In the second video by Brick Experiment Channel I’ve posted here in the past week, a Lego car is repeatedly adapted to cross larger and larger gaps, until it can cross a massive gap just a little narrower than the length of the car. As I said before about their climbing car video, watching the iterative process of improving a simple car performing an increasingly difficult task using familiar design objects is such an accessible way to observe how the process of engineering works.

One of the things you get to witness is when a particular design tactic dead ends, i.e. when something that worked across a shorter gap is completely ineffective crossing a wider distance. No amount of tinkering with that same design will make it work…you have to find a whole new way to do it.

Tags: cars   Legos   video

The escalating costs of being single in America. "We don't seem to like or respect single people and their choices." [vox.com]

A collection of 30 maps made in 30 days. [observablehq.com]

Just sent out the latest issue of the @kottke newsletter. There's been so much interesting stuff on the site lately that it was hard to keep this short. A good way to catch up on things if you've been busy. [mailchi.mp]

This is hilarious but can we just marvel for a moment at the camera work here. There's panning and zooming and the reindeer stayed bang in the middle of the frame the entire time. Respect. [twitter.com]

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For his YouTube channel Listening In, Barnaby Martin analyzed the theme that Radiohead wrote for the 2015 Bond film Spectre, a song that he calls “one of the greatest Bond themes ever written”. Somewhat notoriously (at least around these parts), the producers rejected this theme in favor of a lukewarm by Sam Smith.

After watching Martin’s video, you should watch the Spectre opening credits sequence with the Radiohead theme — it’s so much better than the theme they used in the film.

Tags: Barnaby Martin   James Bond   movies   music   Radiohead   Sam Smith   video

Wait, But Have You Tried– "Have you tried Whole30? Autoimmune paleo? ... Have you tried Transcendental Meditation? ... Have you considered that you’re not allowing yourself to heal?" [newyorker.com]

"There are two classes of problems caused by new technology. Class 1 problems are due to it not working perfectly. Class 2 problems are due to it working perfectly." [kk.org]

Would 100% watch this movie. Indi Jones and the Looted Statuary. [twitter.com]

CT scans of Lego minifigs reveal the incredible precision involved in their manufacture. [scanofthemonth.com]

Americans Need to Learn to Live More Like Europeans. "The U.S. economy could be healthier if it were less reliant on consumption." [bloomberg.com]

Earlier this fall, a bar-tailed godwit set the world record for the longest continual flight by a land bird: about 8100 miles and "flapping its wings for 239 hours without rest". [audubon.org]

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This post, coworker asks for “confidential” help, charity wants us to volunteer for a for-profit company, and more , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Coworker asks me for help “confidentially”

I have a coworker who asks for help with certain processes, which is normal enough in our work, and I’m happy to help. But she also asks that her requests for help be confidential, which is weird (right?). She’ll send emails with “CONFIDENTIAL” in the subject line and then write things like “I’d appreciate this request being kept confidential” in the body of the email.

She’s been in her role for about a decade and I’m just coming up on my one-year mark. We have the same title and basically do the exact same work, so I’m not sure if she’s embarrassed to be asking? Or if she thinks I’m going to blab everytime someone asks for me help? Or it something more serious, where she’s been told to learn these processes but still needs frequent help and doesn’t want word to get back to our manager? What gives?

That is indeed weird! Weird enough that I think it’s possible she’s been told this is stuff she has to figure out how to do on her own. Regardless of the cause though, it’s not really cool for someone to ask you to do work that you can’t mention to anyone else. Of course, that assumes there’s not an actual work-related need for confidentiality; if there is, that would be different but then she should explain that to you.

In any case, ask her! “Jane, I’m happy to help with this kind of thing, but I’m always confused when you ask me to keep it confidential. I’m not comfortable hiding work requests from (manager) if it ever came up, so I wondered why you ask for that.”

2. Charity wants us to volunteer for a for-profit company

I’m a long-time volunteer for a chapter of a well-known national charity. I received an email today sent via our official volunteer email listserv, offering “an exciting opportunity.” The “opportunity” is to volunteer during an upcoming Fancy Event run by a private, for-profit company (i.e. it’s not an event thrown by our charity). Volunteers will drive VIPs between their hotels and the various venues of the Fancy Event over the course of several days. They are asking people to sign up for as many 5.5-hour shifts as they can. The cars will be provided, which tells me that 1) they have a budget for cars but not labor and/or 2) they don’t want to offend their VIPs with the presence of a beater. They are trying to rally well over 100 people over the next four days, which tells me that someone messed up their planning and the VIPs have been left without rides.

