“emotions”
55 posts under this tag.
The above is a map of world happiness—the redder, the happier—Adrian White, Analytic Social Psychologist, University of Leicester, made in a meta-study that aggregated the results of over a 100 independent studies and surveys on subjective wellbeing from around the world. The study itself isn’t yet available, but there’s an intereresting (though hideous) press release were you can quote your country’s rank (the US is #23, Denmark #1, Switzerland #2, Austria #3 (cheers to Alexis!), and Mexico #51).
As I said, the source itself isn’t yet available, but Eurekalert—a science news service of sorts—provides some quotes on White’s meta-study.
My favorite one—because it confirms my individualistic prejudices of course:
We were surprised to see countries in Asia scoring so low, with China 82nd, Japan 90th and India 125th. These are countries that are thought as having a strong sense of collective identity which other researchers have associated with well-being.
It was also interesting to find out that health was the most closely correlated variable to happiness (I would have expected wealth to have that place):
Further analysis showed that a nation’s level of happiness was most closely associated with health levels (correlation of .62), followed by wealth (.52), and then provision of education (.51).
But there are several quotes that hint at the study’s agenda—and it sends a chill through my spine:
There is increasing political interest in using measures of happiness as a national indicator in conjunction with measures of wealth. A recent BBC survey found that 81% of the population think the Government should focus on making us happier rather than wealthier.
If government has proved itself so egregiously lousy and so disturbingly meddling when it started working under the banner of improving our welfare through last century, I can only shudder when imagining what a brand new world awaits us when it pursues “our” happiness.
Eran las ocho y media de la mañana, yo subÃa la escalera del metro, mal dormido y encantado de la vida, porque nada es más hermoso que ser joven, subir unas escaleras temprano y aparecer en la plaza de Saint-Michel.
Fernando Savater, Mira por donde, p257
It was eight thirty in the morning, I was climbing the metro stairs, poorly slept and delighted with life, because nothing is more beautiful than to be young, climb some stairs early in the morning, and appear in Saint-Michel’s plaza.
It’s early morning and it rains droplets and brisk light outside—I’m happy.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge its silliness but who cares, I’m just wowed. I finally downloaded the entire 50GB 6-seasons 127-episode Gilmore GirlsWP series. Frankly, when I begun this I was not (yet) a gilmore-zealot, my point in downloading it was rather to test the limits of my current technology—and, of course, to smugly marvel at how much these limits have receded. I remember when 5mb made for a humongous download. It was something akin to those news one often hears about some university or other breaking some telecommunication’s limit or other (Gazillion Number of Terabytes Per Second Achieved at Gung Ho University). I was merely exploring the digital frontier of the amateurishly possible.
But that was then. I only just watched the first season (~20 hours) with my sisters and loved it. I’m a fan. The “intricate, extremely fast-paced dialogue, with numerous modern pop culture references, along with many other references to politics and high culture.”WP was the initial hook for me but the more I immersed myself into the series the more I was surprised. The show is really girly, really, really different to me, to my everyday experience, to what I’ve lived. And yet I really like it. I think I would be one happy girl (or daughter or mom)—and it’s starting to rub off on me. I’m starting to talk fast and witty (that was a joke), empathy has gone thru the roof, I understand so much more why my mother acts like she does sometimes, Rory has rekindled my geek, bookworm, naive-I-want-to-learn-everything pride, and last night I caught myself speaking like Lorelai. It’s a shame isn’t it? Life’s so short and we’re so fixed in our roles.
And this train of thought has led me to ponder just to what extent we (as in we) are social constructions. It’s a cliche that Shakespeare invented the modern introspecting human and I recently read some lines
Salvo los más instintivos, todos nuestros goces son aprendidos, es decir: imitados. Copiamos nuestros placeres, añadiéndoles apenas un toquecito personal (lo que suele llamarse «perversiones», el único estrechÃsimo y culpabilizador margen de originalidad de que somos capaces). La Rochefoucauld aseguró demoledoramente que nadie se enamorarÃa si no hubiese oÃdo hablar del amor. Aún menos nadie escribirÃa, pintarÃa o compondrÃa música si careciese de los indispensables modelos jubilosos.
