tales from urban dilettantia

A recent post over on the Wired Science blog reminded me that I have been neglecting my favourite subject lately, discussing as it does the way in which happiness and sadness appear to fit the infectious disease model in large social networks. The Wired article leans a little far towards generalisation and pop-science for my taste, but the original study looks quite interesting and has made me wonder about the underlying assumptions, methodology and data set.

Looking through my bookmarks, it turns out that over the past few months I’ve hoarded quite a number of interesting articles on life, happiness and well-being.  In March, Scott Berkun wrote something that really challenges me to read, dealing as it does with being unbusy, being still and cultivating time.  It’s called The Cult of Busy.

Last month Dave Navarro (no relation) from Rock Your Day posted How To Stop Telling Your Sad, Sad Story, which I really loved; it’s such an ass-kicking.

Over at Fora.tv, you can watch Is The Pursuit of Happiness Making Us Miserable (which is probably is, if we take ‘happiness’ to mean hedonic pleasure).

Tim Ferris has written an epic piece on vagabonding, simplicity, travel and well-being.

Everyone’s been writing about Stuff versus Experience this year. There are posts on Unclutterer and CNN and The Frontal Cortex. This is something I wrote about some time ago, at least in relation to my personal experience, and it’s interesting to see it unfolding elsewhere.

On a slightly bigger scale, The Atlantic has an article from back in February on What Makes Cities Happy.

And lastly, the FlowingData blog has these two wry charts: Flowchart to lifelong happiness, and Path to happiness gets complicated and confusing.  FlowingData blog, you make me happy.

The Federal Election was called over the weekend, and will be held on Saturday 21 August 2010. If you’re not enrolled to vote, you have a tiny bit of grace to get it done.

Australians not enrolled to vote have until 8pm tonight to enrol.  Australian who are already on the electoral roll but have moved address have until 8pm on Thursday July 22 (that’s this coming Thursday) to update their details. ‘

While it’s now too late to post your enrolment form, you can still take it to any Australian Electoral Commission office in person, or fax or email it to an office between the hours of 8:30am and 8pm today.

Location and contact details of AEC offices: http://www.aec.gov.au/contact

While the AEC website will tell you that it is compulsory for all Australian citizens aged 18 years and over to enrol and vote in the 2010 federal election, this is not technically the case. In October 2007, the AEC confirmed that “it is not an offence to vote informally in a federal election, nor is it an offence to encourage other voters to vote informally”. The significance of this is that it is compulsory for you to enrol to vote and it’s compulsory for you to turn up to a polling place (or submit a postal vote form), but it is fine to put a blank ballot in the box if you so choose, and so abstain from casting a vote. (While I don’t personally believe in abstaining, I do think you have a right to accurate information.)

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be running an updated version my ‘election-how-to’ series from 2007 on my LiveJournal and my blog at flyingblogspot.com – if you have any election-related questions over the next month that aren’t addressed in the series, ask in the comments and I will do my best to find you an answer.

But in the meantime, if you’re not correctly enroled, go do it now!

If you’ll be so good as to indulge me, I’m going to wax lyrical for a moment about the German World Cup squad.

We went in with the second youngest squad in the tournament, a group of players who had never competed together on the international stage.  Some statistics:

Twelve of the twenty three were of or under 23 years old.

This was the youngest squad we’d taken to a World Cup since 1934.

Twelve had less than ten caps to their name.

Five of them featured in Germany’s UEFA Under-21 team in 2009.

Lahm was our youngest ever skipper at 26.

We went in without many of our best.  Rocked by goalkeeper Enke’s suicide in November.  Captain Ballack, Adler, Rolfes, Traesch, Westermann all injured.

And yet we topped our group, managed to beat England and Argentina – two teams who arguably looked far stronger on paper, if not on the field – and took it all the way to the semi-final in Durban yesterday, just managing to hold the magnificent Spanish side scoreless with a grinding defensive effort until the 73^rd minute, albeit at the cost of launching an attack.

All credit to coach Löw – strategy, teamwork and cohesion have carried us so very far where skill and experience have been lacking.  I have no complaints; the next four years are looking bright indeed.

Interesting, interesting times in Australian politics today.

For non-Aussie readers, we’ve been drawing to the end of our first term of centre-left government under the Australian Labor Party after well over a decade of conservative rule.  This morning, the Labor caucus voted to depose Kevin Rudd as party leader, replacing him with Julia Gillard who has just been sworn in as our new Prime Minister.

In a historical context, this is an extraordinary day. Gillard is our the first female Australian Prime Minister. And not to detract from this, I must say I’m deeply grateful that I live in a time when a woman (and a non-religious, unmarried woman at that) can become PM.  However, setting this aside and measuring up Gillard by her politics, I’m becoming increasingly nervous in the leadup to the coming election.

