A short op-ed on what makes us happy. Some of these tidbits are interesting:
According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.
David Brooks argues that as a society we invest time and energy on perusing the wrong goals. Governments are interested in economic trends, but not so much in social ones, which are arguably more important.
# [1]#The very companies whose CEOs eulogize privacy make their money by controlling vast amounts of their users’ information. Whether through targeted advertising, cross-selling or simply convincing their users to spend more time on their site and sign up their friends, more information shared in more ways, more publicly means more profits. This means these companies are motivated to continually ratchet down the privacy of their services, while at the same time pronouncing privacy erosions as inevitable and giving users the illusion of control.
It’s an interesting article, if you can ignore all the right wing McLeans bull shit.
#Shima and I are doing our part.
# [1]4 August 2010, early morning
I watched Larry Clark’s Kids again with Shima earlier this week. I guess she wanted to watch it after reading the article I linked to about the film. The movie begins and ends with children raping children. In between there is a lot of amoral behaviour. It’s about as horrific as I remembered it. I have no idea why I own Kids. It’s definitely a movie you only need to see once. It does feature a kick-ass soundtrack, so that should count for something.
Club Paradise and the Bloor Landsdowne Christian Fellowship, which share a wall, get a mention.
#The Republican’s continue to woo the KKK vote.
#A slick little web application: it emails you at the end of the day to ask you how your day went; your replies become a private journal.
#Damien Katz, the lead developer of CouchDB, writes about the 1.0 release of the project and the journey to get there.
#This is amazing. Oh so random.
(via Kottke) #Nancy Griffin writes about the most famous music video of all time.
#This article is a fascinating look at fundraising on Kickstarter, and the process of printing a book.
#This has been sitting in my Instapaper queue for ages: Maher Arar’s lawyer writes about his case for the New York Review of Books. It’s disappointing that Obama’s administration is basically carrying on with the same dick-move policies that marked Bush’s presidency.
#Some thoughts on how we consume photography today.
#An interesting article on the last days at the Tonight Show.
# [1]MetaFilter discusses Kids, one of the most horrific films ever made.
#A piece in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande. I hope it goes without saying that articles about hospice care are going to be more than a little depressing. (The article begins, “Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die.” Christ.)
(via MetaFilter) #An advert for some sort of energy drink. Holy shit. (It looks like in real-life they have safety-gear on that got edited out in post.)
#Cobb and his team re-imagined as management consultants.
(via Kottke) #Wrong about how to go about switching anyway. I’ve been using Vim for ages, and I still use the arrow keys and my mouse: the shame! If you haven’t seen Vimcasts, like myself, it’s well worth a look.
# [3]The building will most likely be torn down. I’m surprised that as one of the few houses left on Peter St. it isn’t a heritage building.
#Abu Dhabi has a television show like American Idol, but with people reading the poetry they write instead of singing. Hissa Hilal, who ultimately placed 3rd in the contest, got in trouble because of the content of the poems she wrote.
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