Back in February 2021, 15-year-old Henry Spoering asked Berntsen to help support his Eagle Scout project creating an Orienteering Course at Camp Waluhi'yi in Duncan, Oklahoma. He’d heard about Berntsen’s support for young surveyors from his project sponsor, Marcus Heilman, PLS, of Section 37 Surveying and Mapping. Henry is a seasonal employee of Section 37, so Henry approached the project like any other, applying the skills he’d already learned.

Do you know what a Hedonometer is? Yeah, me neither until just recently. No, it’s not another ancient surveying tool – it’s actually an analysis that determines how happy people are by their tweets.

The Vermont Complex Systems Center analyzes 50 million tweets per day, scoring happiness based on the categories of words that people use. It turns out that the pandemic produced the deepest and longest period of national malaise since the Hedonometer started in 2008. Fortunately, things are trending up as the pandemic is easing in most parts of the country.