In return, volunteers will receive tickets to Future Fancy Event, the price for which averages $110-150, and the for-profit company will make a donation (amount undisclosed) to a local charity of their choosing. Again, the organization that runs Fancy Event is a private, for-profit company; it brought in $40 million in revenue last year (I checked their annual report). They have the nerve to suggest drivers would be doing “a great civic duty” by volunteering. Am I right that this is NOT okay? I know from this blog that it is illegal to volunteer for private companies, but is there any kind of loophole that makes this legal? Even if it’s legal, it feels deeply unethical.

The only thing I can think of that would make this even a little okay is if the nonprofit that emailed you would be the recipient of the per-ride charitable donations, and so they’re trying to drum up lots of drivers to increase the size of that contribution. But you forwarded me the email they sent you and there’s zero mention of it. It appears this charity is just letting itself be used to generate volunteer drivers for a for-profit company, which makes no sense.

You’re also correct that for-profit companies can’t legally use volunteers. A lot of for-profit events do it anyway (offering tickets and access instead of money, just as this one is doing). Generally no one bothers reporting them, often because they’re excited to be part of the event in some way … but usually they’re being offered a more interesting role than “drive rich people around.”

I’d suggest forwarding the email to the national headquarters of the charity with a note about your concerns.

3. Company is holding a week-long retreat in a Covid hotspot

I recently interviewed for a position that sounds pretty much ideal. The interview went well and it’s possible I’ll be offered the job in the coming weeks. I want to say yes. But they mentioned that, as part of the onboarding process, I’ll be asked to participate in an annual week-long leadership retreat, in person, at a resort in an area that is currently a Covid hotspot. This would be the week before Christmas. I’ve barely traveled at all during the pandemic and don’t feel comfortable with this at all, in particular because I really want to spend time this Christmas with vulnerable family members and wouldn’t be able to do so if I’ve just returned from this trip (I am vaccinated, but at this point would have limited protection against the Delta variant).

How should I proceed? If I was offered the job, I want to be firm in my intention not to travel anywhere for the time being, and travel is otherwise not expected in this role. However, I don’t want to potentially cost myself this job offer either. I don’t believe that some kind of virtual participation in this event would be a viable option. From how this event was described, it didn’t seem to be optional.

Be very direct about it, because how they respond to that will give you useful information about how this company operates and how future “I can’t do this because it’s not safe for me” situations might be handled. So, for example: “I have high-risk family members and don’t feel comfortable attending an in-person event in an area that currently has high Covid numbers. Would it be possible for me to participate virtually instead?”

But also, this is a company that’s holding a week-long retreat in-person in a Covid hotspot, which doesn’t bode well for how they’re handling the pandemic. I’d take this as a flag to make very sure that you know how they’ve been operating in that regard and are comfortable with what you find.

4. When is no accommodation reasonable for a disability?

I’m curious when it is acceptable to say no accommodation is reasonable and an applicant can be rejected because they can’t do the job due to their disability. I’m not asking for ways to get around reasonable accommodations. I’m looking for input on situations where a person truly cannot be accommodated.

A few examples, all of which are real examples I may run into: (1) Can a warehouse job that requires driving a forklift, moving around heavy boxes, placing them in shelves that are eight stories tall, and picking things off the shelves exclude people who are blind? In a wheelchair? I can’t see how these can be accommodated in this situation. (2) Can a retail job that requires replenishing inventory from the back room to the sales floor accommodate a blind applicant? Wheelchair? If it requires color coordinating the stock, can someone who’s colorblind be accommodated? (3) What about a home design company that requires knowledgeable color coordination and working with pictures provided from the client, and likely design software that requires visually laying out options? Perhaps there are reasonable accommodations I’m not seeing?

