Interesting Things

Post here if you find something interesting, be it a website or a particular article, and think it's worth sharing.


For instance, I found this website quite a while ago.

www.wefeelfine.org

quote:

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We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

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Oogri Cafe: Service with A surprise.

http://www.psfk.com/2009/10/ogori-cafe-service-with-a-surprise.html


A mysterious cafe in Kashiwa in Japan. Located inside the Urban Design Center Kashiwa-no-ha, the Ogori cafe looks innocuous enough, but holds a surprise in store for its patrons. In a nutshell, you get what the person before you ordered, and the next person gets what you ordered. Thus, if you're in on the game, you can choose to be either a generous benefactor, and treat those that come after you – or try your luck at being cheap. Either way, it's an interesting experiment that explores surprise, kindness and encourages interactions.

Before we left, there was one last thing hat had to be done.

Mike went up to the cafe, slapped down a couple thousand yen (~$25), and ordered a little bit of everything: some ice cream, some snacks, some candy, some drinks, a Japanese horn-of-mysterious-plenty intentionally set up as a shocking surprise for the next lucky customer. (After his order, Mike received single iced coffee.)

As we walked away from the cafe, with just the right amount of delay, we heard an extremely excited 'arigato goazimasu!! thank you so much!!' yelled in our direction, from an ecstatic mom and her equally excited young son. They truly appreciated the surprise.

quote:

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A few times recently, I've seen adverts, usually in print media, using one of my most loathed turns of phrase: 'Your mouth says no, but your eyes say yes.' There are a few variations, e.g. 'Your lips say no, but your eyes say yes' or 'Your mind says no, but your body says yes.' Often this yes/no concept is used in advertising to women, to sell something decadent, frequently a food, often chocolate or some rich dessert. You're saying you don't want it, but you know you really want it. If that sounds suspiciously like rape apologia, it's no coincidence. 'She said no, but she obviously wanted it' has been used in rape defenses as long as there have been trials for rape. What is victim-blaming based on an accuser's appearance or behavior if not a variation on this very concept? 'Her mouth said no, but her short skirt said yes.' I could probably write an entire book about the inherent problems in using rape apologia to sell luxury items to women, and the nefariousness of that strategy given what it sells by proxy, but at the moment, I'll just observe, simply: That shit is fucked up.'

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Melissa McEwan, 'Today in Rape Culture'

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/04/today-in-rape-culture_13.
html