July 2009
148 posts
Your Money's Worth →
As an exercise, Dr. Miller asked readers of the blog to list the 10 most expensive things they had ever bought, and then list the 10 purchases that had brought them the most happiness. More than 200 responded. As we expected, many people rued spending lots of money for stuff that hadn’t brought them joy. Boats seemed to have particularly low utility in delivering happiness per dollar; many cars...
June 2009
148 posts
Coldplay - Talk
Best Advice I Ever Got →
From Tiger Woods:
When I was young, maybe 6 or 7 years old, I’d play on the Navy golf course with my pop. My dad would say, “Okay, where do you want to hit the ball?” I’d pick a spot and say I want to hit it there. He’d shrug and say, “Fine, then figure out how to do it.” He didn’t position my arm, adjust my feet, or change my thinking. He just...
Giving Up My iPod For a Walkman →
You can almost imagine the excitement about the Walkman coming out 30 years ago, as it was the newest piece of technology at the time.
Perhaps that kind of anticipation and excitement has been somewhat lost in the flood of new products which now hit our shelves on a regular basis.
Indeed. (via delicious)
Augustana - Boston
WatchInteresting talk from Philip Zimbardo about time perspective - how the weights we place on future, past and present rewards determine what is important to us, and what motivates (or doesn’t motivate) us.
“One of the chief pleasures of a book is mental solitude, that deep, quiet focus...”
– The Future of Reading in a Digital World
“No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is;...”
– Bertrand Russell (via The Guardian)
Cookie Master →
From a guy who wrote fortune cookie fortunes:
At first, the writing came easily. Finding inspiration in sources ranging from the I Ching to the Post, Lau cranked out three or four maxims a day, between scrutinizing spreadsheets and monitoring the company’s inventory of chow mein. “I’d be on the subway and look up at the signs and think, Hey, that would make a great fortune,” he said. (One such...
Train: A Board Game About the Holocaust →
Players load boxcars with tiny yellow figurines and are asked to move the trains from one end of the course to the other. They pull cards that either impede their progress or free some of the characters. Once a train reaches the “finish line,” the game is completed and it is revealed that the destination of the trains is Auschwitz. Nobody “wins.”
From the interview with the creator, Brenda...
Snow Patrol - Run
Have heart my dear We’re...
Invent, Invent, Invent →
The country that uses this crisis to make its population smarter and more innovative — and endows its people with more tools and basic research to invent new goods and services — is the one that will not just survive but thrive down the road. We might be able to stimulate our way back to stability, but we can only invent our way back to prosperity. We need everyone at every level to get smarter.
“If browsing the internet is like being a mole in a series of ever-branching...”
– To Browse Serendipitously
On Racism →
“Being black in America today,” Ms. Pager writes, “is just about the same as having a felony conviction in terms of one’s chances of finding a job.”
People who believe that blunt-force racism is a thing of the past tend to gasp when they see this data. But the findings are consistent with what black job seekers and community organizations have been saying about their experiences for a long...
The Way We Live →
Suddenly I understood why slumber-party confessions always came after lights were out, why children tend to admit the juicy stuff to the back of your head while you’re driving, why psychoanalysts stay out of a patient’s sightline. There is something exquisitely intimate about the disembodied voice.
Happiness Tips →
The other night I was watching the movie adaptation of Into the Wild, the true story of Chris McCandless. Fed up with the rat race, McCandless graduated college in the early 1990’s, left his worried parents in the dust, sold all his belongings, and ventured deep into the Alaskan wilderness. Before dying of starvation, he seemed to regret his isolationist ways and wrote these last words in...
“Everything—especially the cutting edge of businesses, especially especially the...”
– GOOD blog
“Paul Erdos was brilliant, but even he realized his own limits when presented...”
– Coding Horror
Hilarious. I want this as my epitaph!
“It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times contains more...”
– Did You Know, via swissmiss.
Opportunity in Adversity →
Aimee Mullins was born without fibula bones in her legs, which were amputated below the knees when she was an infant. A lot of people would consider that condition, occurring so young in life, a pretty big disadvantage. But Mullins likes to think of adversity simply as change to which we haven’t yet adapted. “For most people, adversity is a setback that signals something they have to...
Oasis - Falling Down (Eden of the East Opening)
The Ear-Stones of Fish →
The otolithic organs consist of “a bunch of tiny pebbles (of the white rock known as calcium carbonate) embedded in a gooey wad that sits atop a carpet of delicate hairs.” In humans, those “pebbles” are practically microscopic, but in fish, they can be as large as marbles.
Should you have occasion to tonsure a snapper or sea-bass, slicing off the top of its skull just...
The Benefits of a Classical Education →
When Alexander the Great came to see Diogenes in his barrel, he was so impressed by the philosopher that he offered him money. Diogenes scornfully pointed out that he had no need of money, to which Alexander replied, “Have you no friends?”
“The playwright Edward Albee once wrote that it can be necessary to travel a long...”
– Where Can the Doctor Who’s Guided All the Others Go for Help?
On Hearing →
Every human culture studied makes music, and human babies are born loving music, yet the old saw notwithstanding, music will do nothing to soothe the average nonhuman beast. Emerging evidence suggests that many of our fellow mammals, including dogs, cats, rodents and monkeys, are indifferent to music and may even dislike it. In a study of cotton top tamarins and common marmosets, Josh McDermott,...
Daughtry - Feels Like Tonight
“It takes a 40 percent increase in salary to counter balance a ten percent drop...”
– Cited here.
A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight →
By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.
“People...
Careful Observations →
The villagers discovered that there were well-nourished children among them, despite the poverty, and that those children’s mothers were breaking with the locally accepted wisdom in all sorts of ways — feeding their children even when they had diarrhea; giving them several small feedings each day rather than one or two big ones; adding sweet-potato greens to the children’s rice...
Don't Try to Keep Things Simple →
One resolution I’ve made for YEARS is to entertain more. I love people, I love bringing people together, why do I never want to have people over? I realize that every time I start thinking about planning some kind of get-together, my two rules start flashing in my brain: “I’m in a hurry!” “Keep it simple!” These rules tell me that I don’t have time to shop, to clean, to spruce up our apartment,...
The Value of Real-World Social Interactions →
In 2008 Dunn wanted to know if money could buy happiness. She gave a group of UBC students $5 or $20 and instructed them to spend the money on themselves. She gave another group of students the same amount of money and told them to spend it on others, in what Dunn calls “pro-social spending.” The next morning, subjects were asked how happy they felt. Those who spent the money on others were...
Should We Make Health Insurance More Like Car... →
At Safeway, using an innovative new system that correlates employee behavior with insurance premiums, they have kept their costs flat over the last four years, despite the national average for companies increasing by 38 percent.
How does it work? Simple. Be healthy. Pay less. Like car insurance, the amount you pay goes up if you do bad things. Get a speeding ticket, your car insurance goes up....
“Hard-work is not always the solution — sometimes the solution is focusing on the...”
– Laura Harmon
On the Library →
The metadata of a book extends beyond the keywords held between its covers to the many hands the text has passed through; it’s not enough just to scan every page. We need to also scan the conversations, the notes left in the margins, the stains from coffee, tea, and drink. We need to eavesdrop on the readers, without whom every book is mute. That is the promise I seek.
So good to have A...
Snow Patrol - Chocolate
Jon Schmidt - Love Story (Taylor Swift) meets Viva...