Fernando Savater, Mira por Donde
that, bizarre though they felt at the moment, are looking truer with every minute. I wonder, to the chagrin of some feminists I know, up to what extent is gender a social construction?
You can laugh (and I do), but I feel much more feminine and talkative since I watched GGs, and years of Friends have deeply influenced who I am and how I want to live, and I just read about this guy who thinks that Seinfield has simply made him a funnier person. Maybe, and this is a big maybe, one part of the holding power of TV in particular, and fiction in general, is that it allows us some degree of flexibility in choosing what constructions we want our selves to be molded with. Granted, usually we simply reinforce our worn ways, but at times, like this one, there are nice surprises.
SÃ, la histeria colectiva está súper presente en el tema de la muerte. La lágrima colectiva, como ya comienzo a decir. De verdad, la gente llora más porque está junta llorando. Es como un efecto dominó muy loco. SÃ, hay que decir por básica decencia, que todo mundo tiene el derecho de vivir su luto como quiera. SÃ, no hay nada de nuevo en eso.. SÃ, está rico sentir compasión por uno mismo y llorar sabroso con más gente que te da pie a eso. No sé cuánto tiempo esté chida y positiva esa actitud. Llorar sà es positivo, no estoy en contra de ello. De hecho, me gusta llorar. Sólo no estoy de acuerdo en la onda colectiva que parece barril sin fondo. Claramente te pegan la vibra..
La gente va al funeral a llorar y ver llorar. Creo que por eso la gente que no va a llorar, que sólo va a acompañar le han hecho tan difÃcil esto de dar el pésame. No están en la superficie sicológica para meterse en el llanto colectivo y sienten que traicionan si rÃen o simplemente están ahà acompañándote. No, no, no.
- 382: emotional dettachment
- 481: “awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future” (personal favorite)
- 888: “the desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it”
- 3: the desire to want to dial the the Penfield mood organ (interestingly, this emotion has a very low number, suggesting it’s a basic, heavily-relied-upon one)
- 594: “pleased acknowledgment of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters”
- unknown 1: “a creative and fresh attitude toward his job”
- unknown 2: “ecstatic sexual bliss”
- unknown 3: “despair”
- unknown 4: “businesslike professional attitude”
- unknown 5: “self-accusatory depression”
The Penfield mood organ is a wonderfully original invention but what’s even most admirable is the masterful introduction to it Philip Dick pulls off: those 1,300 words are dense and microcapsuled enough to be able to stand alone as a great short story.
What does “boygirlparty” mean?
A boygirlparty is the first party you go to as an adolescent that has all sorts of kids at it (girls and boys) that you’re not used to playing with, It’s exciting and strange. Maybe you play spin-the-bottle. The term, to me, is loaded with all different kinds of child-like wonderment and energy.
Also, boygirlparty is one word. It just is.
And where does the newborn go from here?
The net is vast and infinite.
Ghost in the Shell
2,151 persons visited Imagery 2 days ago, 6,790 visited yesterday, 3,655 have visited it today (as of this very moment). It made it to the del.icio.us homepage. It made it to LifeHacker. Blogs in 22 languages have talked about it.
It’s been overwhelming. I’m compulsively refreshing my stat counter every 20 seconds. I feel so tiny, so standalone everytime it hits me that as I go to the bathroom 30 more people, somewhere in the world, have tried the website. But that the world is a weird, humongous place you knew, what has baffled me as I obsessively researched where everyone was coming from was what a surreal, boundless nonplace the web is. These last two days have shown me a dazzling array of bizarre organisms—mashups, filters, feeds, composites, parasites, symbiots, recomposites, bots, leeches, scams, automators—that thrive on the web, underneath the hood.
Oh, and one more thing: the sheer, brutal, speed of it all. It took two days and one email to Emily Chang (Thanks Sean!) to go from a pretty much forgotten website to this.
