Interesting! Note the happiest people tend to live in third world countries! Could it be wealth and happiness are negatively correlated?

"Costa Rica abolished its army more than 50 years ago, is the most environmentally friendly country in the world – and instead of saying, ‘Hello’, people say, ‘Pura Vida’, or ‘Good Life!’

They also have great coffee.

No surprises, then that it topped this year’s Happy Planet Index as the happiest country in the world.

Rather than ranking countries by wealth, or consumer goods, the HPI ranks countries for offering long, happy lives, clean air and water, and citizens who feel satisfied with their lives.

New Zealand Mexico, India, Norway and Madagascar score highly, as does Vietnam.

Britain – despite its prosperity – barely scrapes into the top 50 countries at 41, although we at least beat France at 50.

America scrapes in at 105th out of 151 countries, in the survey – due to bad environmental record, and lower happiness rating.

Each measure – life expectancy, environmental factors, and happiness – are given a ‘traffic light’ status by the HPI.

Happiness is gauged by a Gallup measure called the Ladder of Life, where respondents are told there are 10 steps – from the best life possible, to the worst, and to imagine which one they stand on.

The poll was conducted by researchers asking people in each country how they felt – as well as measuring environmental and health factors."====http://metro.co.uk/2014/11/21/worlds-hap...0-4956836/

"History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake."--Joyce

I think of an old chair in my living room. The chair in the mind is a cloud of associations, memories, and propositions that coexist in my mind. Further thought about what the chair is reveals abstract relationships, principles of science, atomic particles, cohering forces, a history of events that happened to it, and a mathematically-based spatio-temporal geometry.

Now lets examine the chair itself. I touch it and examine it. I push on its cushions and squeeze it. I sniff it. I discern defects in its materials and fabric. Stains and holes and lumps and odors and faded surfaces. The chair itself is somewhat less than ideal. The chair reveals itself incrementally thru my perceptions of it. Never revealed all at once, it is the "in itself" noumenal thing at the unraveling core of my senses and thoughts.

The chair is NOT, iow, my mere thoughts or perceptions of it. It is constituted independently of any consciousness I have of it.

Here we stand on the precipice of an infinite gap. The thought and the thought about. The chair as I think it and the chair as it is. How does one connect to the other? How does an abstract construct of my own mind come to be about and refer to an essentially unthinkable object outside of my mind? Where do they intersect?  And how is it that they reciprocally contain each other?

Being is paradoxically accessible thru an introcerebral process as the negative or blanked out locus of that process in an extracerebral continuum. Being arises as the negative terminus of the ideational construct--the unthinkable that our thought is about. Everything we know about the chair is knowledge or information in our mind. But it is knowledge and information about something that is beyond that knowledge or information--an object that exists physically and absolutely as a being in itself. Being is the source of all knowledge and information, being revealed by it while simultaneously and infinitely transcending it forever.  

Good dessert dish for the holidays. In one large bowl, dump one large Cool Whip, one large cottage cheese, one large strawberry jello, 2 bags frozen strawberries, and stir till mixed. Refrigerate overnight and you got your basic delectable pink stuff. You can also do orange stuff, peach stuff, blue stuff, and even cherry stuff. Guests will gobble it up.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-...extrinsic/

EXCERPT: Intrinsic value has traditionally been thought to lie at the heart of ethics. Philosophers use a number of terms to refer to such value. The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such,” or “in its own right.” Extrinsic value is value that is not intrinsic.

Many philosophers take intrinsic value to be crucial to a variety of moral judgments. For example, according to a fundamental form of consequentialism, whether an action is morally right or wrong has exclusively to do with whether its consequences are intrinsically better than those of any other action one can perform under the circumstances. Many other theories also hold that what it is right or wrong to do has at least in part to do with the intrinsic value of the consequences of the actions one can perform. Moreover, if, as is commonly believed, what one is morally responsible for doing is some function of the rightness or wrongness of what one does, then intrinsic value would seem relevant to judgments about responsibility, too. Intrinsic value is also often taken to be pertinent to judgments about moral justice (whether having to do with moral rights or moral desert), insofar as it is good that justice is done and bad that justice is denied, in ways that appear intimately tied to intrinsic value. Finally, it is typically thought that judgments about moral virtue and vice also turn on questions of intrinsic value, inasmuch as virtues are good, and vices bad, again in ways that appear closely connected to such value.

All four types of moral judgments have been the subject of discussion since the dawn of western philosophy in ancient Greece. The Greeks themselves were especially concerned with questions about virtue and vice, and the concept of intrinsic value may be found at work in their writings and in the writings of moral philosophers ever since. Despite this fact, and rather surprisingly, it is only within the last one hundred years or so that this concept has itself been the subject of sustained scrutiny, and even within this relatively brief period the scrutiny has waxed and waned....

http://theyoungsocrates.com/2014/12/08/e...its-roots/

EXCERPT: Economics explains how people interact within markets to accomplish certain goals. People; not robots. And people are creatures with desires, animalistic urges that guide them into making conscious – but also unconscious – decisions. That sets them apart from robots, which act solely upon formal rules (If A, then B, etc.). [...] humans are biological creatures who (might) have got a free will, an observation which makes their actions undetermined and therefore unable to captured in terms of laws.

