Things Are Good

Stay Young By Enjoying Art

Who doesn’t like art? If you find yourself answering “me” to that question then perhaps you should check out different galleries. Recent research has shown that people who regularly engage with art and feel something about it tend to age slower. Even engaging with art all east once a month show a 3% decrease in aging speed. Neat!

Stay young, enjoy art, live life.

“These results demonstrate the health impact of the arts at a biological level,” said Daisy Fancourt, the study’s lead author and the head of University College London’s social biobehavioral research group, told The Guardian. “They provide evidence for arts and cultural engagement to be recognized as a health-promoting behavior in a similar way to exercise.”

The study was conducted among 3,356 adults between 2010 and 2012, and included survey data and blood tests. Individuals’ rate of aging was assessed according to epigenetic clocks, which are analytic methods that track age-related changes to DNA and can be used to estimate biological age, which may differ from a person’s chronological age.

In Vienna Anyone Can Build a Park

A picture of an urban small public garden / sitting space. Grätzloasen

To make Central Park in New York City they rated entire neighbourhoods and forcibly moved people, today in Vienna you don’t need to push anybody out of the way or destroy anything to get a park. Vienna, like most cities, has a lot of room for new playgrounds, patios, performance, and whatever else you can use open space for. To make use of this space the city has opened up the ability to make a parkette to anyone, so if you want a new park in your area just go ahead and do it (ok, after you fill out some forms). These new small-scale parks even get a weird name: Grätzloasen.

This is a great initiative and I hope that other cities take the same approach.

“While we were building it, I remember there were a few people looking at it very weirdly. A few days later, we had neighbours say: ‘Why would you take away a parking space?’” Jana says.

But they seem to have come around. This spring the grätzloase saw more construction as they installed a retractable sunroof. “We had a weekend of building together. Everybody that walked by said: ‘Oh! This is so nice.’”
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Building parklets could be one way of warming people up to the idea. Sabrina Halkic, the managing director of Local Agenda 21, describes them as an example of “tactical urbanism” – low-cost, often citizen-led improvements to the built environment. She sees the grätzloasen as a gateway to further changes.

When You Read, Do You Hear Voices?

books

Do you read fiction? Do you find yourself ‘hearing’ the different character voices as you read them (other than audiobooks, naturally). Do you picture the world the story is set in great detail? These are the sort of questions that Reader Bank is all about. It’s a new research project looking into longitudinal behaviours of readers and how it relates to, well, who readers are and how they think. It’s an ambitious project that you can be a part of no matter how much or little you read. Maybe doing their studies will motivate you to read more.

ReaderBank is the world’s most ambitious study of reading, imagination, and wellbeing. Every day, readers around the world lose themselves in novels or poetry, but how and why that happens can be mysterious and unexpected. With ReaderBank, we are aiming to collect a variety of information on what it is to read and imagine. From lively festivals like the Edinburgh International Book Festival and Jaipur Literature Festival, to our own workshops and projects, we collate stories of how literature touches lives across the globe.
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ReaderBank explores reading experiences to understand how we imagine, how we think, how we feel, and how we inhabit our everyday worlds.

Protecting Canadian Privacy and Sovereignty

Peace Tower at Parliament Hill in Ottawa

The Canadian government has made it clear that Canada is all in on AI for better or for worse. Amongst many concerns with the AI approach is the protection of both Canada’s sovereignty and its people’s privacy. Unfortunately the government has opted to not protect privacy and to spy on every Canadian to the point where privacy-first companies are saying they can no longer operate in Canada if the bill passes. Thankfully there are organizations like Open Media that are championing the rights of Canadians and you can help them by signing their recent petition. You cannot have political sovereignty without individual privacy.

Privacy regulators, election experts, and the public have all consistently told the government we need privacy protections to apply to political campaigning. Even Parliamentary and Senate committees say permanent party exemption from privacy law is unacceptable.

But the federal Liberals, Conservatives, and NDP have not only refused to permit any meaningful oversight of their activities; they’ve worked together to thwart it!

Over the last few years, they’ve initiated court challenges and forced through legislation, most recently Bill C-4, that effectively excludes them from normal privacy obligations that would otherwise apply under provincial laws. They’ve even granted themselves immunity from past violations of these privacy laws—going back to the year 2000.

Privacy is not partisan. With AI already supercharging voter micro-targeting, we need real privacy oversight over all party activities in place today. The basic integrity of our democracy depends on getting it right.

Take action now!
Read more.

A Blender Can Improve Your Garden

A small vegetable garden is good for your health, your neighbourhood, your sense of self, and even your pocketbook. In many backyard gardens a simple composter is usually enough to refresh the soil and keep the plants happy. If you’re limited in space you can still make use of your kitchen scraps in a garden using the power of a blender. A household blender can speed up the decomposition process by chopping up food waste into a slurry that will quickly be consumed by all those nice little microbes. When you do this don’t go easy on the water and don’t dump all the slurry in one spot – spread it out for best results.

Blender compost can be made out of any blendable kitchen scraps that you’d normally throw into your compost pile, such as vegetable and fruit peels and cores, cooked pasta, eggshells, coffee grounds, and loose-leaf tea. If you don’t mind a bit more mess, you can also blend in premoistened paper towels, cut flowers, and dried autumn leaves. Just like with any compost, steer clear of blending meat or dairy waste, which attracts pests.