I am utterly charmed by the apple hat - copied shamelessly from Tara, of course. This is my new yarn obsession... look for more fruits and veg to come! They knit up unbelievably quickly and are just too cute. Farmers' Market, here we come!I stumbled across a fun-ish link somewhere in the blogosphere, the How Happy Are You? quiz. It's not terribly scientific, but kind of interesting. The questions definitely suggest that happiness is a chosen attitude, rather than something determined by genetics, context, etc. Terry would probably say that is comes from a Modernization perspective (if you are unhappy, it's your fault, and you need to change your values/attitudes/beliefs/actions). It is just fascinating how we try to measure things that are not really measurable in a scientific way. According to this quiz,
| You Are 60% Happy |
 |
How Happy Are You?
Comments, anyone? (Oh - if you click on the link, just scroll down past the "Know anyone pregnant?" box.)
2 comments:
Got this comment from Dave Coombs, PhD via my dad:
"I enjoyed the anthropological eloquence of the seminar syllabus you sent. It was too brief for me to fully appreciate the approach, but it sounds like a healthy application of post-modernism to theorizing, in that it recognizes that theory development is not some independent, objective "scientific" enterprize, peering down out of the heavens at its subject matter, but a somewhat odd (to the average American at least) kind of cross-cultural social activity that grows out of the specific history and partially shared interests of an often marginal academic community (or rather, a cluster of sometimes distant sub-communities) and leads to a number of unusual ways of thinking about people, their diverse behaviors and the thought processes we try to infer from those.
I think one of the main positive contributions of the perspective represented in the syllabus is that it challenges the arrogance of modernist "scientific" thinking and tries to teach us some epistemological humility. Given the nature of human nature, that attempt is probably doomed to failure, but it is well worth presenting as an ideal.
So, thanks for sending that part of Betty's message on to me. It made me miss being more connected to my marginal academic community, and she is right; it's just a matter of learning a new, distant dialect of English and a lot of concepts that accompany it."
Link doesn't work... I am therefore unhappy...
and the random group of letters is fwkpsuk - it's almost profane
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