Deanna’s been working on some wedding pictures. I didn’t realize this; what a nice surprise to find out what she was working on! Quite pleased with the results!

(via deanna was here)

From Sunday, waiting for brunch after Mass.

With Deanna home sick from work, I’m working from the couch in my pajamas.

I’m not sure what I was smiling about, but I assure you it wasn’t because Deanna was taking my picture (since I didn’t know she was).

Happy Halloween everyone!

A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl — the German vowel sound ü, for example — you’re likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o.

I’ve long been intrigued by the effect of language on thought processes or worldview. For example, the tendency for verbs to end up at the end of German sentences loads a whole lot of meaning in the last words of a sentence, and I wonder how that affects both conversational interruptions and listening habits. I’ve recently been introduced (thanks, Zach) to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity which is, more or less, a scientific inquiry exploring my selfsame thoughts.

I hadn’t thought about language’s effect on emotions; that is equally interesting, but doesn’t seem to have been tested in the same way.

The experiment quoted above, though, fails; it doesn’t explain why I love German and why saying things like “Öl” and “müde” make me happy.

Not today, which is crummy, but Sunday, which was beautiful!

Andrew Godwin runs a really nice service called LastGraph that creates these graphs based on one’s Last.fm profile data.

Of course, what would this be without a new one? (I had to check it out again, of course.)

Always an interesting view.

Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest lasting lifestyle in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering facade and that have so far eluded us?

It’s any wonder that it’s my favorite season!

[In late August] we talked about a disturbing report by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. […]

Now, at the close of that conversation, we asked our listeners to tell us more about how these findings might be playing out in their own lives, and folks reached out to us with very revealing and emotional stories […]:

“I am 38 years old. My dad is 58 years old, and he has been a functioning alcoholic/drug addict my entire life, and listening to your segment made my eyes open really wide. It’s very difficult for the children, but you know, as you grow older you start to accept people for how they are and you find a way to accept them on terms that you can deal with.”

Internet and hot cocoa

I should be good for a few hours, eh?

Or, as Becca put it so aptly, “Lipton is carpet water.”

I’m a sucker for these animated explanations. And the parallels about fire-fighting insurance are pretty striking.