I can’t speak to what specific accommodations might be available in those situations since I don’t know all the adaptive technology that might be possible, but the Job Accommodation Network is a wealth of suggestions for accommodations for different disabilities. However, what the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits is discriminating against workers who can perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodations — so if there’s not a reasonable accommodation that will allow the person to perform the work, the law doesn’t require an employer to hire them anyway. So the law wouldn’t require you to hire, say, a blind applicant to drive a bus. (The law also has an exception for accommodations that would pose “undue hardship” to the employers, which is usually — although not always — about cost.)

5. What to say when you’ve stunk up the bathroom

I’m a 20something woman working an admin job at a hotel. I share a single restroom with the staff on my floor. Also, I have IBS, which can mean much-less-than-pleasant trips to the bathroom, even if I do everything possible to ameliorate it. This restroom is often in high demand— as in, someone trying to enter as soon as I leave (and not a stranger at a store, who I’ll never see again). Which is worse: to let them go in unwarned, or to say a quick “hey, I’d give it a minute”? I’m not bawdy but I’m not shy, and I’d be happy to issue a brief warning if that’s kinder.

I’m leaning toward “I’d give it a minute” and talking to your facilities people about if there’s a way to get better ventilation in there, but I want to throw this out to readers to see what they think.

adeles:

There ain’t no gold in this river
That I’ve been washing my hands in forever
I know there is hope in these waters
But I can’t bring myself to swim
When I am drowning in the silence
Baby, let me in

ADELE — Easy On Me (2021)

1. Bye-bye white women Chicago docents.  Solve for the equilibrium.

2. Bitcoin bodice rippers (MIE).

3. The world that was 1970 (Edison Lighthouse, short music video).

4. Sanity about Instagram (NYT).  “Of the better studies [three separate links there] that have found a negative correlation between social media use and adolescent mental health, most have found extremely small effects — so small as to be trivial and dwarfed by other contributors to adolescent mental health. Complicating matters further is that in the Facebook surveys, twice as many respondents reported that Instagram alleviated suicidal thinking than said it worsened it; three times as many said it made them feel less anxious than said it made them feel more so; and nearly five times as many reported that Instagram made them less sad than that it made them sadder.”

5. “We examine how the net worth of billionaires relates to their looks, as rated by 16 people of different gender and ethnicity. Surprisingly, their financial assets are unrelated to their beauty; nor are they related to their educational attainment. As a group, however, billionaires are both more educated and better-looking than average for their age.”  Paper here.

6. Rebecca Blank to be president of Northwestern.

The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

This post, update: someone keeps farting in important client meetings , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

Remember the letter-writer who was concerned that someone kept farting in important, high-level client meetings? Here’s the update.

Thought I would give an update on the farting in the boardroom story of a little while back as the issue did not go away and things turned out a lot differently than how I expected.

So there were another 4-5 meetings. The farting continued, in some meetings it was worse than others. It did seem that those scheduled in the morning were less gassy affairs, although by no means did attendees enjoy fresh air for the entire duration of those. Despite the regular bouts of nostril-burning flatulence wafting throughout the room, it became clear we were going to be working with this client on a long term basis and the atmosphere grew a little more relaxed accordingly. On one occasion near the end of a meeting someone cracked a very funny joke, which provoked an outburst of communal laughter, during which someone, presumably involuntarily, let out an audible fart. It was short, not very loud, and if anyone noticed it they didn’t let on. However, whilst I couldn’t be sure if everyone heard it, it was certainly smelt by everyone. The eye-wateringly foul stench wiped the smiles off some faces and replaced the amused expressions of a few others with frowns. This seemingly brought this particular meeting to a slightly premature end as the most senior member of the client team rose to his feet and said without a hint of irony, “Well that’s probably as good a note as any to end on for today.” It was unclear if he was referring to the funny joke cracked moments earlier or the fart, indeed he seemed a very sharp individual who probably realized it was a perfect moment for ambiguity. But I have to admit the sight of everyone’s eyes darting around the room as people tried to gauge each other’s reactions to try and figure out exactly what he meant was an amusing one. But not as amusing as moments later watching senior management leaning over the table exchanging farewell platitudes and shaking hands whilst yet another stinking fart assaulted everyone’s noses.

