inkbluesky

Monica Bellucci expressive

Click on the link for a larger version. Some may find the graininess not ot their tatse, but to me it gives the photo a kind of nostalgic look. If the Italian director Fellini was making the film 8 1/2 today Monica would have been perfect for the part originally played by Claudia Cardinale. Belluci's face and hands are so expressive that she manages to be both open and mysterious at the same time. Another conundrum to find someone's openness and mysteriousness equally compelling. - " This sort of mysteriousness, which is always so becoming in a hero, threw a fresh grace in Catherine's imagination around his person and manners, and increased her anxiety to know more of him."
Northanger Abbey by Austen, Jane

Why people are so bad at predicting what will make them feel good

Real estate agents say you should buy the worst house in the toniest neighbourhood rather than the best house on a modest street.

But Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard University psychology professor, believes such a purchase is rarely a prescription for happiness. Before you sign that offer to purchase, consider how you'll feel coming home each day to a dump amidst the mansions.

"It will make you feel bad because the brain is a difference detector; almost everything that it senses, it senses as a comparison," he says in Toronto to talk about his book Stumbling on Happiness.

The capacity to imagine future happiness or unhappiness — called "affective forecasting" — is, Gilbert says, what distinguishes us from other animals.

As he puts it, "We don't have to actually have gall bladder surgery or lounge around on a Caribbean beach to know that one of these is better than another."

Gilbert has spent 15 years at Harvard's Social Cognition and Emotion laboratory investigating how people imagine what will make them happy, and why they so often get it wrong.

He has found that small pleasures like coming home to a house no worse than the neighbour's is more likely to yield long-term joy than inheriting $1 million, getting a big promotion or being elected president.

"It's the frequency and not the intensity of positive events in your life that leads to happiness, like comfortable shoes or single malt scotch," he says.

I've seen this a certain level. Someone is estatic with their new car, then after going without other things to keep up the payments or having to buy some new tires the happiness wears off. new home owners, people that have always rented are elated at first, then comes the maintenance, the grass cutting, roof repairs and property taxes. It does seem like whenever we do something that makes us happy that there is a trade off.

Knowing that absolutely, positively my vote is counted would provide me with a little more happiness, Will Your Vote Count in 2006?

How bad are the problems? Experts are calling them the most serious voting-machine flaws ever documented. Basically the trouble stems from the ease with which the machine's software can be altered. It requires only a few minutes of pre-election access to a Diebold machine to open the machine and insert a PC card that, if it contained malicious code, could reprogram the machine to give control to the violator. The machine could go dead on Election Day or throw votes to the wrong candidate. Worse, it's even possible for such ballot-tampering software to trick authorized technicians into thinking that everything is working fine, an illusion you couldn't pull off with pre-electronic systems.

Join a timeshare island tribe in Fiji?

Today's LA Times has a short article about Tribewanted, a project to recruit 5,000 people from around the world who want to live on an island with 100 other people for a couple of weeks and build a community.

The goal: to build a sustainable eco-community and keep at bay developers with dreams of massive hotel complexes. Memberships — Nomad ($220), Hunter ($440) and Warrior ($660) — entitle members to seven, 14 or 21 days on the palm-fringed 200-acre oasis, 100 at a time. Fees cover food, lodging and local airport transfer.
This is not for the five-star hotel crowd. The tribe will be roughing it, especially the early arrivals, who will have only tents and basic shower and toilet facilities.

I'm not sure this would make me happy, but I'd like to try it. Unfortunately for wage slaves like me its not in the cards right now.