Lighted Mercury Lantern Sale

 

Lighted Mercury Lantern Sale Dear Almanac Readers,   Decorative and portable, Mercury Lanterns have a speckled glow perfect for a patio or dining room table. Right now, you can save $5 on each lantern when you buy 2 or more. Choose from blue, silver, and champagne to create the perfect nightly atmosphere.  Use coupon code GLOW at checkout Shop the Lantern Sale

Vegetables Never Looked So Good

Vintage Designs in Full Color The Vegetable Mug features vintage illustrations that are just as detailed as they are colorful. This mug makes the perfect gift for the gardener in your life, even if that’s you! Shop Now

What can we learn from the humble cow?

Find out in a poem from 1936! This wooden sign features a poem that originally appeared in The 1936 Old Farmer's Almanac. It's a thoughtful meditation that's inspirational for our busy lives.

For most people, the average day follows a pattern of peak, trough and rebound.

 

1. For most people, the average day follows a pattern of peak, trough and rebound.

Some of life’s patterns hide in plain view, so commonplace that we don’t even notice them. Two professors of sociology from Cornell discovered one such pattern fairly recently while studying Twitter trends. These scholars analyzed half a billion tweets from over 2 million users in 84 countries to find what people were feeling and when they usually had those feelings.

They found that there is a pattern of peak, trough and rebound during the course of a day for most people. The morning tweets tended to be more positive, hopeful and energetic. This positivity would taper off during the afternoon until about 5 p.m., and then pick back up by early evening. This pattern was the same across time zones, cultures, climates, religious value systems and geographical location. This positive affect was generally higher on weekends, but the basic shape of the curve remained intact: peak, trough, rebound.

Other studies have examined factors related to positive and negative affect, like feelings of happiness, warmth toward others, general enjoyment of life and emotional stability. Unlike the Cornell study, which extrapolated mood from tweets, these studies involved self-reported feelings on a pre-established rating system, which increases accuracy of the findings (although it’s hard to beat a sample size of 500 million tweets!). In all these cases, the shape of the curve was extremely similar.

These findings have remarkable and important implications for life and when to make decisions.