It got to the point where people let their guard down a bit and became a little less restrained in hiding their reactions. An electric fan mysteriously appeared in the corner of meeting room one day, but it wasn’t used for the first meeting it appeared in, probably as it was an early morning affair with limited silent and deadly emissions. But during one particularly gassy afternoon episode a week later, one of the clients, a younger female, was sat with the corners of her mouth pointing downwards and using a piece of A4 to fan the air, trying to make it look like she was just trying to cool her face. Our director saw this, and asked the junior member sitting nearest the new fan to “switch it on please, seems its getting a little hot in here” with a completely straight face. On the fan went – but the speed was set on a higher speed than anticipated and all that happened was pieces of paper, meeting notes, and a newspaper were blown off the table and flew around the room along with the familiar pungent stench. Thankfully this was laughed off, and I took advantage of the interruption to suggest a break, as we left the office juniors to clear up the chaos. During the unplanned interval, I noticed our most senior executive had hung back to help reorganize the room. This was most out of character, but it turned out he just wanted to get the newspaper, which had been blown inside out.

Seconds later he emerged from the room and walked towards the gaggle of us who were drinking coffee and chatting in the open plan area outside the meeting room. He radiated a beaming smile as he strode right past everyone in the direction of the men’s restroom with the newspaper tucked under his arm. Seeing that he didn’t return to the meeting room for a good ten minutes after everyone else had, it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce why he had been so eager to get his hands on some reading material. This brazen and unashamed approach to bathroom business quickly led me to place him in the number one position on the silent boardroom farter suspect list. I also especially noted there were no more silent-but-deadly interruptions for the remainder of that meeting, which went on for a further three hours or so.

During our very last meeting, which was to seal the deal, there was an awkward culture clash. We work in a multi-national office in a major Asian city. English is the working language, and between us and the client team everyone speaks English fluently, but there is a varying mix of comprehension of our host countries language. All of our senior executives are westerners and unable to converse in the local language. I’m not a local but I’m fluent in the local lingo. During the meeting, two maintenance men wearing overalls entered the room and announced they were responding to a report of a fault in the ventilation system. But both the workers were not fluent in English, so I did some on the spot interpretation, to which our most senior executive replied, “Please tell the janitors the air con and ventilation system are working fine, we have important business to conclude today.”

I duly interpreted. But the workman, not at all concerned with the subtleties of boardroom etiquette, bluntly replied in the local vernacular “There’s no ventilation problem? It smells like shit in here!” which basically caused the half of the room who could understand to laugh and the other half to respond with smiles and looks of curiosity as to what exactly was said. Thinking on my feet I didn’t translate anything back to my side, but urged the maintenance guys to come back in a few hours because it was a really important meeting and we really had to get on with it. It was a ruse which seemed to impress the client executive who is also fluent in that language, and offered my side a way to continue without drawing more attention to the constant bad smells than was necessary.

The deal ended up being signed off and it was decided both teams would go out for dinner and drinks to celebrate. Sure enough the drinks flowed and both sides let their hair down as the night drew on. Whilst chatting with one of the clients, someone of similar level to myself, and with a few drinks in me, I couldn’t help but bring up the farting issue. The client replied, “Oh, that was our boss, we’re soooooo sorry about that! He’s a great guy but sits there in our office telling dick and fart jokes all day, he says it’s an example of “thinking out of the box” to make our team more relaxed comfortable with each other. So after each meeting we were telling him to quit passing gas. He would deny it each time but the whole thing had just became a running joke for our team so we just rolled with it, sorry!”

Very surprised by this revelation, and at the level of humor coming from such an otherwise professional and serious team, I felt it best to just laugh it off and not reveal real source of the reek. But emboldened by this, days later I ran into our senior executive’s PA (who was usually in the meetings) and asked her straight up if the guy had a wind problem. “Oh yeah,” she replied, “I’m glad my desk is outside, he just sits and farts in his office room all day and just doesn’t care.”

I ended up feeling like I was the one who had the problems all along — a keener sense of smell than most, not especially amused by fart jokes, and a little naive — seniority level and attitude to public farting are not necessarily linked!

Because of humans, most of the world’s oyster reefs have disappeared over the last 200 years. Now, some groups around the world are trying to put some of them back. In addition to providing water filtration and habitats for other animals, offshore oyster reefs can help slow long-term erosion by acting as living breakwater structures that partially deflect waves during storm surges.

