The science of happiness – Depression – Health In Focus – Health And Fitness:

You can’t buy joy, but you can learn to lift your
spirits.
It’s one of those things, like art, that’s hard to define, yet
we know it when we see it. What exactly is happiness and how can
you get it? While that question has occupied the minds of
philosophers from Aristotle onwards – humans seek it above all
else, he wrote more than two millennia ago – scientific
investigation of this most elusive of emotions only really got
underway in the past two or three decades.

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well this isn’t news, but since it is thunderstorms this morning…. I think this is something to read.

Our President needs your help:

So GW is at Johns Hopkins School of International Studies when he gets an interesting question from a graduate student.  It’s a real stumper, a veritable legal connundrum.  So please take the time to view this video and see if you can answer the thorny question.  And if so, then call the White House.  Or better yet, just show up.  Immediately. 

Obviously, the President is eager to figure this out.

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a very disappointing response….

Creative Loafing – Weekly Planet Tampa: Talk Of The Town: Life Sentences: In Living Color:

The hardest thing about being colorblind is trying to explain to people who aren’t colorblind what it’s like to be colorblind.

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I’m not colorblind, but I always advocate colorblind friendly web design as part of universally accessible design (ok, yes for everyone that uses a standards compliant browser, not for everyone). Here is a translator so you can judge your design : http://colorfilter.wickline.org/

In any case, when i was reading thee story linked above… something else struck me. there are a variety of forms of colorblindness, i know, but what struck me was the relationship between learning the names of colors, sociality, and colorblindness. How is that learning negotiated and how the social experience must be fundamentally different for someone that doesn’t really see the same sets of things. by that i mean…. if i am pointing at something that is green and you don’t really see the same green, and you have to remember that even in color-seeing populations there are variations in what people see, then when we create the category of green in our minds over time, does it have different properties between different populations in relation to the social properties, as we know it does across cultures. so when we are learning the category green, however you want to claim that is done… what happens when the relationships between people that is implied in the learning of this category linguistically, cannot be certain of their referent. does the inability to communicate some aspects of our perception and map that onto other people fundamentally cause a different relationship between people? is our situatedness (of social relations) grounded in capacity (to share perceptions), i’d say yes, but do we supercede our capacity (to create share perceptions) through frequent shared experience. but… it is an interesting question. does someone that does not perceive color the same way as you, learn to treat people differently because of the difficulties in defining color?

Software is Contributing to Human Suffering

Originally uploaded by ruby.doesrails.com.

one of the best statements for the idea that software tends to replicate the conditions of the world in which it is created.