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I have a little bit of work and extra assignments stacking up on me so tonight is a true open thread night.
But...you know…
I do kinda get into self-help literature; after all, I need all of the help that I can get, so I’ve gotten into the habit of reading Harvard Business School professor Arthur C. Brooks’s column in The Atlantic. His advice for his latest column is: Get Creative!
The 19th-century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky—still popular today for such works as The Nutcracker and the 1812 Overture—was not a happy man. In his 5,365 extant letters to friends and family, we find constant references to his sadness and unremitting anxiety. Over and over, he wrote versions of the line: “I suffered incredibly from depression and hatred for the human race.”
He had just one, temporary analgesic for his misery: “It would be in vain to try to put into words that immeasurable sense of bliss which comes over me,” he wrote in 1878, to his patroness, “[when] a new idea awakens in me and begins to assume a definite form.” [...]
Scholars have demonstrated that creative activities can increase one’s sense of well-being. For example, researchers in 2021 found a strong positive correlation between self-perceived creativity and life satisfaction among both students and working adults. To establish causality, they asked some subjects to think of occasions in their life when they’d behaved creatively. Afterward, these participants reported 28 percent higher well-being scores than those not asked the creativity question.
When scholars look at well-being in a granular way, they find that creativity serves less to raise happiness than to lower unhappiness. Indeed, 46 percent of Americans say they use creativity to relieve stress and anxiety, according to the American Psychiatric Association. In specific experiments, psychologists have found that among people experiencing anxiety and depression, painting lowers symptoms—hence art therapy. Similarly, researchers have shown that poetry therapy, which involves writing and reading poems, can reduce anxiety and post-traumatic-stress symptoms in patients. Other studies have found that simply working on creative solutions to common problems can relieve psychological burdens.
Sometimes I get a little suspicious of Brooks because his stuff occasionally reads like nothing more than marketing material but I do like it when he draws on tried and true material as opposed to the latest studies. This column is worth the read. He even offers some useful hints on getting started with creativity at the end (which I know a number of people here at Top Comments and Daily Kos don’t need).
Just in case that you didn’t know know, the Era of the Swiftie Dads has arrived.
Mary Elizabeth Williams/Salon
I had long been aware of the existence of Swiftie dads — I live with one, after all — but had regarded them as more of the “singing along to ‘Shake It Off’ in the car” variety than the boa-clad men I witnessed strolling up and down the high street that bright June Tuesday. Yet there they were, enthusiastically bonding not just with their families but with each other, sharing a brotherhood in friendship bracelet-clad arms. And we experienced it firsthand when we bumped into an old friend of my spouse, his wife and young daughters in tow, wearing a shirt that read, “Dad (Taylor’s Version).”
Our modern epidemic of loneliness is significantly more dire in men, who today have roughly only half as many friends as they did a generation ago. That isolation can have a significant impact on their mental and physical health and lifespan. They also spend about half as much time with their children as mothers do — and, according to one Pew Research Center poll, the majority of them say that it’s not enough. But as Prince William himself could tell you — Taylor might be able to help you out there on a couple of fronts. [...]
Ben Valenta, coauthor (with David Sikorjak) of 2022’s "Fans Have More Friends," has some advice for the haters. He tells me that “We dismiss Taylor Swift or our daughters’ interest in Taylor Swift as girly or a waste of time to our detriment. It’s an opportunity to connect and deepen our engagement with each other.” And when I describe the scene last week in Cardiff to him, he says, “What you were seeing is fandom in action. There are various layers of interaction happening. The dad is there with his daughters; that's the primary purpose. But the reason to wear the t-shirt is to signal to other dads, ‘Hey bro, I see you,’ and create opportunity for additional social interaction.”
So...are you packing for a trip or a vacation? Are you using the car trunk? Carry-on luggage on a plane?
This story is for you!
Gregory Barber/Quanta
For centuries, mathematicians suspected that hexagonal tiles are the best possible way to fill space. By this they mean that if you want to subdivide a large area into tiles of equal size while minimizing the perimeter of each tile, you can’t do any better than hexagons. In 1999, Thomas Hales of the University of Pittsburgh finally proved it. They’re better than squares, triangles, or any other alternative.
But many shapes can’t be tiled without leaving gaps. Circles, for example, obviously can’t. With the best possible formation, a hexagonal-shaped circle packing, you’ll fill nearly 90.69% of the plane.
In the 1920s, mathematicians began wondering: What’s the worst shape to pack? In other words, what shape forces you to leave the largest gaps, even if you pack it in the best possible way? A new paperby Hales and his former graduate student Koundinya Vajjha, now an engineer at Intel, marks a major breakthrough in the search.
Defining a worst shape requires a few rules. It’s straightforward to come up with arbitrarily bad shapes that contain holes or inward dips...
I guess that the lesson there is what seems simple is highly complex...or something like that!
Finally today, I am just bookish enough that if time machines existed, I would just liked to be dropped off in Alexandria, Egypt sometime between 270-210 BCE at The Great Library and I’d figure it out. I could imagine being a monk in a Middle Ages monastery with the job of writing and preserving texts or maybe even a scribe of Ancient Egypt...well, maybe not a scribe in Ancient Egypt.
But the tasks that scribes carried out were repetitive. Today, office workers seek ergonomically supportive chairs for long hours sitting at a desk. The Egyptian men assumed one of three positions that became an occupational hazard, the study authors found.
Researchers analyzed the remains of 69 men buried at a necropolis in Abusir, Egypt, between 2700 BC and 2180 BC. Thirty of the men were scribes, as marked on their tombs, and their skeletons had more degenerative joint changes within specific areas of their bodies than the other remains.
The findings open a new window into what life was like for scribes in ancient Egypt during the third millennium BC. [...]
Records from that time indicate to researchers that sons of elite families were educated at the royal court.
“At a very early age, in their teens, they enlisted to serve in entry-level positions in various administrative offices to gain the necessary training to further their careers,” Dulíková said in an email. “They then moved up the hierarchy of the offices they held.”
Oh, who and kidding? I’m too damn nosy into other people’s business, of course I would want to know what was going on with the Pharaoh!
Comments below the fold.
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From belinda ridgewood:
In today's Black Kos diary (a Tuesday & Friday diary series that everyone should read!), Denise Oliver Velez brought the firepower of Black Twitter to bear on tfg's racist remark about "Black jobs", and lpeacock followed up with a clip for those who'd unaccountably missed his rally. (Note: this is a tweet-heavy thread. I must say, though, that the content of Black Twitter is one of the few things that tempts me, still, to sign up for an X account.)
Highlighted by KathyM:
This comment by learn in today’s Abbreviated Pundit Roundup by Greg Dworkin.
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