Geeks Find Happiness in the Blogosphere!

A pair of researchers analyze the blogosphere in search of hapiness and here's what they come up with ...
Abstract:
What are the sources of happiness and sadness in everyday life? In this paper, we employ ‘linguistic ethnography’ to seek out where happiness lies in our everyday lives by considering a corpus of blogposts from the LiveJournal community annotated with happy and sad moods. By analyzing this corpus, we derive lists of happy and sad words and phrases annotated by their ‘happiness factor.’ Various semantic analyses performed with this wordlist reveal the happiness trajectory of a 24-day (3am and 9-10p are most happy), and a 7-day week (Wednesdays are saddest), and compare the socialness and human-centeredness of happy descriptions versus sad descriptions. We evaluate our corpus-based approach in a classification task and contrast our wordlist with emotionally-annotated wordlists produced by experimental focus groups. Having located happiness temporally and semantically within this corpus of everyday life, the paper concludes by offering a corpus-inspired livable recipe for happiness .

Read the full study here
A fascinating study but if you're pressed for time, here's the punchline...

"Recipe for Happiness (Ingredients with high happiness load are italicized.)
Ingredients

• Something new
• Lots of food that you enjoy
• Your favorite drink
• An interesting social place

Directions Go shop for something new – something cool, make sure that you love it. Then have lots of food, for dinner preferably, as the times of breakfast and lunch are to be avoided. Consider also including a new, hot taste, and one of your favorite drinks. Then go to an interesting place, it could be a movie, a concert, a party, or any other social place. Having fun, and optionally getting drunk, is also part of the recipe. Note that you should avoid any unnecessary actions, as they canoccasionally trigger feelings of unhappiness. Ideally the recipe should be served on a Saturday, for maximum happiness effect. If all this happens on your birthday, even better. Bon appétit! And so concludes this paper. Yay!"

Originally posted by ResourceShelf
Photo Credit: Buddha of the Salon originally posted by untitled13

Jump the Blaine!

I really don't know much about David Blaine other than he's one of those attention-grabbing magician/illusionist types that seek a bit of the old Houdini Magic. I do know that he dated Fiona Apple at one time and that he is a native New Yorker and that he is half Puerto Rican and half Jewish. Okay, maybe I know more about David Blaine than I thought or really should know. Maybe David Blaine is controlling my thoughts?...Nah, if anyone is controlling my thoughts it's Doug Henning. He was so...magical. Blaine on the other hand is all in my face as I have to deal with his everpresence on my way to delivering my daughter to daycare behind Lincoln Center. I took this groovy pic on his first day in the tank as the setting sun shone through giving him the otherworldly aura that he craves with every fiber of his being. The young man oogling Mr. Blaine participated in a peace march that morning, a very moving thing to see local youth march for peace on May Day! Maybe that's what this post is really about...peace! Cue the Fonz!