Sociology: Popularity of a Person or a Country

Which is more popular? A country or a person? Consider the country called Sierra Leone located in west Africa.Sierra Leone is known for its diamonds, the devastating civil war which lasted for 11 years, and its role in the slave trade centuries past. Most people have heard about the country but do they know anything more than that?

Now compare with a person's name. Obviously, there's very few people with the full name Sierra Leone*. However, there are people with the last name of Leone. There's two methods here to see who's or what is more popular and both uses Google. The first is a simple Google Image search for 'Leone' which can be seen as follows:

From the first screen, the statistics for each image linked to the country or a person as are as follows for the first 23 images shown:

Sierra Leone: 7
Sunny Leone: 5
Ashley Leone: 1
Pino Leone: 1
Matthew Leone: 3
Rudy Leone: 1
Jim Leone: 1
Jennifer Leone: 1
Donna Leone: 1
Paola Leone: 1
Carlo Leone: 1

Clearly, Sierra Leone does lead but not by much. Combined, from the image relation percentage, the popularity of people with the last name Leone is much greater than that of the country of Sierra Leone. Taking a look with method two of examining number of Google searches for each of the 10 people and the country Sierra Leone reveals the following number of results in order:

1. Sierra Leone: 380,000,000
2. Sunny Leone: 57,400,000
3. Jennifer Leone: 16,500,000
4. Jim Leone: 15,000,000
5. Mathew Leone: 12,200,000
6. Donna Leone: 12,100,000
7. Ashley Leone: 11,000,000
8. Carlo Leone: 9,400,000
9. Paola Leone: 4,740,000
10. Pino Leone: 3,820,000
11. Rudy Leone: 2,800,000

Combined, the 10 people searches amount to 144,960,000 or over 1/3 of the amount of information for Sierra Leone. Clearly, the information for Sierra Leone still dominates but there is much interest in the people as well. As a sidenote, an interesting lineup of the popularity level of these people and what they do highlights what much of society has their minds wrapped around. In the order of the number of results by Google and removing the names Jennifer Leone and Jim Leone which are due to people with a really popular first name, people's minds are focused on:

1. Hot girls (Sunny Leone or Pino Leone)
2. Music (Matthew Leone or Ashley Leone)
3. Crime novels or fictional Venice (Donna Leone)
4. Science or justs Canavian disease (Paola Leone)
5. Politics (Carlo Leone)
6. Horses (Rudy Leone)

This is not very surprising at all given that to most people, politics and equestrian (art of horse riding) are hardly interesting, while almost no one will object to music and no guys will object to hot girls. Still,  the good sign remains that the country information still ranks first. Perhaps this shows that global politics is still interesting to many people but politicians are not since they come and go. *By the way, did you know that there's a town in Sierra Leone named Shen Ge? I plan to go there one day.

Self-improvement: Balance of Thoughts on Time

I'm listening to some R&B while sipping on some green tea. My bedroom is tranquil and despite the time of the day has a feeling of permanent lethargy. It is an amazing ambience for reflection or slacking off but a terrible ambience for doing any real work. I use this thought to comfort myself on why I'm writing this instead of doing real work.

When I drive my mind naturally wanders, like yesterday when I daydreamed an epic story in my head for a good hour or so where a god had to do evil to ultimately achieve good but the heroes stayed ignorant of that until the end. There were some amazing graphic scenes and plenty of betrayals and unnecessary deaths. Let me digress no further. Before I jumped into this golden pit of illusions, I thought of an interesting psychological theory:

"Without a balance between thoughts on the past, present, and future, one can never be happy."

The amount of time one's mind dedicates to reflecting on the past, doing the present, and dreaming for the future should be in balance. For instance, if one excessively reflects on the past, one will be stuck in the mentality of past failures or past glories. This will likely cause the person to not like the present either due to regret of events that could not be changed or the seeming reality that the past is much better than the present. They may both be true but dwelling on it too much is harmful to one's mental stability.

Similarly, if one focuses on the present which is the "just do it" mentality, one can lose oneself in the daily reality of life. Where one came from and where one's going should not be ignored since otherwise one can wake up one morning and feel lost in the world. One has lost the meaning of one's life. Lastly, if one dreams too much on the future, one ends up doing nothing useful since the mind consistently dwells on fanciful daydreams.

So how do we find this balance between these thoughts? That depends on the individual since everyone is different. A systematic approach that may work is what I've been doing lately. Simply carry a notebook around with you and carry around a phone with an alarm. Set alarms for random times during the day. When the alarm sounds, write down three things: the time, what you're thinking, and how happy you are. At end of each day, you can take a look at your notebook and see a collage of snapshots of your thoughts during the day. You can repeat this for a week and observe the consistency of your thought inclinations.

Literature: On a Blue Day

Note: Just another exercise in dramatic writing. Just to let you know that I'm honest and will never go anywhere I shouldn't be, I never did any of this. All imagined in my mind and expelled henceforth from it!

I'm not in the library for its books or its "esteemed" educational value. I'm here for it offers me an expansive solitude that I can find little of elsewhere. This was the feeling I had even before I found a key to the roof top. I was in the elevator going up.

Second floor. The only person beside me in the elevator was a short girl with a large backpack. We were in a pseudo-comfortable silence. The backpack was pink. I glanced at her shoes. They were also pink. I turned away and silently counted in my head waiting for this pink monstrosity to leave.

Fourth floor. The door opened and the eyesore thankfully departed. I quickly punched the button to close the door before anyone could get in. Not that I could see anyone waiting in front of the elevator but you could never be too careful ensuring zero disturbance.

