You know yourself pretty well. But what if a lot of your ideas about yourself — what makes you happy, healthy, and whole — turned out to be wrong? And how would you even find out? You’d probably start by becoming a self-tracker, piling up all kinds of data on your daily life. Then you’d analyze that data, and maybe you’d find that coffee doesn’t help you concentrate after all and that your sleep patterns aren’t correlated to your happiness. You’d almost certainly read The Quantified Life, a blog on self-tracking and self-experimentation. Seth Roberts, the self-experimenter Dubner and Levitt wrote about in 2005, makes frequent appearances.[%comments]
The Quantified Life
TAGS: Happiness
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. You can also watch it on 
This is on a different topic from the book SuperFreakonmics – about the lot of women in India. I didn’t see a blog post about this, so don’t know where else to talk about this.
I’m a (Caucasian) doctor in the San Francisco area with have a lot of patients of Indian origin. I have a couple of points: Female infanticide in India is not a male or female issue (though it is a male chauvinism issue); both genders participate in it. The killing happens inside the hospital delivery room (or the mother’s bedroom if in a rural setting), because once the baby is brought outside the delivery room, it becomes impossible to claim that the baby was born dead. In India, men typically do not enter the delivery room – even the baby’s father. Thus the mother or the midwife has a choice to not to kill the new born baby, but instead to bring it outside the delivery room. I think your article brings this to light. Relatedly, most dowry related decisions during a wedding (how to much to ask, etc.) are usually conveyed by the groom’s mother to the bride’s mother. and subsequent bride burnings are done by the mother in law.
The second point is about the condoms not fitting Indians. Hilarious as it was to read this, I’m not convinced that this is true. All my Indian male patients use US-made condoms (including the standard brand that is synonymous with the word condoms) and not one of them has complained or commented about condoms not fitting. This argues that either the UN-mandated condoms were bigger than the US-made ones (doubtful), or the researchers got this wrong – perhaps they asked the men to try out the condoms before the men were ‘ready’?
This reminds me of why I need an alarm clock. Otherwise, I wake up at 3-4 am for an 8 am class. Having such an external measure of time relaxes me because I don’t have to wake myself up.
I think that playing such a trick on the mind can work when finishing a book. What’s mine? One of the difficulties of writing a book in a roundabout way– is too too too many versions of some chapters. The way to attack this problem is choose one version as a reference point– It does not eliminate the problem when there are 100+ versions of a chapter, but it does control it a bit. I do hope that some computer software company will come up with a solution that makes solving my problem easy in the future i.e., a program that shows the redunancies/overlaps and differences etc between two chapters immediately. Perhaps such a program exists- but I have no time to learn it. Funny!