I Like...

My favorite new show is, hands down, "Better Off Ted". Applying the quirky dry humor of "Arrested Development" to workplace situations like "30 Rock", it strays into the absurd, but in the most rational way. It's like "The Office", but about Dunder Mifflin's parent company, which happens to be an evil conglomerate. Here's the opening minutes of the premiere:


I had the biggest laughs at episode 4.
Workplace situation: the company installs new motion sensors (for room lights, drinking fountains, paper towel dispensers, etc.)
Absurd: the new sensors can't see black people. They're working on it, but "in the meantime, they'd like to remind everyone to celebrate the fact that it does see Hispanics, Asians, Pacific-Islanders, and Jews."
Rational solution: Since reinstalling the old system costs too much money, the company hires minimum-wage white folks to follow black employees around and activate the sensors. The solution is called "Project White-shadow".
Watch the episode here.

Teenage Textaholics

Crazy statistic via NYTimes:

American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company -- almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.

My friend recently broke up, got back together, and re-broke up with his girlfriend over hours of conversation over many days, all over text message. I just shook my head, and told him to mail me a letter with the details.

For public-transportation-using NYers

... or essentially, all NYers. I really like the subway travel time heatmaps on Triptrop NYC.

Put in an address and you get a map of how far away everything is using the subway. 15 minutes, forty minutes, two hours -- all set up with nice little colors. That's pretty easy, I think. Triptrop can help you find a convenient place to live. It's also a nice way to tell your friend to stop inviting you to the purple part of the Bronx, or to prove that the G isn't actually that bad.

Happiness? Yes, please.

What Makes Us Happy? asks Joshua Wolf Shenk in the June 2009 issue of The Atlantic. The article is a dual biography of two intertwined entities, a long-running study of 268 Harvard men and the study's long-time principal investigator, George Vaillant. The study was started as a way to determine how people lived successful lives. Valliant's main interpretation from decades of study is that how people respond or adapt to trouble correlates with their healthy aging.

At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or "psychotic," adaptations -- like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania -- which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the "immature" adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren't as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. "Neurotic" defenses are common in "normal" people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one's feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve "seemingly inexplicable naivete, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ." The healthiest, or "mature," adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).

It sounds like being "normal" has less to do with subsisting healthy behavior and more to do with behaving in a way that makes people like you (see above: normal = not "isolating, not impeding intimacy). And "normal" seems to involve "dissociation", "repression" and "failure to acknolwedge input from a selected sense organ".

Err, I guess it's true, Denial isn't just a river in Egypt.