Free Hugs

Touching bottom and coming back up.
The Free Hugs Campaign started when the founder (identified as "Juan Mann", a pseudonym and a homonym of "one man"),like so many people in our ever-more-fragmented social world, found himself without friends or family even in his own home town.

He needed a hug. Badly.

He made a "free hugs" sign and stood on a busy street. First one, then several, and finally many people came to hug him, then one another.

How it all started:

I'd been living in London when my world turned upside down and I'd had to come home. By the time my plane landed back in Sydney, all I had left was a carry on bag full of clothes and a world of troubles. No one to welcome me back, no place to call home. I was a tourist in my hometown.

Standing there in the arrivals terminal, watching other passengers meeting their waiting friends and family, with open arms and smiling faces, hugging and laughing together, I wanted someone out there to be waiting for me. To be happy to see me. To smile at me. To hug me.

So I got some cardboard and a marker and made a sign. I found the busiest pedestrian intersection in the city and held that sign aloft, with the words "Free Hugs" on both sides.

And for 15 minutes, people just stared right through me. The first person who stopped, tapped me on the shoulder and told me how her dog had just died that morning. How that morning had been the one year anniversary of her only daughter dying in a car accident. How what she needed now, when she felt most alone in the world, was a hug. I got down on one knee, we put our arms around each other and when we parted, she was smiling.

Everyone has problems and for sure mine haven't compared. But to see someone who was once frowning, smile even for a moment, is worth it every time.

The police intervened. No free hugs around here, you weirdos.

The campaign to legalize free hugs acquired 10,000 signatures and the right to hug has been restored.

Inspiring Video.

See more about Free Hugs at Wikipedia

Warning: Road Music Ahead

Yesterday the blog Deputydog featured a musical highway. Thousands of very precise grooves cut into the road make the car vibrate at different pitches.

There is a link to a video where you can experience driving over the road and listening to the tune.

This is a poor man's answer to Sirius and XM.

Verbal Conversation Clock

From Information Aesthetics comes a fascinating instrument for visualizing the social dynamicas of groups.

The clock is a real-time data visualization displaying a representation of conversation to all people present. The graph shows turn-taking, domination, interruption & activity throughout a conversation.

Look at the image on the left.

The Conversation Clock makes tick marks along concentric rings; like the minute hand on a clock, each cycle contains a single minute of tick marks. The inner rings represent earlier times in the history of the conversation.

Note the changing colors. Each tick mark is colored according to the microphone from which input was received & sized to indicate the amplitude of the associated waveform, so activity & turn-taking become easy to observe, including people not speaking versus dominating the conversation, or aspects such as interruption, silences, and argument also make visual impressions on the table.

This tool would provide useful feedback to participants in group dialogues; people very rarely have accurate awareness about how they are behaving in groups.