[...] Don’t we never ‘just want’ to go out, ‘just want’ to buy a new television, ‘just want’ to go on holiday? Yes we do: it seems that – sometimes – we just happen to want things: we don’t know why, we don’t have explicit motives for our desires. [...] how on earth could economists know – let alone capture these actions in laws? That’s only possible if you make assumptions: very limiting assumptions.

Rational choice theory is a framework used within economics to better understand social and economic behavior by means formal modeling. But if this sense of understanding – that is possible only through formalizing humans’ behavior – is only possible by treating humans like robots, what then is, on a conceptual level, the difference between economics and artificial intelligence...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...111559.htm

RELEASE: Yamal Peninsula in Siberia has recently become world famous. Spectacular sinkholes, appeared as out of nowhere in the permafrost of the area, sparking the speculations of significant release of greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere.

What is less known, is that there is a lot of greenhouse gas methane released from the seabed offshore the West Yamal Peninsula. Gas is released in an area of at least 7500 m2, with gas flares extending up to 25 meters in the water column. Anyhow, there is still a large amount of methane gas that is contained by an impermeable cap of permafrost. And this permafrost is thawing.

"The thawing of permafrost on the ocean floor is an ongoing process, likely to be exaggerated by the global warming of the world´s oceans." says PhD Alexey Portnov at Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Climate and Environment (CAGE) at UiT, The Arctic University of Norway.

Portnov and his colleagues have recently published two papers about permafrost offshore West Yamal, in the Kara Sea. Papers look into the extent of permafrost on the ocean floor and how it is connected to the significant release of the greenhouse gas methane.

Permafrost, as the word implies, is the soil permanently frozen for two or more years. For something to stay permanently frozen, the temperature must of course stay bellow 0°C.

"Terrestrial Arctic is always frozen, average ground temperatures are low in Siberia which maintains permafrost down to 600-800 meters ground depth. But the ocean is another matter. Bottom water temperature is usually close to or above zero. Theoretically, therefore, we could never have thick permafrost under the sea," says Portnov "However, 20,000 years ago, during the last glacial maximum, the sea level dropped to minus 120 meters. It means that today´s shallow shelf area was land. It was Siberia. And Siberia was frozen. The permafrost on the ocean floor today was established in that period.

Last glacial maximum was the period in the history of the planet when ice sheets covered significant part of the Northern hemisphere. These ice sheets profoundly impacted Earth's climate, causing drought, desertification, and a dramatic drop in sea levels. Most likely the Yamal Peninsula was not covered with ice, but it was exposed to extremely cold conditions.

When the ice age ended some 12,000 years ago, and the climate warmed up, the ocean levels increased. Permafrost was submerged under the ocean water, and started it´s slow thawing. One of the reasons it has not thawed completely so far, is that bottom water temperatures are low, some -- 0,5 degrees . That could very well change.

It was previously proposed that the permafrost in the Kara Sea, and other Arctic areas, extends to water depths up to 100 meters, creating a seal that gas cannot bypass. Portnov and collegues have found that the West Yamal shelf is leaking, profoundly, at depths much shallower than that.

Significant amount of gas is leaking at depths between 20 and 50 meters. This suggests that a continuous permafrost seal is much smaller than proposed. Close to the shore the permafrost seal may be few hundred meters thick, but tapers off towards 20 meters water depth. And it is fragile.

"The permafrost is thawing from two sides. The interior of the Earth is warm and is warming the permafrost from the bottom up. It is called geothermal heat flux and it is happening all the time, regardless of human influence. " says Portnov.

Portnov used mathematical models to map the evolution of the permafrost, and thus calculate its degradation since the end of the last ice age. The evolution of permafrost gives indication to what may happen to it in the future.

If the bottom ocean temperature is 0,5°C, the maximal possible permafrost thickness would likely take 9000 years to thaw. But if this temperature increases, the process would go much faster, because the thawing also happens from the top down.

"If the temperature of the oceans increases by two degrees as suggested by some reports, it will accelerate the thawing to the extreme. A warming climate could lead to an explosive gas release from the shallow areas."

Permafrost keeps the free methane gas in the sediments. But it also stabilizes gas hydrates, ice-like structures that usually need high pressure and low temperature to form.

"Gas hydrates normally form in water depths over 300 meters, because they depend on high pressure. But under permafrost the gas hydrate may stay stable even where the pressure is not that high, because of the constantly low temperatures."

Gas hydrates contain huge amount of methane gas, and it is destabilization of these that is believed to have caused the craters on the Yamal Peninsula.

http://www.universetoday.com/117291/2015...ore-117291

EXCERPT: Together, the space probes Dawn and New Horizons have been in flight for a collective 17 years. One remained close to home and the other departed to parts of the Solar System of which little is known. They now share a common destination in the same year: dwarf planets.

At the time of these NASA probes’ departures, Ceres had just lost its designation as the largest asteroid in our Solar System. Pluto was the ninth planet. Both probes now stand to deliver measures of new data and insight that could spearhead yet another revision of the definition of planet.

Certainly, NASA’s Year of the Dwarf Planet is an unofficial designation and NASA representatives would be quick to emphasize another dozen or more missions that are of importance during the year 2015. However, these two missions could determine the fate of billions or more small bodies just within our galaxy, the Milky Way.

If Ceres and Pluto are studied up close – mission success is never a sure thing – then what is observed could lead to a new, more certain and accepted definition of planet, dwarf planet, and possibly other new definitions....