PhD student Alex Davies has set out to discover the happiest places in the world by analyzing Tweets. A noble project! But one that may need some tweaking, given that according to his data, the happiest U.S. state is Tennessee (tied with Arizona as the eighth most-unemployed state in the union) , and the happiest country is Germany (which, c'mon, it's Germany; if it were a happy country we wouldn't have had two different world wars).

Then again, maybe Tennessee and Germany are happy because big-city American jerks like us don't ever visit? You can see interactive maps, including the most frequently-used "happy" and "sad" words ("nice," "best" vs. "migraine," "preciso") at Davies' website. [Alex Davies]