Luxe is losing its edge

This is from an article in IHT:

Since the 1990s, sales of luxury goods have exploded, along with the growth of a well-heeled new global elite, turning once little-known European brands into giants and transforming chic addresses like Fifth Avenue, Bond Street and the Champs-Élysées into veritable open-air malls for the upper middle class.

Now, reality has caught up with Bulgari and the rest of the industry. Sales at the 125-year-old jeweler rose an anemic 2 percent in the third quarter. Analysts are pessimistic about a recovery in its current fourth quarter, a period that is responsible for an outsize portion of the company's annual results. And demand for luxury goods is expected to drop by 3 to 7 percent next year, according to a recent study by Bain & Company, the first time the sector has recorded an annual sales decrease since Bain began tracking it in the early 1990s.

"Past slowdowns were more regional in nature and people could perceive the end game," Angela Ahrendts, Burberry's chief executive, said in an interview. "This is global. We were with an investor last week who has had to rerun his worst-case scenario five times in the last five months, and we're still not there yet."

Perfume Ingredients: Cat faeces and Whale vomit?

Obviously I have been surfing the guardian website as I found this one on perfume just after the one about theatre critics.

"Many of perfumery's most venerable creations owe their sensuality to the use of animal ingredients with a certain "spray" element: civet, a faecal paste extracted from the anal glands of the civet cat; castoreum, a leathery emission from the genital scent sacs of the castor beaver; ambergris, a briny and vomitous by-product of the digestive system of sperm whales; and musk secreted from the sheath gland of the musk deer have all been popular perfume ingredients. Then things become still more complex: civet may be cut with hair or - brace yourself - infant excrement."

Baby poo in your perfume?

Theatre critics vs bloggers

There's a guardian posting on the possible irrelevancy of critics with the rise of the internet:

"Classical music and dance critics have been declared surplus to requirements on several papers"

Strangers May Cheer You Up, Study Says

This is from nytimes, article by Pam Belluck

How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if you don’t know them at all. And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse’s mood. So says a new study that followed a large group of people for 20 years — happiness is more contagious than previously thought.

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

And what about schadenfreude - pleasure in someone's misery - or good old-fashioned envy when a friend lands a promotion or wins the marathon? “There may be some people who become unhappy when their friends become happy, but we found that more people become happy over all,” Dr. Christakis said.

Professor Cacioppo said that suggested that unconscious signals of well-being packed more zing than conscious feelings of resentment. “I might be jealous of the fact that they won the lottery, but they’re in such a good mood that I walk away feeling happier without even being aware that they were the site for my happiness,” he said.

The effect on happiness was much greater from friends, siblings or neighbors who lived nearby. A next-door neighbor’s joy increased one’s chance of being happy by 34 percent, but a neighbor down the block had no effect. A friend living half a mile away was good for a 42 percent bounce, but the effect was almost half that for a friend two miles away. A friend in a different community altogether can win an Oscar without making you feel better.

“You have to see them and be in physical and temporal proximity,” Dr. Christakis said.

Body language and emotional signals must matter, said Professor Fowler, adding, “Everybody thought when they came out with videoconferencing that people would stop flying across the country to have meetings, but that didn’t happen. Part of developing trust with another person is being able to take their hand in yours.”

Still, they said, it is not clear if increased communication via e-mail messages and Webcams may eventually lessen the distance effect. In a separate study of 1,700 Facebook profiles, they found that people smiling in their photographs had more Facebook friends and that more of those friends were smiling. “That shows that some of our findings are generalizable to the online world,” Dr. Christakis said.

Sadness was transmitted the same way, but not as reliably as happiness. Professor Cacioppo believes that reflects an evolutionary tendency to “select into circumstances that allow us to stay in a good mood.”

Still, happiness has a shelf life, the researchers found.

“Your happiness affects my happiness only if you’ve become happy in the last year — it’s almost like what have you done for me lately,” Dr. Christakis said. Plus, the bounce you get lasts a year tops. Better if your friends can spread out their happy news, and not, say, all get married the same year.

Another surprising finding was that a joyful coworker did not lift the spirits of colleagues, unless they were friends. Professor Fowler believes inherent competition at work might cancel out a happy colleague’s positive vibes.

And people in the center of social networks were happier than those on the fringes. Being popular was good, especially if friends were popular too.

So should you dump melancholy friends? The authors say no. Better to spread happiness by improving life for people you know.

“This now makes me feel so much more responsible that I know that if I come home in a bad mood I’m not only affecting my wife and son but my son’s best friend or my wife’s mother,” Professor Fowler said. When heading home, “I now intentionally put on my favorite song.”

Still, he said, “We are not giving you the advice to start smiling at everyone you meet in New York. That would be dangerous.”

How to Nap.

This is the how to nap article.

Spread the Love, it's Contagious!

Spread, spread the love! One's person's happiness goes a long way

Science & the Soul

Flesh Made Soul

Can a new theory in neuroscience explain spiritual experience to a non-believer?
By Sandra Blakeslee

Just pasting it here so can read it later...
http://www.science-spirit.org/newdirections.php?article_id=740

Biblio biblio boo!

"In 1936, George Orwell published a little essay entitled Bookshop Memories. In it, he recalled his time as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop, a time that was happy only when viewed through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia. Irony might be defined as disgust recalled in tranquillity, and Orwell’s essay is nothing if not full of irony. He was glad to have had the experience, no doubt, but more glad that it was over."

From: Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm by Theodore Dalyrmple
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/28194/sec_id/28194

Confabulation

Confabulation: when people fabricate reasons to explain their own behaviour.

In split brain patients studied by Gazzaniga- patients seem to have an 'explanation' for a certain action eventhough the language centre of the brain ('the interpreter module') has no access to the real cause or motives of the person's behaviour.

The 'interpreter module' is situated in the left brain. When the right brain is flashed with the word 'walk', the patient might stand up and walk away. When asked why he is getting up, he might say, "I'm going to get a Coke." The interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing it had done so.

All these on confabulation, above, I got from Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, page 8-9. (Randomhouse, UK) He goes on at page 21:

“Moral judgement is like aesthetic judgment, when you see a painting, you usually know instantly and automatically whether you like it. If someone asks you to explain your judgement, you confabulate. You don’t really know why you think something is beautiful, but your interpreter module is skilled at making up reasons, as Gazzaniga found in his split-brain studies. You search for a plausible reason for liking the painting, and you latch on to the first reason that makes sense (maybe something vague about colour, or light, or the reflection of the painter in the clown’s shiny nose).”

“Moral arguments are much the same: Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other. When you refute a person’s argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defended was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgement was already made.”