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Right: yes, at the start of July I went to France for a few days... got to see the end of the first stage of the Tour de France at Les Herbiers. It was legit! I was there with a politician from South London who knew all about the history of it, too. About half a kilometer past us was the 60-person bike crash. Spectators need to pay attention!!! People die on the Tour almost every year. Pretty intense sport. Oh, and they were cycling UPHILL at over THIRTY mph!

Below: I stayed one day in Paris with my Aunt Michele, and met up with former Emory Provost and good friend Santa Ono, who was in Paris for a science conference. Amazing company in an amazing place! The Bastille was truly beautiful - wish I had more time to spend at the Champs d'Elysees and the Louvre. However, I had an amazing picnic dinner on the steps of Montmartre my last night there - July 4th. Last night, I watched the French rom-com Amelie, which is filmed almost entirely in that part of town.































Other pictures include the Top Right: picture of me on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower. Couldn't be a happier tourist. Absolutely lovely! Bottom Right: Clifford Tower in York. I took an amazing trip there with friends from Sheffield, one of whom lives within 15 minutes of me in Virginia - but I never met her until I got to England! Bottom Left: Julie Whitehead, one of only two certified Laughter Ambassadors in the UK. Here we're demonstrating the pain threshold assay with a blood pressure cuff. Great way to kick it off!

I've now been to three different Laughter Club sessions, all of a very different nature. A month's time is a reasonable span for collecting pilot project data, as this is the first being done. The economic game that subjects have been playing afterward as a control, combined with the modified ultimatum game which I will detail on the poster - present some provocative suggestions about human nature, again contradictory to rational economic theory.

Even more interesting has been the participant feedback in interviews afterward, and the amount that it teases the brain to think this way on a micro-cosmic level. Almost all subjects indicated it would likely affect the way they approach how they handle money on the macro-cosmic level in the future. I can't wait to summarize this in a paper - I'm sure that's where it starts to get more sticky, though.

Since Blogger is still being annoying, I might have to do one more post to get a few pictures up...