Smoke & Mirrors
"The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the amount of truth he can accept about himself without running away." - Leland Val Van De Wall
Smoke & Mirrors: Once a month, children are brought to [a London studio], one at a time, and shown a handful of episodes to figure out exactly which parts of the shows are engaging and which are tuned out. For anyone older than 2 years old, the team deploys a whimsically named tool: the Distractatron. It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down. “It’s not mega-interesting, what’s on the Distractatron,” said Maurice Wheeler, who runs the research group. “But if they aren’t fully focused, they might go, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and kind of drift over. We can see what they’re looking at and the exact moment when they got distracted.”
Made in China: I have no idea why, but I looked straight up at the sky. An aircraft was passing over. No big deal, air traffic in the region is quite dense. But then, another aircraft was also making its way across the sky. It was obvious- they were on a collision course. Oh God, there’s going to be a horrific accident. And I’m going to be stranded alone in this place. Is it deliberate? Could it be an act of war? The paths intersected, and it was obvious then that the first aircraft was much, much higher. I had been mistaken because of its unusual size. I looked it up, which took a while even with the VPN. Apparently, it was a fucking spacecraft. Three astronauts were aboard, returning from a 115-day trip to the International Space Station. The landing site was in Kazakhstan, and they happened to be passing over Guangzhou just at that moment when I looked up.
The World's Emotional Status is Pretty Good: Which country comes first in happiness completely changes depending on how you measure. The Positive Experience Index is an average across different questions: Did you feel well rested yesterday? Were you treated with respect all day yesterday? Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday? Did you learn or do something interesting yesterday? Did you experience enjoyment during a lot of the day yesterday?
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/358022/global-mental-health-happiness-measure-gdp
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Here's a little something about the Edamame trend in India, something that glared at me when a fine dine restaurant in Mumbai served me some in a plate of Paneer Lababdar.