Many people feel happier on some days, and less so on others. How would you person­ally define your ‘perfect’ day? And no, I don’t thinking staying in bed all day quali­fies as one.

There might be external factors that affect our moods and feelings. Maybe the position of the planets, or events occur­ring elsewhere, have an impact on our lives. If they do, we have a method of finding out. Each day, we can have a poll in which partic­i­pants can rate their day. In general, if the average rating on any day deviates consid­er­ably from the overall mean, and the same day corre­sponds to a ‘signif­i­cant’ event, then we have some evidence supporting our hypothesis.

We should, at the same time, be wary of the tempta­tion to be preju­diced in our analysis. Most ‘studies’ are simply a matter of inter­preting the data in a desir­able way.

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