Counting Feelings

How happy or sad are you? Quantifying feelings is a dilemma for logical, numbers oriented people like me. If we could just measure some of this we could then begin the process of attempting to optimize (or minimize) the feeling.

Remember mood bracelet (or rings) that you could buy to indicate your mood. Based on your body chemistry, they change color based on the emotional state of the wearer. So when anger begins to boil - count to 10 and see if you can keep the ring glowing in the "contentment" color.

The Misery Index tried to simplify the combined economic feeling of unemployment and inflation. I tried to create the Worry Index (see blog 7/2/2010) There is a HPI - Happy Planet Index (guess which color is happy in the picture above). So there are many out there attempting to measure feelings (see blog "Quantify Suffering) 9/1/2010).

J.R. sent me an interesting BBC presentation on the health/wealth/life span has changed in 200 countries in the last 200 years - Hans Rosling This one is worth the 4 minutes to watch (especially the statisticians).

There is a problem with counting to much ---- "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; Everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted." Albert Einstein