Do we need to be bored?

I saw this article when I was reading through my WSJ this morning: "Boredom enthusiasts Relish Pleasures of Understimulation." Basically it was more of a comedic piece in the Wall Street Journal, but I've often wondered if there is any scientific data suggesting that people in fact need down time, or even boredom to be healthy. The article mentioned something about the fact that people with high levels of boredom are more likely to die from certain conditions such as stroke or heart disease. However, I am reminded about another article I remember reading that talked about the fact that stress gets a lot of bad press as being a major killer, but some study was used that showed that in fact it wasn't necessarily the amount of stress so much as how the person handles stress in their life that was the main contributer to being a problem. In my own life I feel like being able to handle boredom, also known as being "patient", is more of a virtue. Although I can't say I'm as busy and involved as I once was in everything in life, I think that people that are passionate can always find something to do... probably like everything in life, there is a balance to be struck. Let me know your thoughts.

World's first all inclusive simulator

As far as my understanding, this is the first attempt to create a simulator to simulate everything on the planet... I often wonder about the science/math needed to perform simulations like this. From reading slashdot's analysis of this story, it mentioned "Psychohistory". Apparently this is a concept around the idea of not being able to predict every individuals reactions, but using the law of numbers to know the basic motion of society/a group of individual "random" actions. Although probably true over long periods of time, I really wonder how black swans and other theories tie into this idea.

Also, I have questions over what the purpose of this simulation actually is. To begin with, I think there is enough environmental effects seen on the earth caused by elements outside of the atmosphere to question if they would actually be able to predict anything on a large scale such as weather that they would like to know. I'm guessing they'll simulate at least our solar system in this model... but even with that, I'm still hesitant to believe there will be any real use to using this simulation for anything reasonable.

The only thing I can say really seems useful to me is the fact they're collecting all of this data around the earth real time to help create the simulation. Maybe they will be able to see correlations which we didn't recognize before... Hopefully I'll be able to do an update to this story some years in the future.