I'm not sure it's a brand name so much as a type of cheese.

"It's cheese, Gromit!"

Ok, Oslo would be a small city in the UK - London has 12x the population. Madrid is closer. Paris is great - the ride is very smooth.

The problem is this blog post fails the exact same rule of thumb. Predictable confected contrariaism much like so many others.

The 1973 sonic boom regs were there to protect the US airline industry, not citizens.

Is it imperfect in an unusuable way? Do you have links to alternatives?

Meshcore is the obvious quick answer to alternatives to flood routing

You need different slippery slopes as they're two different visions of a future (or rather past in Orwell's case)

With the slop slope everywhere goes to the same thing, which is how the poster could write that comment: by thinking sloppily.

Downvoted for not starting with "Great question!" /s

The funny thing is that Stonehenge isn't strictly speaking a henge. A henge is an earthwork with a ditch inside a banked earth wall. There might or might not be stones inside the the earthwork.

Additionally funny (and ironic) that the term "henge" comes from Stonehenge, even though Stonehenge is technically not a henge.

Having been brought up on pictures of Stonehenge, I felt a little twang of confused letdown the first time I visited Thornborough. This passes quickly though, and if you're vaguely near North Yorkshire it's well worth a visit. I've had the pleasure of camping at the base of it a few times with fire and mead which makes it all the more fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornborough_Henges

I guess kudos for doing a deep dive into this, but was it necessary?

Aren't all of these types of things (unhappiest day of the year, best day to be born on, age that we're happiest etc) clearly pseudo-scientific/scientistic babble - and brands can then just use them to sell the Scandi (or whatever) lifestyle. Nobody who believes this is going to be swayed by your anaylsis. :)

Yes, it's necessary, and getting more so all the time: lately I've been seeing more and more commentary trying to tie happiness measurements to some political stance: "conservatives are happier than liberals", "women are happier after divorce", etc. And increasingly it's not coming just from random commenters, but from people with real power.

In such an environment it's vital to know if the methodology for measuring happiness is good or bunk.

Should outlets like the NYT be reporting uncritically on pseudoscience? As long as they are I think this kind of work is extremely valuable.

The survey being used was created by a Princeton University psychology professor. It may or may not be useful but there's nothing obviously pseudo-scientific about it. I do not think the linked article writer is making that claim.

"And then an uncomfortable thought: what if someone was reading all of this?"

If you really are a security researcher then that's not true. You already know all this.