My current mood was an unstable system and the slightest perturbation may cause it to fall into the more stable mood best described as handling reality. Rare moods have to be preserved in a state of unstable equilibrium for as long as possible. It's like taking psychedelics once in a while to connect with the universe but doing that too much will seriously impair with handling reality. But regardless these rare moods must be preserved for how else could you experience the spectrum of your mind?

Sixth floor. Philosophical musings shoved aside, my mind returned to the practicality at hand. Leaving the elevator, I surveyed the area next to the stairs. No one in sight. Climb? Yes! My internal voice had to shout.

I went up and saw a door with a keyhole. Glanced back again and saw no one. I turned the key and walked out into the sun. The roof top was empty as expected.

I chose a boring day to be up here. No clouds. Just an aimless infinite blue. No wind. Just flocks of crows or ravens flying aimlessly. A slight breeze? Probably the downwash from their wings or more likely my imagination.

I sighed and walked towards the edge. Funny how there's no guard rails. If someone falls off though, they'll be all over it with regulations and whatnot. That's the funny thing about this country. One person's carelessness instantly means everyone else has suddenly irrevocably turned stupid.

I walked along the edge. If I fall off, there may be some interesting consequences. Quick images flashed through my mind like a film fast forwarded X16. I lose my footing on my next step and I topple over the side with a yelp. Good that I already have numbers prepared in my head in case something like this happens. Every floor is ~3 meters tall. There's approximately 7 floors making it 21 meters tall. Terminal velocity for a skydiver of around my weight is about 50 m/s. Obviously, I won't reach terminal velocity but how many seconds will I have? Every second my body is gaining velocity of ~10 m/s. This means I have about two seconds to think of anything in my last moments. This approximation isn't good enough, some part of me wanted to say.

I told it to shut up. Am I really going to squander my last moments trying to resolve the time of flight before I can no longer model myself as a rigid body or point mass? That's somehow comically absurd.

Third floor. Time does slow down in your last moments. Somehow I was able to think all that and I'm still just half-way there. The windows are rushing by at an accelerated pace. No one has noticed me yet. I hear the wind howling by. Maybe I'll suddenly sprout wings and fly. Will they be a mechanical contraption or magical? I spared a moment to ponder on which one I preferred. I decided that I'll go with both for redundancy. Saving myself should be a system with no single point of failure.

First floor. Sadly, daydreaming really doesn't help with developing powers in reality. The grey ground flew towards me mercilessly. I saw two people glowing white standing close to where I was soon to land with a crunching splat. They were smiling. Are they angels?

Odd, I almost did think I saw two glowing entities down there. I blinked. There were just two students there talking. I stopped my daydreaming on the edge of the roof. I stepped back and turned around. Either I have briefly entered the twilight zone or I really needed some sleep. Either way my mood was gone and this short venture was done. I went back inside and closed the door quietly behind me.

Self-improvement: Not What You Do But Why You Do

It's very important to realize before you do anything, the reason you're doing it. If it's not for a meaningful purpose, you probably should not be doing it. And you should always be truthful to yourself on the real reason why you're doing it.

It's often easy to trick your mind into thinking on one reason you're doing something when that really is not the real reason. Do not just stop at your mind; look at your heart and ask how you feel. Most of us are gifted with conscience within our hearts and more often than not that'll be the gate which can see our true reason rather than the reasons given by our complicated mind.

For instance, today, I was thinking that I should isolate myself again to try to get a lot of work done to make up for slacking off recently. This is what my mind was saying. But then I asked my heart and it said only one word "guilt". If my heart had said something like "triumph" or "expectation", that'll be different. But I cannot base this action on this feeling since I understand enough about myself that I can be easily distracted when I'm completely isolated. And I know that more "guilt" will be tacked on the present "guilt" because I'll be ignoring other obligations I need to do today if I just completely isolate myself. I'm just digging a larger hole for myself.

The heart is simple like that--emotions that can be expressed in one word can say more than any fancy reasoning needing a paragraph. And it typically is more honest than your mind but do both to confirm.

So to sum it up, two things to keep in mind as going through life:

1. Before doing any activity, ask yourself why you're doing it.

2. Know the real reason on why you're doing it by looking at both your mind and your heart. In other words, your reasoning and your emotion.

Self-improvement: Cycle of Thoughts and Moods

While wondering why I was feeling mildly depressed earlier, I had a mild epiphany. Negative moods like depression is definitely not a bad thing. In fact, I realize now that sometimes I like to be unhappy. Without these negative moods, how can I come to revelations like this one?

Moods are not meant to be controlled but they should be influenced to form right proportions.

One should not expect to be happy all the time but neither should one expect to be depressed all of the time. An excess of negative or positive moods surely limits one's experience and perspective. The trick is to attain the right proportion of all these feelings so that life can be experienced in its entirety without being blinded by overwhelming joy or overwhelmed by hopeless despair.

Moods cannot be controlled directly but thoughts can. And a consistent string of thoughts form the mood. So if one can direct the thoughts into a coherent picture, the mood naturally forms. The idea is to control one's thoughts.

How do one control one's thoughts? Besides just forcefully controlling one's thoughts (which may be very hard), there are multiple options to indirectly affect it as well. For me, these two work well:

1. Do things that are conducive to certain thoughts.

2. Go into environments that influence thoughts in a certain way.

For instance, if I want to feel depressed and alone, I'd like to find myself in an abandoned construction site on a wet cold day doing absolutely nothing but thinking. If I want to feel happy and sociable, I'll hold a party or talk to random people. If I want to feel imaginative and creative, I'll write my novel. If I want to feel focused and alert, I'll write some code or work on building something.

Many people have the notion that they have to feel a certain way to do something. But it's really a cyclic approach. One can do something because one feels a certain way. On the other hand though, if one does not like how one feels at the moment, why not do something or go somewhere to change one's thoughts so as to change one's mood?