Think having children will make you happy?

Although not originally written with the aim of testing for the effects of focusing illusion on happiness in mind, Clark and colleagues (2008) did just that. In their seminal paper that examines the long-run dynamics of life satisfaction across changes in different life events, they found that there is a significant increase in life satisfaction for both males and females one year before the birth of their child – which is also present at the year of child’s birth – before dropping beyond zero within one year of the new arrival. Both males and females then go on to experience significant unhappiness for the next four years before being ‘just’ content about parenthood – they become no less happier than when they were childless all those years ago.

Why do we have such a rosy view about parenthood? One possible explanation for this, according to Daniel Gilbert (2006), is that the belief that ‘children bring happiness’ transmits itself much more successfully from generation to generation than the belief that ‘children bring misery’. The phenomenon, which Gilbert says is a ‘super-replicator’, can be explained further by the fact that people who believe that there is no joy in parenthood – and who thus stop having them – are unlikely to be able to pass on their belief much further beyond their own generation. It is a little bit like Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest. Only the belief that has the best chance of transmission – even if it is a faulty one – will be passed on.

Le chauffage, c'est très cher

Le graph ci-haut vient du site de PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric company) qui fournissent l'électricité pour mon appartement.

Les barres verticales sont mon coût en dollars. La zone ombrée est en degrées*jours, les degrées étant la différence (négative) avec la température optimale (65 degrées farenheit) alors que la ligne avec les petits carrés représente le contraire (degrées * jours plus chaud que la température idéale).

En ayant pas d'air climatisé, je suis surtout impacté quand j'essaie de chauffer et c'est froid dehors. En moyenne sur une base annuelle, ça revient à 46$ par mois! C'est surtout parce que mon appartement est très, très mal isolé!

Sortie au Lake Tahoe

Le weekend passé notre équipe a fait une sortie de ski au Lake Tahoe. C'était la troisième fois dans ma vie que j'ai été faire du ski. Le centre de ski était Heavenly. J'étais quand même assez bon considérant, mais j'ai aussi failli me tuer sur la piste intermédiaire Rounabout (5 miles avec une affiche qui disait: "Not recommended for beginners" hmmmm).

La météo était vraiment superbe et confortable; sans tuques et avec des mes gants de vélo, j'étais très confortable.

Moi et une vingtaine de mes collègues sommes restés dans une maison louée. La bouffe et l'alcool (beaucoup d'alcool!!), acheté chez Costco, était gracieuseté de la compagnie. C'était vraiment une fin de semaine très agréable.

La vue de la maison qui avait été louée

Je pense que la partie la plus épeurante du ski est le lift...

J'ai l'air vraiment cool, hein!

Lake Tahoe!

Sur le retour (4h en voiture) nous nous sommes arrêtés à Sacramento dans une excellente microbrasserie (Brew It Up)

32 songs in 8 minutes

Wow, j'adore! Ça me donne envie d'apprendre la guitare ;-)

Y-Up tickets

Il est possible d'acheter une place dans la première classe d'un avion au prix régulier de la classe économique!

Il s'agit de regarder pour les billets Y-Up ("why up") ou discounted First Class airline ticket. Ces billets sont souvent un meilleur deal pour les voyagers de dernierès minutes. Par contre, il faut quand même noter que le prix ne sera probablement pas meilleur que les billets de classe économique vendus en rabais.

Voici un article qui explique comment acheter des billets Y-Up.

copper

copper est une série de panneaux de comics d'un jeune homme appellé Copper et de son chien dans des mondes issues des rêves de Copper. La qualité du dessin et le niveau de détail est exceptionnel. Les histoires semblent simples à la première lecture mais révèlent souvent une réflexion philosophique profonde qui font autant réfléchir que sourire.

Wall Street on the Tundra: Iceland

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904

Iceland’s big change began in the early 1970s, after a couple of years when the fish catch was terrible. The best fishermen returned for a second year in a row without their usual haul of cod and haddock, so the Icelandic government took radical action: they privatized the fish. Each fisherman was assigned a quota, based roughly on his historical catches. If you were a big-time Icelandic fisherman you got this piece of paper that entitled you to, say, 1 percent of the total catch allowed to be pulled from Iceland’s waters that season. Before each season the scientists at the Marine Research Institute would determine the total number of cod or haddock that could be caught without damaging the long-term health of the fish population; from year to year, the numbers of fish you could catch changed. But your percentage of the annual haul was fixed, and this piece of paper entitled you to it in perpetuity.

[...]

Even better, if you didn’t want to fish you could sell your quota to someone who did. The quotas thus drifted into the hands of the people to whom they were of the greatest value, the best fishermen, who could extract the fish from the sea with maximum efficiency. You could also take your quota to the bank and borrow against it, and the bank had no trouble assigning a dollar value to your share of the cod pulled, without competition, from the richest cod-fishing grounds on earth. The fish had not only been privatized, they had been securitized.

[...]

The other, more serious problem was the Icelandic male: he took more safety risks than aluminum workers in other nations did. “In manufacturing,” says the spokesman, “you want people who follow the rules and fall in line. You don’t want them to be heroes. You don’t want them to try to fix something it’s not their job to fix, because they might blow up the place.” The Icelandic male had a propensity to try to fix something it wasn’t his job to fix.

[...]

Back in 2001, as the Internet boom turned into a bust, M.I.T.’s Quarterly Journal of Economics published an intriguing paper called “Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment.” The authors, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, gained access to the trading activity in over 35,000 households, and used it to compare the habits of men and women. What they found, in a nutshell, is that men not only trade more often than women but do so from a false faith in their own financial judgment. Single men traded less sensibly than married men, and married men traded less sensibly than single women: the less the female presence, the less rational the approach to trading in the markets.

Study: Cat Parasite Affects Human Culture

Infection by a Toxoplasma gondii could make some individuals more prone to some forms of neuroticism and could lead to differences among cultures if enough people are infected, says Kevin Lafferty, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Gobekli: le paradis originel?

The first is its staggering age. Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.

That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.

Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.