Month: May 2012

Jules Evans advocates the tracking of personal habits:

At the end of each day some ancient philosophers would keep track of what happened during the day – what they did well and what they did badly. The idea is that if you want to change yourself and get rid of bad habits, first you have to track yourself. Humans are such forgetful and unconscious creatures, we don’t always realise who we are or how we’re behaving. So we need to keep track of ourselves.

Epictetus, for example, said if you have a bad temper count the days on which you don’t lose your temper, and if you manage to do it for 30 days then you can consider yourself to be making progress…If you have depression or anxiety and go and see a cognitive therapist, they will suggest that you keep a journal and keep track of your thoughts and habits, to bring more self-awareness into it and also so you can see the progress that you are making. You might have a day that you feel really down but you can look back and see that actually you have made a lot of progress from, say, three months ago. So that is one practical exercise which the ancients used that is really useful today.

Especially in a world where women hold more power on date night:

"The Avengers" will be No. 1 this coming weekend. But the top-grossing film for the preceding six weeks was a female-oriented picture: Four weeks of "The Hunger Games,” followed by two weeks at the top for surprise hit "Think Like a Man," whose principal audience was not just women but African-American women, who make up about 6 percent of the United States population. (Clearly a lot of other people went to see it too.) Those six weeks aren’t statistically meaningful by themselves. But when added to the big numbers rolled up last year by "The Help"and "Bridesmaids," and the $1.7 billion taken in so far by "The Twilight Saga" around the world, they begin to suggest the contours of a new reality, one in which films aimed at girls and women are high-end blockbusters on an equal footing with guy-flicks.

Previous coverage of the summer's superhero hits here and here.

Alix Spiegel explored it with psychologist James Pennebaker:

He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status. "It's amazingly simple," Pennebaker says, "Listen to the relative use of the word "I." What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word "I" less.

Why:

We use "I" more when we talk to someone with power because we're more self-conscious. We are focused on ourselves – how we're coming across – and our language reflects that.

You can put it to the test.

The mp3 comes to life:

The video for Benga’s latest single, I Will Never Change, required 960 records to create 1 minute and 20 seconds of wave form:

To animate the wave form, we built it and then carefully removed each individual record. This had to be done very gently as any shift in the position of the sculpture would result in the failure of the animation and as we had to literally destroy each piece of vinyl to get it off, there was only one chance to get it right. Once the sculpture was finally built, the animation process took about 30 hours.

The Tories were battered in the local elections – except in one place, London. Labour as a party had a double digit lead over the Tories in London, but the Tory Boris still won – putting him in the cockpit of the party. Uh oh:

The relationship between the Prime Minister and his rejuvenated and emboldened Mayor will be an interesting one. David Cameron’s delight at holding his London bastion will be tempered by the knowledge its resident is more popular with the voters, more popular with his activists, and better at wiff-waff. In turn Johnson is aware his victory was narrowly snatched from the jaws of national defeat, and that association with a wounded leader is not good for the Boris Brand. It was noticeable that in the final day before polling Cameron did an interview with the Evening Standard which included an unsubtle attempt to jump aboard the accelerating Johnson campaign bandwagon, one that was not agreed, and not exactly welcomed, by the Boris camp.

Misery really does love company:

New research published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization this month finds that what matters in heterosexual relationships is not just how satisfied people are with their life, but how satisfied they are relative to their partner. The surprising result is that relationships in which the man is happier than the woman are significantly more likely to come to an end relative to relationships in which both partners are similarly unhappy.

There's a Tumblr for everything.

Paul Miller started his one-year hiatus this week, promising not to use the internet for personal or work-related uses or asking anyone to use it for him:

I want to see the internet at a distance. By separating myself from the constant connectivity, I can see which aspects are truly valuable, which are distractions for me, and which parts are corrupting my very soul. What I worry is that I'm so "adept" at the internet that I've found ways to fill every crevice of my life with it, and I'm pretty sure the internet has invaded some places where it doesn't belong.

His first missive is here. Jen Doll is unimpressed:

The question that's most interesting to me with regard to going off the Internet is whether or not Miller can remain relevant to the rest of us on the Internet, while he's off of it. It's sort of like writing about a TV show when you're no longer actually watching episodes. And it grows progressively less and less interesting to get dispatches from someone regarding their non-Internet life when you yourself are living life very differently and, if given the choice of Internet or no Internet, would always pick Internet.

Jen Doll recalls James Sturm's similar experiment in April of 2010. He lasted four months:

What happened when he went off the Internet? Nothing much. He didn't suddenly get deluged with phone calls or faxes. … In his third-week dispatch, he writes, "so far the biggest surprise has been how uneventful it is." He points out as a troubling aspect, the inability to Google. By his sixth entry, after two months, he'd cheated. Cheated on the Internet, cheated on all of us! It's only fair, because life without the Internet is sort of… boring.

Sensenbrenner, about as extreme a Republican as you can find, pulls out of a Heartland Institute climate change conference.

Another paranoid anti-Semite talks about the Greater Israel lobby's success in preventing any two-state solution in Israel/Palestine:

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tells CNN that right-wing extremists from the United States toppled his government with “millions and millions of dollars” in order to thwart his attempt to reach a lasting peace agreement with the Palestinians…

Olmert told Amanpour that he was working toward a peace agreement in 2008, knowing that this would mean handing over East Jerusalem to the Palestinians. “But I had to fight against superior powers, including millions and millions of dollars that were transferred from this country (the U.S.) by figures which were from the extreme right wing, that were aimed to topple me as Prime Minister of Israel. There is no question about it.”

And yet he won't name names or specific organizations. Which kinda confirms their "superior power". Superior to both a US president and an Israeli PM.