Bliss (pronounced blis)
(1) Perfect happiness; supreme joy or contentment.
(2) In theology, the ecstatic joy of heaven.
(3) A cause of great joy or happiness (archaic).
(4) A name used for a wide variety of locational, commercial
and artistic purposes.
Pre-1000: From the Middle English blys, blice, blisce, blise, blesse & blisse, from the Old English bliss
(bliss, merriment, happiness, grace, favor), from a variant of earlier blīds, blīþs & blīths (joy, gladness), from the Proto-West Germanic blithsjo & blīþisi (joy, goodness, kindness), the construct being blīthe (blithe) + -s, source also of the
Old Saxon blizza & blīdsea (bliss), the construct being blithiz (gentle, kind) + -tjo (the noun suffix). The early use was concerned almost exclusively
with earthly happiness but, because of the fondness scholars in the Medieval Church
felt for the word, in later Old English it came increasingly to describe spiritual
ecstasy, perfect felicity and (especially), the joy of heaven. In that sense as a verb it remains in common
use in evangelical churches (especially in the southern US) to suggest the “attaining
and existing in a state of perfect felicity”.
The adjective blissful was from the late twelfth century blisfulle (glad, happy, joyous; full of
the glory of heaven). Synonyms in a
general sense include euphoria, happiness & joy while in a theological
context there’s paradise, beatitude, blessedness, elicity, gladness, heaven
& rapture; there is no better antonym than misery. Bliss & blissfulness are nouns, blissy,
blissed & blissless are adjectives, blissful is a noun & adjective and
blissfully is an adverb; the noun plural is blisses.
The unrelated verb bless was from the Middle English blessen, from the Old English bletsian & bledsian and the Northumbrian bloedsian
(to consecrate by a religious rite, make holy, give thanks), from the Proto-Germanic
blodison (hallow with blood, mark
with blood), from blotham (blood) and
originally it meant the sprinkling of blood on pagan altars. The pagan origins didn’t deter the early
English scribes who chose the word for Old English bibles, translating the Latin
benedicere and the Greek eulogein, both of which have a ground
sense of "to speak well of, to praise," but were used in Scripture to
translate Hebrew brk (to bend (the
knee), worship, praise, invoke blessings).
In late Old English, the meaning shifted towards "pronounce or make
happy, prosperous, or fortunate" under the influence of the etymologically
unrelated bliss, (the resemblance obviously a factor in this) and by the early
fourteenth century it was being used in religious services to mean "invoke
or pronounce God's blessing upon" and is unusual in that there are no
cognates in other languages.
State of bliss. Lindsay Lohan embraces her inner Zen, Phuket, Thailand, 2017.
In idiomatic use, a
"bliss ninny" is (1) one unrealistically optimistic (a Pollyanna,
which, in Marxist theory, can align with the concept of "false
consciousness), (2) one who prefers to ignore or retreat from difficult
situations rather dealing with the problem (sometimes expressed as a
"state of blissful ignorance") or (3) a student of theology
intoxicated with the spiritual aspects of the teachings, but ignorant of the
underlying scholarship. A "bliss
out" is the experience of great pleasure, often analogous with a
"love rush" and the state in which one can be said to be
"blissed up". In economics, a
"bliss point" is quantity of consumption where any further increase
would make the consumer less satisfied (as opposed to the law of diminishing
returns where increases deliver pleasure in decreasing increments; a classic
example is alcohol. It's used also in
cooking as the measure of certain critical ingredients (fat, salt, sugar etc)
at which point palatability is optimized.
To follow one's bliss is a notion from pop-psychology and the new age
which advocates using one's awareness of what causes one to experience rapture
as a guide for determining what constitutes authentic and proper living.
Charles O'Rear's original 1996 photograph, licenced in 2000 by Microsoft which used it as the desktop wallpaper for the Windows XP operating system. Much time was spent in Microsoft's compatibility labs working out what would be the most "blissful" opening music (the "startup chime") to accompany the images' appearance upon boot-up.
There are claims that Bliss, the default desktop
wallpaper used in Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system, is the most viewed
photograph of all time. It was taken in
1996 by Charles O'Rear (b 1941) at Sonoma County, a viticultural region in California,
using a Mamiya RZ67 film camera and as used by Microsoft, was barely changed,
just cropped to better suit the shape of computer screens, the green hues
slightly more saturated to render the image more “wallpaper-like”.
