Among my favourite books is The World in Six Songs, by Daniel Levitin. I loved it so much I wrote a series of blog posts in 2009 about a songs challenge I came up with, and even got to talk to the author about it! Recently, I heard about scientific book involving the number six, called Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe, by Martin Rees. This one didn’t interest me that much, with “deep forces” being beyond what I could fully understand, or at least be willing to commit the time to doing, seeing what those numbers were. Before I went to do that, though, I thought of the six numbers of “my universe”, as in a balance of the physical universe I knew and understood, as well as the emotional one that had the most meaning to me. I did it to see if I could hit at least one of those numbers in Just Six Numbers, to see if what I thought were the important numbers were truly as important as someone more knowledgeable of the “deep forces” of the universe deemed them to be. The results are below, but before you read on and maybe get influenced by my choices, try making a list of just six numbers in “your universe”, with “your universe” being whatever ways you want to define it.
meaningful
Wish Your Facebook Friend a Happy Birthday with a Song to Make It More Meaningful
On Facebook, you can opt to have your birthday show up as a notification on your Facebook friends’ Home Page on the day it is your birthday. Most people then just usually write something short, and frankly, a little meaningless from how generic it often is.
The person whose birthday it is, then, gets like a ton of notifications of these greetings. They may or may not go through them all, as most are the same old plain “Happy birthday!” variation. But what do you expect of mostly shallow “friendships” that come with most of most people’s Facebook “friends”?
However, some people go through all the comments so they don’t miss something they may want to respond to, or should acknowledge to avoid embarrassment of not having read it when someone took the time to write it… and asks about it later.
What I’m proposing is that if you want to be a little more genuine, and break the person’s routine scroll through all the relatively meaningless wishes a bit, add a little song link, like from YouTube. A lot of songs can be found there.
Digital Citizen 