The present’s baffling.
As an exercise in vanity, here’s some compulsively gathered, up-to-the-minute updated, biased media coverage of the website (mostly blogs):
...it can only give you answers.
He died quite a few years before Google (or the Internet, for that matter) started, but I’m sure Picasso would have said that. And I think there would have been some truth in it.
Yesterday I spent most of my day just trying to find out why my local web-apps had crashed horribly ever since I upgraded to Rails 1.1. It was all a complex dance between Google, my web-apps, and all sort of forums. I painstakingly build my web-apps one-step at a time, several times, just trying to find out exactly what step was causing the problem.
And finally the question emerged: ¿Is there a known problem between RMagick, a ruby image-manipulation library that I use, and Rails 1.1? The answer from Google was nigh immediate: Rails 1.1 requires Ruby 1.84, which in turn kills RMagick. I’ll simply have to do without it until a fix is posted.
It is not the results that drive us, but the query.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of a search engine is not that it provides with immediate answers, but that this immediacy allows us to pose far more questions.
This preponderance of questions over answers is what makes me believe there might be some future in clustering techniques (Marissa Mayer to the contrary): when it works best, clustering works by hinting at good questions.
A question machine
Do we need a question-machine? What is a question-machine? Is that the question to ask? Is the name of god a question? Where can I buy the Whole Earth Review? Is the universe recursive? What is this “fly on the wall” syndrome? When did I first hear the song There Was An Old Woman? What might Sergio Rivas be doing this very moment? Where is that story we wrote together? Was it any good? What is a question? What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? Is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis true? How is Ray Kurzweil like? Is it true that “the potential for expanded communication between people far exceeds the potential both of language as we think of it (the stuff we say, read and write) and of all the other communication forms we already use?” Is the universe discrete or continuous? Will they come when you do call for them? Will we ever achieve post-symbolic communication? Is symbolic systems a career for me? What does a “reality conversation” look like? Will there be a singularity? Are we becoming a Gaia? Is there an I? Is everything a prosthesis? Is everything an interface? Will interface design be the art form of the twenty first century? Will I be any good as a web-app craftsman? Will sex ever be free? What are the classic walks of the world? What is meaning? Will I ever find out? Is copyright fair? Are there better solutions? Is it wrong for me to download music illegally? When will this post be lost forever? Why are there so few women in scientific careers? How can Orson Scott Card be so smart and yet so frighteningly conservative? Is abortion the cause for a drop in U.S. crime rates? Was the pill the cause of the sudden increase in U.S. crime rates? Is technology the answer? Will they really build a robotic team that can compete and defeat the world soccer champions by 2050? Is it too late for Esperanto? Will an A.I. ever read these very words? Will anyone? How should we live? Shall we aim at happiness or at knowledge, virtue, or the creation of beautiful objects? If we choose happiness, will it be our own or the happiness of all? Will I die? Will I really be rich by 30? How was Borges like? Did AMLO know about Bejarano and Ponce? Which is the best candidate in this presidential elections? Will Caja Negra work? Will I work at Google? Should I’ve taken that Etsy offer? Would I be happier in New York? Am I scared? Am I too easy on myself? Is it wrong that I don’t finish what I start? Is this good or bad procrastination? Will I ever meet annzah? Am I foolish to believe, deep down inside me, that in my life “everything happens for the best”? How should I love her? What’s char doing right now? Is she happy? Did she find out the title of the song of that ad? What is the equivalent of a word-processor for reading? How can you improve reading? How can you automate understanding? As in, say, how can you automate or speed up the process of understanding a legal document? With diagrams? Is Doug Engelbart’s idea of a parts-of-speech highlighter any good? Is speed-reading real? If it is, why is it so marginal? Will Jef Raskin’s Archy ever pan out?
Today I acquired a newfound respect for journalists and a new reminder of just how easy it is to fool oneself. More details will follow but this note tonight is for me, I don’t want to forget this moment.
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