Did You Know? Happiness is Linked to Peacefulness

The countries with the highest well-being tend to be the most peaceful and those with the lowest well-being are the least likely to be peaceful. The findings are from a new Gallup analysis revealing a strong relationship between Gallup’s life evaluation measure and two indicators of country stability.
Read more at GALLUP.com.

I’m sure the gun naysayers would be unhappy to see the US ranked higher on the ‘absence of violence’ graph than the United Kingdom with their tight gun control laws.

Overall, these conclusions are either self-evident or interesting. It depends upon which comes first–well-being or political stability. If people feel good about their government, they will not want to change it. That’s self-evident.

But is the corollary true: If government is stable, do people feel good about themselves? I don’t see evidence of that. Consider dictatorships.

Which begs the question, what is the definition of ‘stable’?

On a side note, one of my core beliefs is that man’s aggressive tendencies are fundamental to his survival. Throughout history, the more violent cultures have won out over their peaceful neighbors. Look at Athens and Sparta.Look at Hitler (short term, but no less destructive). The willingness to fight back, to defend ourselves with whatever means are available, the creativity to come up with new-fangled ways to protect our way of life is critical to our species. I don’t believe we want to breed that out of our genome.

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Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com and TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blog, Technology in Education featured blogger, IMS tech expert, and a bi-monthly contributor to Today’s Author. In her free time, she is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. Currently, she’s editing a thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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Pig Survived Being Buried for Weeks

The Scientist reports that scientists have cloned a castrated male hog that survived for more than a month buried in the rubble after a massive 2008 earthquake in China.

Read more…

Did You Know? Happiness is Linked to Peacefulness

The countries with the highest well-being tend to be the most peaceful and those with the lowest well-being are the least likely to be peaceful. The findings are from a new Gallup analysis revealing a strong relationship between Gallup’s life evaluation measure and two indicators of country stability.
Read more at GALLUP.com.

I’m sure the gun naysayers would be unhappy to see the US ranked higher on the ‘absence of violence’ graph than the United Kingdom with their tight gun control laws.

Overall, these conclusions are either self-evident or interesting. It depends upon which comes first–well-being or political stability. If people feel good about their government, they will not want to change it. That’s self-evident.

But is the corollary true: If government is stable, do people feel good about themselves? I don’t see evidence of that. Consider dictatorships.

Which begs the question, what is the definition of ‘stable’?

On a side note, one of my core beliefs is that man’s aggressive tendencies are fundamental to his survival. Throughout history, the more violent cultures have won out over their peaceful neighbors. Look at Athens and Sparta.Look at Hitler (short term, but no less destructive). The willingness to fight back, to defend ourselves with whatever means are available, the creativity to come up with new-fangled ways to protect our way of life is critical to our species. I don’t believe we want to breed that out of our genome.

The Importance of Running to Man

Man seems an unlikely survivor of the primal world. We don’t have claws like Dinofelis, deadly teeth like Sabertooth, thick skin like early rhinos, or the huge size of a mammoth. How did we escape becoming the favorite snack to all these better-equipped predators?

One way is we learned to run. Not the sprint of a gazelle who can take off and flee at an outrageous pace. Like her, many Pliocene animals relied on quickness and speed to escape predators or catch prey. Few had resources beyond that initial sprint.

We weren’t as swift as our four-legged competitors, but when the gazelle quickly tired and had to stop to regenerate, we kept running. In fact, even then, we could run great distances which enabled us to chase down prey when they tired and overheated.