Calming Art By Laura Freedman

Almost 20,000 people have downloaded art by my sister Laura Freedman for use as cell phone backgrounds, but recently a small but growing group of calmunist art collectors are buying prints and all manner of items illustrated with her work. The work pictured above is called "Celebrate Today".

My sister is a different sort of calmunist. Her art reminds me of Miro and Klee with a more digital and primitive edge. See more of her art at RedBubble.com

The Roots of Happiness

Harvard Psychologist Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. He suggest that we not believe our own publicity and realize we are better than our worst failures and not quite as good as our proudest achievements.

"From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. In fact, a recent study -- this almost floors me -- a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness."

Here him at Ted Talks at
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

Calm Down...We (Still) Feel Fine

A human outpost that constantly inspires:

"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."

http://www.wefeelfine.org/