Gillard’s generally regarded as Labor-left, but the factional powers who have enabled the coup come from the conservative Catholic Labor-right boys’ club.  The people who have run New South Wales into the ground, pushed back against emissions trading & carbon legislation, and fought to protect Labor’s Western Sydney seats by attacking refugees in the media.  For me, they’ve long represented the worst of the party, and I’m concerned that they’re going to demand repayment for their support.  Gillard’s track record as Shadow Minister for Population and Immigration and reference to ‘strong management of our borders’ in her press conference point in one particular direction, and  I fear that immigration policy will form the requisite pound of flesh.

She’s an excellent parliamentary debater, a strong public speaker and I have little doubt that we will see some great moments on the campaign trail as Australia’s first female Prime Minister comes up against Australia’s favourite misogynistic opposition leader.  But in a broader sense, I struggle to see positive policy change coming out of the spill; there’s just doesn’t seem to be a realistic incentive at the moment.

To be electable, Gillard merely needs to placate the mining industry, promise ‘safe borders’ to mop up the Western Sydney seats and generally appear to be less of a dick than Abbott in the media spotlight.  Given the current parliamentary balance and restrictions around calling a double dissolution election, emissions trading legislation can’t be pushed through, and civil liberties issues such as web censorship aren’t a deal-breaker to the wider public.  The things I care passionately about have become, at least for the next few months, political side dishes at best.

If there’s one thing that will break my heart in the coming election, it will be yet another racist, fear-mongering wedge-issue campaign.  Prove me wrong, Julia.  Prove me wrong.

This is a weird little story for you, apropos of nothing.

Before beginning, I ought to mention that I think I’ve seen the film.  It begins by setting the scene.  There’s a woman, on leave from her place of work.  She and her best friend spend the days studying, writing, smoking, drinking coffee, reading and talking philosophy.  They are productive, and for the most part, quiet.  It is a bright, clear winter.  I’ve heard the soundtrack; a little post-rock, a little eerie, a suggestion of distance.

And then, a postcard arrives in the mail, not to her house, but to her ex-husband’s address.  The name’s nearly hers – one letter out, and the same as her dead grandmother’s.  It’s written in French, postmarked Paris, and talks about a family gathering at a cafe a short drive down the coast.  She wonders.

This is a weird little true story.  I only know the first part.

This post is like a Leftovers-Night dinner.  You’ll see.

Right now I’m doing some work that involves re-running a model through twenty or so different scenarios, and each run takes around a minute, so I have Notepad up and am using the runtime to write. It feels like a luxury to have some time to start thinking about having a page to fill with words.

I’ve been trying to manage the number of hours I’ve been spending in the office, but even when I’ve been able do that, the intensity of the last month has been something to behold. There’s not much I’m able to say about it in a public forum, but it involves a lot more responsibility and a whole bunch of time-critical work. I’m hopeful October will see a promotion, as I feel there’s a significant mismatch between the level I’m on and the work I’m doing.

Over the past month, the last module of my professional qualification has started up, so I’m studying and involved in a bunch of other things too. I know it’s something I come back to time after time here, but the struggle to manage commitments seems to be something of an ongoing theme in my life. I made a mind-map while I was having lunch yesterday, and even though many things spawned sub-commitments and began to ooze from the edges of the A4 page, it feels better to have the majority of it laid out.

Out of everything I’m doing at the moment, passing the last module of my Grad Dip CA is far and away the most significant one when it comes to my long term well-being. In part, this is because repeating will be a very expensive exercise, but more because the timing of finishing the course directly relates to when I’ll be free to leave Large Accounting Firm without having to repay my sizable study debt. ‘Freedom, horrible freedom!’ as they say. (‘I’m the Queen!’ ‘No you’re not!’)

What else? Oh yes, the week just gone has been a shocker when it’s come to mental health – by far the worst in recent times. While horrible, the upside of this has been that I’ve managed to get through it without messing up anything significant, which is quite exciting – my ability to manage depressive episodes has really lifted in the past couple of years, and this is a topic I’d like to write more on at a later date.

Other than that…well. I’ve seen The Mountain Goats, Jeff Martin and Henry Rollins recently. Rollins was doing his Frequent Flyer spoken word tour, and I don’t think I have anything near the articulacy to express how moving and inspiring I found it. The man is a spectacularly interesting human being, and I find much of his discussion around depression, adventure, happiness and human experience to be almost painfully resonant. (I’m selfishly frustrated that he’s famous, because if he weren’t it would be easier to say ‘hey mate, come have a drink with me and we’ll talk about life the universe and everthing’.)

