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  • A happy friend is worth about $20,000

    ByJohn Brown

    This is based on research, folks.

    But we didn’t need scientists to tell us this. The old Frank Kapra films like IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE that have been demonstrating this for years.  I think we need a new government measurement. We’d call it the GDH, the gross domestic happiness index. And then we can see who really is rich, e.g. my five bunko buddies cancel out your Lexus any day.

    Joking aside, this shows how much social interaction is built into our genes. And why we tend to tire of congenital whiners, complainers, and sadsacks. Not to say that people who are sad shouldn’t be. But that a happy friend or family member, who listens with kindness, can be a great boon to someone who is suffering.

    People with the most social connections — friends, spouses, neighbors, relatives — were also the happiest, the data showed. “Each additional happy person makes you happier,” Christakis said.

    “Imagine that I am connected to you and you are connected to others and others are connected to still others. It is this fabric of humanity, like an American patch quilt.”

    Each person sits on a different-colored patch. “Imagine that these patches are happy and unhappy patches. Your happiness depends on what is going on in the patch around you,” Christakis said.

    “It is not just happy people connecting with happy people, which they do. Above and beyond, there is this contagious process going on.”

    And happiness is more contagious than unhappiness, they discovered.

    “If a social contact is happy, it increases the likelihood that you are happy by 15 percent,” Fowler said. “A friend of a friend, or the friend of a spouse or a sibling, if they are happy, increases your chances by 10 percent,” he added.

    A happy third-degree friend — the friend or a friend of a friend — increases a person’s chances of being happy by 6 percent.

    “But every extra unhappy friend increases the likelihood that you’ll be unhappy by 7 percent,” Fowler said.

    The finding is interesting but it is useful, too Fowler said.

    “Among other benefits, happiness has been shown to have an important effect on reduced mortality, pain reduction, and improved cardiac function. So better understanding of how happiness spreads can help us learn how to promote a healthier society,” he said.

    The study also fits in with other data that suggested — in 1984 — that having $5,000 extra increased a person’s chances of becoming happier by about 2 percent.

    “A happy friend is worth about $20,000,” Christakis said.

    Here’s the full article.

  • NPR’s Intelligence Squared

    ByJohn Brown

    Sometimes I love NPR, and sometimes those folks drive me nuts. But with Intelligence Squared they’ve come up with wonderful programming. I accidentally tuned in one night and found I couldn’t turn the radio off.

    What they do is bring together articulate experts, half who argue for a motion such as “Guns reduce crime?” or “Is the government responsible for health care?” and half who argue against it. The nice thing is that they make enough TIME to allow full statements. These aren’t roundtables of knucklehead pundits spouting sound bites. These are long discussions.

    Of course, so much depends on the presentation skills of the various experts. But being able to listen to both sides of an issue, at the very least, gives much to think about.

    In this debate they argue for and against the motion “The US is winning the war in Iraq”.

    They convinced me (I won’t say which side, however). Take some time and listen to this while you do monkey work for the day job.

  • UFO over Washington D.C.

    ByJohn Brown

    I just ran across this.

     Published on Saturday, July 27, 2002 in the Washington Post
    F-16s Pursue Unknown Craft Over Region
    by Steve Vogel

    WASHINGTON — For Renny Rogers, it was strange enough that military jets were flying low over his home in Waldorf in the middle of the night. It was what he thinks he saw when he headed outside to look early yesterday that floored him.

    “It was this object, this light-blue object, traveling at a phenomenal rate of speed,” Rogers said. “This Air Force jet was right behind it, chasing it, but the object was just leaving him in the dust. I told my neighbor, ‘I think those jets are chasing a UFO.’ ”

    Military officials confirm that two F-16 jets from Andrews Air Force Base were scrambled early yesterday after radar detected an unknown aircraft in area airspace. But they scoff at the idea that the jets were chasing a strange and speedy, blue unidentified flying object. Read more here.

    I don’t automatically assume it was methane creatures from Jupiter or our long lost cousins from Alpha Centauri. But I do find it interesting. Was it some new military craft? An exercise? Something the military has seen before? From another nation? The possibilities are endless. Here’s another link to the full article since the WP appears not to have archived it online.

  • Growing Your Own Replacement Parts

    ByJohn Brown

     

    This is simply incredible. Watch the video about Claudia Castillo growing a replacement to part of her windpipe with her own stem cells. She didn’t grow the complete tube, but nevertheless…

    Ms Castillo, who was born in Colombia, had suffered a tuberculosis infection that ravaged her airways, leaving her unable to do simple domestic tasks. Disease had caused her windpipe, or trachea, to collapse just at the point where it entered her lung. Without the pioneering operation in June, the lung would have been removed. Today she again has a normal life and is able to look after her two children. She can walk up stairs without getting breathless and has even been dancing.

    Oh, my. Can you believe this? What the future holds for all the folks with damaged parts…

    And does this mean as we age, we’ll be able to swap out the old for new? How will that affect aging? This is simply incredible.