing you in Canada’.

Pam would be thrilled, but I’d be wor­ried about those left behind aboard the steadily sink­ing USS ‘Amer­ica the Doomed’.

Acrobats at the PNE

Thanks to a really cool gift from my par­ents, a Flip Ultra Video Cam­era, I’m thrilled that now I’ll be able to add not only pho­tos, but now videos of my own to my blog, and plan on doing that from time to time.

Here’s some­thing from the first day I got to use my new toy, at the PNE. We went with my par­ents and had a great time. Once again, the high­light of the day for me (and for the rest of our group, I think) were the Bei­jing Acro­bats. We saw them last year, and were thrilled to see them again. Here’s a short video I did of some of their rou­tines. The light­ing is not ideal, but most of the time I think you can get the gist of what they are doing. Not bad for a first try, I hope: