As you stand in endless lines this holiday season, here's a comforting thought: all those security measures accomplish nothing, at enormous cost. That's the conclusion of Charles C. Mann, who put the T.S.A. to the test with the help of one of America's top security experts. Vanity Fair on the security theatre performed by the American TSA:

Terrorists will try to hit the United States again, Schneier says. One has to assume this. Terrorists can so easily switch from target to target and weapon to weapon that focusing on preventing any one type of attack is foolish. Even if the T.S.A. were somehow to make airports impregnable, this would simply divert terrorists to other, less heavily defended targets--shopping malls, movie theaters, churches, stadiums, museums. The terrorist's goal isn't to attack an airplane specifically; it's to sow terror generally. "You spend billions of dollars on the airports and force the terrorists to spend an extra $30 on gas to drive to a hotel or casino and attack it," Schneier says. "Congratulations!"

What the government should be doing is focusing on the terrorists when they are planning their plots. "That's how the British caught the liquid bombers," Schneier says. "They never got anywhere near the plane. That's what you want--not catching them at the last minute as they try to board the flight."

To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost. And directed against a threat that, by any objective standard, is quite modest.

Theatre or not, flying through the US sucks. From the Vanity Fair.

Visitors to a Stockholm hotel will be able to use mobile phones instead of keys to unlock the doors to their rooms. Unlike the trial in the US I mentioned in September, this requires NFC which few phone manufacturers other than Nokia have public plans to implement.

Assa Abloy AB, the world's largest maker of door locks, has launched a pilot in which Clarion Hotel Stockholm will lend customers mobile phones with close-range radio chips, much like devices used for contact-less payments at gas stations.

Repeat visitors during a four-month trial will be able to check in through their phones before arrival and have their phones activated as "keys." They will then be able to skip the registration desk and unlock the door by holding the phone next to it.

From AP News.

See also: NFC will be in all Nokia smartphones from 2011 and Phones Begin to Replace Hotel Keycards.

Psychologists and economists have looked in some detail at vacations -- what we want from them and what we actually get out of them. They have advice about what really matters, and it's not necessarily what we would expect:

• How long we take off probably counts for less than we think
• Taking more short trips leaves us happier than taking a few long ones
• We're often happier planning a trip than actually taking it
• Interrupting a vacation can make us enjoy it more
• How a trip ends matters more than how it begins
• And though it may feel unnecessary, it's important to force yourself to actually take the time off in the first place -- people, it turns out, are as prone to procrastinate when it comes to pleasurable things like vacations

[...] what matters far more is the intensity of sensation, whether it's excitement or pain or contentment. And it's not the overall average of the experience that people remember, but how they felt at the most intense moments, combined with how they felt right as the experience ended. Psychologists call this the "peak-end rule."

Read: How should you spend your time off? Believe it or not, science has some answers.

Researchers in the Netherlands found that people perceived transit to take 2.3 times as long as driving a car. Your trip is actually much shorter than you think it is.

A recent study by researchers in the Netherlands put a number on it: when asked about how they get around, people perceived transit to take 2.3 times as long as driving a car. Interestingly, that number fell when the people surveyed habitually took transit in addition to driving - they were more familiar with what was involved and planned accordingly.

The perception principle also holds true for time people spend waiting for transit as opposed to being on it: a continuous ride will be perceived as taking less time than one that involves transfers and waiting, even if the second trip is actually shorter. Federal transit planners estimate that penalty to be somewhere between two and three times the actual time - so, a wait time of 10 minutes is perceived as 20-30 minutes.

From Crosscurrents.

ReadWriteWeb and Luxist report on how two Holiday Inn hotels have begun using iPhone, Android and Blackberry smartphones as room keys (MobieKey is also compatible with other phones as well), giving guests, after they 'enrol', the option of skipping the front desk entirely.

With the new system, which will be in testing through December, hotel guests can reserve their accommodations online. A text message is sent to their phone on the day they reserved with a room number and a link to unlock the door. No more friendly banter with the front-desk clerk when you're late for a meeting, just get in and go - it sounds great.

The program began earlier this month at Holiday Inns in Chicago and Houston. According to USA Today, hotel patrons can sign up for the pilot program by making online reservations and enrolling through an email that receive prior to the check-in date. It is also careful to mention that smartphones "will always be an option for guests rather than a replacement for all keycards"

I'm not a skeptic but for me getting lost is part of the fun and the point of travel.

Welcome to the new, hyper-connected, technology-based travel paradigm. It's the era of the smartphone as ubiquitous tool of navigation, when what matters is not just the here but the now. Google Maps and Google Street View blanket more and more of the planet. Facebook and Twitter allow users to ''geotag'' their updates with specific geographic coordinates, while Foursquare turns ''checking in'' into a form of entertainment. Users of the photo-sharing site Flickr geotag more than four million photos per month. And augmented reality (AR) technology, which allows travelers to navigate their way to nearby attractions by aiming a smartphone in any direction, weaves together all those geodata points into a miniaturized virtual world.

Read: Horizon Wireless