Musicwise, I’ve been obsessing over a few things, mostly relating to recent gigs. Jeff Martin’s Live in Dublin album is excellent, and I would strongly suggest getting it from iTunes if you haven’t already. portabledave has also put me onto The Tallest Man On Earth aka Kristian Mattson, a profoundly Dylan-esque folk muso from Denmark whose new album, The Wild Hunt, I’ve had on repeat. And then there’s the latest Mountain Goats album, The Life of the World to Come, which has this song about the thylacine, the dodo and the golden toad which just about moves me to tears every time, because (like most Australians?) I’m well aware of the heartbreaking footage they’re referring to in the first verse:

And finally, a few links that I’ve stumbled across and appreciated in recent weeks:

tacit posted a thoughtful article today on choosing relationships. I wanted to point it out, not simply because it’s a good article but also because it covers a number of points that really resonate for me personally. This part in particular hits home:

I’d also go on to say that it’s possible to choose not to be someone’s partner specifically because you do love them so deeply and sincerely, and want them to live a life the best possible life they can. For me, love is not about being all-conquering, but it is very much about choosing to do the right thing by the people you love even when that’s very, very difficult to contemplate.

Another point that interested me was the discussion of relationship choice in the context of fail-safe logic, basically contrasting the outcomes of taking a blacklist/dealbreaker approach to potential partners to those of taking a whitelist approach. I really like the concept of this being an abundance model as opposed to a starvation model – the choice of approach implies quite a lot about one’s self-perception and self-worth:

And, just because I love this bit, and because I see so many people doing the opposite so unhappily:

So much for writing original content today! However, I’m not sure I can say any of this better than it’s already been said, and it is something I wanted to share.

The last couple of weeks have been rather a hive of political activity.

I suppose everyone’s seen the WikiLeaks / CollateralMurder.com news unless they’ve been off-planet for the Easter break. I’m not sure I can add anything by commenting on this; it speaks – poignantly and heartbreakingly – for itself.

Malcolm Turnbull announced on Tuesday that he won’t be running in the coming Federal Election, and interestingly first released the news on Twitter. I respected him, appreciated the direction in which he attempted to steer conservative Australia, and I’m genuinely sorry to see him go. Later in the day, Nationals MP, Kay Hull, announced she wouldn’t be contesting the 2010 election either, a decision that may shake things up a little if the Libs start eyeing her seat of Riverina.

In state politics over in Tasmania, the hung parliamant saga goes on. And on. While Labor on ten seats appear keen to handball the ordeal of minority government over to the Libs (also on ten), the Tassie Greens are using their five seats to broker a power-sharing agreement. Meanwhile, the whole mess will fall into the lap of Tasmania’s Governor, and I will rant angrily yet predictably about the monarchy after a few drinks down at the pub. Interestingly, this peculiar situation isn’t an entirely unprecedented one; anyone remember the 1989 Tasmanian Election and its aftermath, or are we all too young?

Running a little ahead of Australia, the Brits have called their general election. Gordon Brown is playing the middle-class card for all he’s worth, and the Greens have fielded the largest number of candidates in the party’s history. For anyone interested in following the action, The Guardian are running a very comprehensive, live-updating site. (I found out today that the Home Office has granted my citizenship application, but of course as a non-resident I’m not eligible to vote.)

Possum over at Crikey has written a good piece on politicking, bad statistics and immigration: Net Arrivals

And finally there’s been much said recently on the topic of the institutionalised protection of child sex offenders by the Catholic Church. Michael Nugent from Athiest Ireland posted a critical analysis of Ratzinger’s apology a couple of weeks ago on his blog. As an ex-Catholic, and indeed as a human being, this is a topic that fills me with a cold, cold rage, and it impresses me to see someone with the capacity write so rationally and analytically on the subject, rather than mirroring the vitriolic rant to which I would be inclined to descend.

As boxer_the_horse says,’sometimes the internet is great!’ So, in lieu of me actually managing to finish writing a post of my own, let’s have a look at some random internet squishiness.

To begin with, I’m obsessed with the Michael Buble Being Stalked By A Velociraptor blog at the moment.  Gosh it’s great; that raptor lurking in the crowd or behind the curtains cracks me up.  I just keep randomly going to the site and giggling about it, even when there aren’t any new ones up.

BBC Wildlife is offering a series of free PDFs in the Photo Masterclasses series.    Covering a wide variety of topics from birds in flight to photographing wildlife at dusk and dawn, they’re well worth a look.

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across the concept of Demand Resistance which describes me so very well, and links in with procrastination, perfectionism and anxiety.  I promised to send information on this to a number of people, so here’s a link and here’s another with some good information in the comments.

I have a feeling I may have linked Visual Complexity before, but it’s still beautiful and there’s always something new to see. In fact, one of the things I discovered there this morning was a link to Sourcemap:open supply chains, a tool for researching and sharing where things come from.

Here’s a tribute to New Zealand-born photojournalist Margaret Moth who died earlier this month, and to her fascinating and adventurous life.

And finally, photographers, travellers, architecture enthusiasts and UrbExers, check out this Russian LiveJournaller who has taken a set photos of abandoned churches.

Yes, sometimes the internet is great!

I was just sorting a few files out in Aperture and came across this photo I took out on the deck in Margaret River when I was staying with velvetbutter in December.  It’s taken with my 70mm-300mm lens and a cheap infra-red filter I picked up for a few dollars from Deal Extreme.  IR photography is great fun – there shall be more!