Delicious LiveJournal Links for 12-1-2008

• Map of the Market
  Very nice visualisation of the US stock market, broken down by type of company.
  (tags: web2.0 visualization tools technology stocks trading)
• Group therapy "beats depression"
  The study, funded by the Medical Research Council, found MBCT, developed in 2002 by a team of psychologists from Canada, Oxford, and Cambridge, was actually more effective than medication in improving patients" quality of life.
  (tags: counselling cbt meditation psychology)
• Alone Together
  In American lore, the small town is the archetypal community, a state of grace from which city dwellers have fallen (thus capitulating to all sorts of political ills like, say, socialism). Even among die-hard New Yorkers, those who could hardly imagine a life anywhere else, youâ™ll find people who secretly harbor nostalgia for the small village theyâ™ve never known. Yet the picture of citiesâ”and New York in particularâ”that has been emerging from the work of social scientists is that the people living in them are actually less lonely. Rather than driving people apart, large population centers pull them together, and as a rule tend to possess greater community virtues than smaller ones.
  (tags: cities society sociology)
• Master Foo Defines Enterprise Data
  Very funny, very wise.
  (tags: management excel spreadsheet database enterprise)
• Black Mesa Mod for Half-Life 2
  An awesome trailer. I"ll be downloading this and playing it through, if they ever actually finish it.
  (tags: games HL2 half-life)
• Naked Movie Spoilers
  100 movie spoilers in under 4 minutes in one take. Naked.
  (tags: movies funny spoilers)

I'm off to shower, shave and read the end of Absolute Sandman. Try to behave

[Poll #1307515]

Feeling the need to say _something_

I just got unfriended by someone who's been on my friends list since, ooh, 2001.

When I first joined LJ I added a whole bunch of people I didn't know, anyone whose journal interested me, anyone who seemed like they might be a friend, if only they lived in the same place I did.

And then, over time, as more local friends filled up my friends pages, some of these people got moved off of my commonly viewed friends pages. They never vanished entirely, and I'd check in on them occasionally, but I don't spend _all_ my time online, and there was no way I could keep up with everyone on my friends list and ever leave the flat.

But it seemed churlish to remove people who had been reading me all that time - even if they weren't actually reading me back either (and I had no real way of telling). I almost never write friends-only, but I felt that preventing perfectly decent people from reading the posts that were filtered purely to prevent work/parents from reading them was a bit churlish. And so they sit there, largely unread, largely uncommenting.

Part of me feels like having a clear out, and reducing my friends list down to people that either _are_ friends, or are actually read by me on a regular basis.

Part of me thinks that I shouldn't make that decision tonight.