Happy Places

This is #55 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community. For most of my life, I’ve loved doing statistical analysis. Part of that, I suppose, is the ‘collector’ in me. And part of it is unearthing information from the data that isn’t obvious, and provides some interesting insights. Recently during my wanderings in the neighbourhood I started observing people’s facial expressions, and wondering if they might be a ‘barometer’ for what’s happening in our local community and the world at large. The only thing I could discern without having to collect data was that people are happier when it’s sunny. Hardly a revelation. So I decided to do some very low-quality highly-unscientific data collection to see what I was missing. On recent walks around the neighbourhood, I identified 20 areas where people were engaged in relatively homogenous activities, that were significantly different from the…