What it takes, in general, to cultivate friendships, in terms of “work” and time.
The videos and content in Week 2 of the Science of Well-being course mostly focused on dispelling misconceptions we have about happiness. Professor Laurie Santos talked a lot about, and referenced studies to back her point, how a lot of things we perceive will make us happy, or sad should we not get it, don’t have nearly the impact we think they have. That’s because our intuition for predicting happiness is terrible! Professor Santos didn’t frame it in the following way, but it seemed to me our intuition for what would make us happy is very much based in the amygdala that’s the emotional centre, and reptilian part, of our brain that’s old, more animal-like and limited. Emotional intelligence, as a concept, is the ability to control this amygdata with the rest, and more rational part, of the brain, the part that knows waiting 20 minutes for 2 marshmallows instead of taking 1 now will bring you greater benefits when you are as young as 4 years old. That was the key to the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment that showed having delayed gratification as a trait in a 4 year old who first starts to think, is a better predictor of success in life compared to any other tests like SAT scores, education attainment, BMI, etc. That animal instinct suggesting what might make us happy is a very simple and basic form of processing that gets predicting happiness, and especially lasting happiness, all wrong.
I just finished recreating a Tableau “viz” that is a series of online, interactive dashboards with weather information for eight places in Nova Scotia from the past 100 years (1917-2016):
They are on the Tableau Public site under my profile listing all my vizzes so far. Not many but the start of something good!
I also have dedicated weather vizzes for:
from reasonably good data sets that existed so I didn’t have to kill myself getting all the data from nearby weather stations and cobbling them all together! I had over 1600 files for those 8 places! Well, Halifax didn’t have a great data set but since so many Nova Scotians live in the area, including me, I didn’t want to leave them out.
The object of this Facebook note is to identify ways which you know, or feel pretty sure, you are NOT average. It sounds like it might be for “misfits” or “pompous” people, but hey, everybody is “not average” in a lot of ways. Try it! I think you’ll love it! I don’t think you’ll have to encourage some friends to try it themselves, either, after they see it! There’s something about not being average that breeds competition. They’ll be “stealing” it, in Facebook-speak, from you as soon as they can find enough time to think about doing it for themselves!
Welcome back to daylight savings time (DST), or what should be regular time as far as I’m concerned. This is actually the artificial time change to “spring ahead” the 1 hour for the majority of the year. But if it’s for most of the year, it should be the standard, in my opinion. It’s only a matter of time before you get revolutions and change when the minority rules.
It never ceases me every time I have to change the “clocks” of many many “clocks” I have to change. That doesn’t even include the ones I don’t have to change, like the one on my computer which changes itself after I had set it up to do so!
This year, I am “down” to a “merciful” eleven clocks/watches! ELEVEN!!!
Digital Citizen 