Comments on: Happy Happiest Day of the Year!

By: Lynn

Lynn — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 14:11:00 +0000

Yes, I’ve heard that high school-aged couples breaking up are sometimes given anti-depressants now to combat their sadness! How can you ever be happy to be with someone, and not be sad when you know you won’t be seeing them anymore? And friends that don’t accept your sadness or express sympathy for you? Some friends, huh? I imagine the people who were lucky enough to see Heath Ledger’s work, were touched by him, and I think it was certinly a positive thing that they felt sad at his untimely death. Of course you feel pain at the death of huge numbers of innocent people, but it is different from feeling a personal connection to another human being, even though it may be only through his art. We “feel” within who we are and what we know. I’m sure it’s important to experience other realities, too, though.

By: Meg

Meg — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 07:18:23 +0000

Probably just ’cause the lowest value on the graph is a lil above -4, and the highest is a lil below 27? It does make for weird subdivisions along the axis, though.

By: Village Idiot

Village Idiot — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:41:09 +0000

Yes, but why does the Y-axis start with -4 and end at 27 (not that it matters, really)?

By: Juliem

Juliem — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:04:17 +0000

When my nephew and I both, in separate posts, commented on FB that we were particularly unhappy this last Thanksgiving (he because two of his grandparents died this year, and I because of the recent passing of my father, we were both taken to task by “friends.” (Oddly enough, all of the “how dare you not be grateful for what you have” statements included references to currently serving military personnel.)

My point is that it is often socially unacceptable, maybe now more than at other times, to express “inappropiate” unhappiness during the holidays.

By: Village Idiot

Village Idiot — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:55:17 +0000

If you’re from the US. A billion to the British (and others) is a million million, not a thousand million.

In the apparently outdated math I was taught, a million million has twelve zeroes in it: 1,000,000,000,000. In the US we call that a “trillion.” How many zeroes does the British trillion contain?

By: Jess

Jess — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 08:28:47 +0000

If you’re from the US. A billion to the British (and others) is a million million, not a thousand million.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 02:14:55 +0000

If you follow the links the graph is for GNH, gross national happiness, which is the sum of positivity and negativity measures. So more negativity in updates would lead to a negative GNH.

By: Village Idiot

Village Idiot — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:40:48 +0000

Uh, and why does the Y-axis start with -4 and end at 27? That’s just weird.

By: Village Idiot

Village Idiot — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:35:52 +0000

Well, it was only the saddest day for Facebook users. After all, he was a face that a lot of other faces thought was totally hot so it was, like, so sad when they had to delete it from the Face Book of Life. It also shows how narrow the worldview must be for the majority of Facebook users.

Most Facebook users didn’t personally know Heath Ledger at all. Likewise, they also didn’t know any of the 50,000 people killed in an earthquake in China in the spring of 2008 or any the 75,000 people killed during a cyclone in Myanmar as well, but somehow Mr. Ledger’s death was felt as a personal loss to them and became the saddest day of their year. To be fair, I’d bet most of those affected by the earthquake and cyclone had no idea who Heath Ledger was, either. On the other hand, I hope the forlorn masses of Facebook at least appreciate how good they have it if their saddest day is the death of one guy they’ve never met or likely even seen in person before.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their associated dead and wounded are just baseline background noise now, and the low-amplitude cyclical oscillation that makes up the majority of the year’s results implies that even if Facebook is ostensibly a ‘social’ network, it is a relatively homogeneous, insular, and self-referential one. Like Marge said above, the peaks and valley probably reveal the Monday=sad Friday=happy cliche of both students and the 9-to-5 crowd.

If we’re talking about people who not only think inside the box, but who live, work and recreate inside it too, then deleting 125,000 faces who were probably never in the Book of Faces in the first place would certainly not be as tragic as deleting a single one of this two-dimensional paradigm’s exalted archetypes.

By: Nataly

Nataly — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 05:49:17 +0000

It’s a sad day that a lot of people have in common.

By: cmb

cmb — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 02:53:13 +0000

I can’t believe Heath Ledger dying was the saddest day of the year! I mean, it was sad, yeah, but really?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 19:55:29 +0000

From the original page it seems they just used US data.

By: Quijotesca

Quijotesca — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:54:12 +0000

Uh, no, New Years Eve is third. Is that not what you were looking for?

By: Oh you, Wiki Figures.

Oh you, Wiki Figures. — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:34:48 +0000

two thousand million is two billion

By: Lilly

Lilly — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:31:38 +0000

Don’t forget everyone writing “‘Happy’ Thanksgiving” in their status.

Actually, I’m surprised it comes out ahead of “‘Merry’ Christmas” and “‘Happy’ Holidays”. Maybe that is because people actually have things to do on those holidays because they are not super lame like Thanksgiving is, so people are not busy using Facebook.

New Years is conspicuously missing from that chart.