Desi In Toronto

This definitely qualifies as the site of the day!! Let the applet load and have fun. From the mission statement :

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

“Harvesting human emotions”. Isn’t that an awesome idea? I think I am going to spend some time on this site and I hope to come across some fabulous blog!!

……why do we have a prayer in the legislature?

McGuinty’s move has left more than a few citizens and politicians peeved. Reactions ranged from those advocating that the prayer should be kept not necessarily as a nod to Christianity but in recognition of Ontario’s heritage; to those who would outlaw religious expression in the public square altogether; to people who believe Canada is a Christian country that must retain its Christian flavour.

Some would alternate the prayer with invocations from other faiths, while others have wondered whether the Lord’s Prayer is ecumenical in spirit. How can anyone object to its universal teachings and ideals?