Quite how often bliss has been viewed isn’t known. Economists and others use a variety of mathematical
models and equations to calculate numbers where exact or even indicative
records either don’t exist or can’t be relied upon, a famous example of which
is the “piano tuner” problem posed by Italian-American nuclear physicist Enrico
Fermi (1901–1954) for his students to ponder.
The challenge for the students was to create a formula to estimate the
number of piano tuners in Chicago, based only on the known population of the
city. It would thus be a task of extrapolation,
using one constant and a number of assumptions.
Fermi deconstructed his equation thus:
(1) Chicago has a population of 3 million.
(2) Assume an average family contains four members so
that the number of families in Chicago must be about 750,000.
(3) Assume one in five families owns a piano, meaning
there will be 150,000 pianos in Chicago.
(4) Assume the average piano tuner services four pianos a
day and works a for five day week, taking an annual two week vacation.
(5) Therefore, in his (50 week) working year, a tuner
would tune 1,000 pianos. The formula is thus 150,000 divided by (4 x 5 x 50) =
150. There must be around 150 piano
tuners in Chicago.
The method obviously doesn’t guarantee an exactly correct
result but it does provide an indicative number might be off by no more than a
factor of 2-3 and almost certainly within a factor of 10-12 so it’s reasonable
to conclude there will be neither 15 nor 1,500 piano tuners. A number with a factor error of even 2-3 in
most cases is probably not a great deal of help (except to cosmologists for
whom a factor of 10 error remains “within cosmological accuracy” but the piano
tuner problem does illustrate how the concept can work and the more (useful)
constants which are known, the more accurate the result is likely to be
achieved.
Bliss, a little greener and cropped to fit on computer monitors.
Even so, it’s probably impossible to estimate how often bliss has been viewed, even were one to assemble as many constants and assumptions as are available such as:
(1) Number of copies of Windows XP sold.
(2) Number of copies of Windows XP in use in each year
since it was introduced.
(3) Number of users per copy of Windows XP.
(4) Number of instances which retained bliss as
wallpaper.
(5) Number of times per day each user saw bliss.
However, even with those and as many more assumptions as
can be imagined, it’s doubtful if a vaguely accurate number could be derived,
simply because data such as the number of users who changed their wallpaper (or
have such a change imposed on them by corporate policies) isn’t available and
there’s no rational basis on which to base an assumption. However, although any estimate will almost
certainly be out by millions or even billions, the bliss viewing number will be
a big number and it being the world’s most viewed photograph is not
implausible.
One of the reasons for the big number was the unexpected
longevity of Windows XP which proved more enduring than two of its intended
successors, the somewhat misunderstood Windows Vista and the truly awful
Windows 8, the ongoing popularity of the thing meaning Microsoft repeatedly
extended the end-date for support.
Introduced later in 2001, with a final substantive update made in 2008,
support for Windows XP was intended to end in 2012 but such was the response
that this was shifted in one form or another to 2014 for the mainstream
products while for specialist installations (such as embedded devices), it
lingered on until 2019. That extension
appealed to the nerd after-market which quickly provided hacks (with titles
like “XP Update Extender”) to allow users to make XP on their desktop or laptop
appear to Microsoft’s update services as one on the devices still
supported. Microsoft could have stopped
this at any time but never did which was a nice courtesy.
More productive but less blissful: the scene in Sonoma County, 2006 after the land was given over to a vineyard.
Another aspect of XP where “bliss point” could be used was that the users interface proved for many something of an ideal, combining the basic design of the model introduced when the object-oriented GUI (graphical user interface) was offered on Windows 95 (and subsequently bolted to Windows NT4) along with a few colorful embellishments. So compelling was this that when, inexplicably, Microsoft introduced something less usable for Windows 8, the nerd after-market quickly mobilized and many “classic menus” appeared, the best of which remains “Open-Shell” (previously called “Classic Shell” & “Classic Start”) and there are those still so nostalgic for the ways of XP that some add it to their Windows 10/11 systems, even though the menu structures of those are a genuine improvement. How many also add the bliss wallpaper (which remains widely available) isn’t known but Microsoft certainly haven’t attempted to suppress the memory, the Office 365 team including it in 2021 in a set of historical images for use with their Teams communication platform.
Microsoft Windows XP: The startup chime.
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