Daily Score Blog

Here's a quick & easy way to encourage people walk more:  give them pedometers (link may be subscription only -- sorry).  A pilot project in BC is doing just that -- and according to one of the participating doctors...

"[P]edometers may be as effective in changing patients' exercise habits as nicotine patches and prescription medications are for quitting smoking."

Research shows that walking at least 5,000 steps per day reduces the likelihood of obesity, and walking 9,000 or more steps per day can increase the odds of being of "normal" weight, rather than overweight.

The thing is, I have absolutely no idea how many steps I take during the average day.  A thousand?  Five thousand? More? It's pretty much impossible to gauge.  But with a pedometer, you know exactly how much you've walked -- which makes it much, much easier to set & meet concrete walking goals.

Perhaps another example of how a little bit of information can carry you a long way.

This is worth reading just because it's interesting:  an article on what actually makes people happy, which often has little to do with what people think will make them happy.

To boil the article down to 3 points (we read, so you don't have to!):

• Small but frequent comforts (say, a pair of shoes that really fits) can do more to make you happy than intensely joyful but infrequent events (say, winning the lottery). When it comes to happiness, frequency trumps intensity.
• People know when we're happy, but we're only so-so at predicting what will bring us lasting contentment.  We assume that big events -- winning the lottery, losing a leg -- will permanently alter our sense of wellbeing.  But apparently we humans are pretty good at getting used to things, and the joy or disappointment of what might seem like "life changing" events can fade pretty quickly.
  
• Finally, when it comes to happiness, comparisons to peers really do matter.  Living in a modest home in a neighborhood of mansions can make you feel lousy, since you're reminded of your relative deprivation every time you leave home.  As one happiness researcher puts it, "the brain is a difference detector; almost everything that it senses, it senses as a comparison."

My takeaway:  I should quit playing the lottery, and use the money I save to buy some new shoes.  Oh, yeah -- and I should never leave the confines of my own house.

Note: This is part of a series.

When Measure 37 passed in Oregon, it triggered an avalanche of imitation. It sparked I-933 in Washington, a ballot measure that would fundamentally re-define how property uses can be regulated. Because the authors of I-933 studied Oregon's law, it's often thought that I-933 is simply an Evergreen State version of 37.

But that's not right. The truth is that I-933 is not a clone of 37 so much as it's a steroid-pumped version of Measure 37. Despite the fact that I-933 weighs in at a hefty 1,600 words, compared to Measure 37's bantamweight 1,000 words, I-933 contains many fewer protections for communities and taxpayers. 

A close reading of I-933 reveals that Oregon's experiences under Measure 37 are not a reliable guide for understanding how I-933 would work. Like Barry Bonds stepping up to the plate, I-933 will have a much bigger effect than its predecessor.

Just how is I-933 "juiced"? Let me count the ways...

A few years back, Vancouver made an ambitious projection:  by 2021, the city hoped, 18 percent of all trips in the city would be on foot or bicycle.

But as this Vancouver Sun article shows (subscription may be required), city residents have already left that projection in the dust. Based on figures for 2004 and 2005, between 27 and 32 percent of all trips in the city are taken courtesy of shoe leather or bike tires -- more than any other North American city, with the exception of the Big Apple. Apparently, Vancouver's approach to transportation and land use -- promoting compact neighborhoods close to downtown, and treating walking, biking and transit as worthy transportation options -- is having its intended effects.

But the news gets better.

Here at Sightline, we're enamored of good visuals--especially maps that tell stories. So I was pleased to find a terrific interactive map published by Save Our Wild Salmon. Scrolling across features in the Columbia-Snake River basin, users learn the story of salmon conservation.

I'm not just talking about pop-up windows that describe the dams and wilderness areas (it has those too). I'm talking about clickable icons that activate movie clips. You hear real people tell their stories of life in a faltering salmon economy, and you see compelling images of the places where people and salmon meet. It's nice work.

 Click here to see the full map.