In the last century, 85% of the world’s oyster reefs have vanished. And we’re only recently beginning to understand what that’s cost us: While they don’t look incredibly appealing from the shore, oysters are vital to bays and waterways around the world. A single oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water every day. And over time, oysters form incredible reef structures that double as habitats for various species of fish, crabs, and other animals. In their absence, our coastlines have suffered.

Now, several projects from New York to the Gulf of Mexico and Bangladesh are aiming to bring the oysters back. Because not only are oysters vital ecosystems; they can also protect us from the rising oceans by acting as breakwaters, deflecting waves before they hit the shore. It won’t stop the seas from rising — but embracing living shorelines could help protect us from what’s to come.

(via the kid should see this)

Update: Check out the Billion Oyster Project if you’d like to get involved in returned oysters to New York Harbor. (via @djacobs)

Tags: food   global warming   NYC   oysters   video

If you’re able to peel yourself away from the mesmerizing TikTok videos from Glow City Candles, then you can head over to the shop’s website to pick up one of the brand’s Halloween-themed candles to create a bloody good tablescape. The Arizona-based candle company, which launched earlier this year, has gone viral several times on the video sharing platform, and for good reason. The candle-dipping process Glow City uses to create its works is utterly fascinating. READ MORE...

Omg look at these adorable crocheted pasta shapes made by Normalynn Ablao. Her pattern for the pasta is available on Etsy, as are patterns for burritos & taco bowls, mozzarella sticks, and cinnamon rolls.

Tags: food   Normalynn Ablao

From an interview with the Ted Lasso creative team, here’s co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis on where the idea for the show came from:

The thing Bill and I talked about in the pitch was this antithesis of the cocktail of a human man who is both ignorant and arrogant, which lo and behold, a Batman-villain version of it became president of the United States right around the same time. What if you played an ignorant guy who was actually curious? When someone used a big word like “vernacular,” he didn’t act like he knew it, but just stops the meeting like, “Question, what does that mean?”

Austin Kleon riffed on the unusual relationship between ignorance and curiosity:

That last point might be the most important: care is a form of attention, and unlike talent or expertise, it can be willed into being at any time.

If you care more than everybody else, you pay better attention, and you see things that others don’t see. To ask the questions that need to be asked, you have to care more than others about what happens, but care less about what others might think of you in the moment.

Which makes me think about my favorite scene from Lady Bird, summarized here by A.O. Scott:

Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith), the principal, has read Lady Bird’s college application essay. “It’s clear how much you love Sacramento,” Sister Sarah remarks. This comes as a surprise, both to Lady Bird and the viewer, who is by now aware of Lady Bird’s frustration with her hometown.

“I guess I pay attention,” she says, not wanting to be contrary.

“Don’t you think they’re the same thing?” the wise sister asks.

The idea that attention is a form of love (and vice versa) is a beautiful insight.

These thoughts resonated with me today because I recently had a falling-out with someone I care about, in part because I paid insufficient attention to who they were as a person. I was ignorant and incurious in our relationship, a disastrous combination that caused deep pain. In the aftermath, I instinctively reached for the comfort of a rewatch of the first season of Ted Lasso, hoping for some laughs. But what I especially noticed this time around was how much effort Coach Lasso puts into deciphering who people are, who they really are, so he can help each individual be their best selves, which is perhaps the hallmark of a wonderful partnership. It was a good reminder for me of attention as a form of love but also of the work I need to do to actually practice that consistently in my life.

Tags: Austin Kleon   Jason Sudeikis   Lady Bird   Ted Lasso   TV

This post, my boss will not physically acknowledge me in social settings , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I’ve noticed something odd about how my boss talks to me. He doesn’t physically acknowledge me in social settings — if I’m standing in a group with him and others, he doesn’t look at me at all, but he does look at everyone else. I can’t remember the last time he looked at me in casual conversation, though we’ve been in that setting many times. If I say or ask something, he’ll acknowledge or answer it, and will even address me directly, but he never looks at me or even turns to face me. I’ve looked, and I’ve not seen him do this with anyone else — just me.

This even happens when there’s just one other person — he’ll face them and not me, even while directly addressing me. A non-English speaker would easily think he wasn’t talking to me.

I once told a friend I’d buy them a drink if my boss looked at me during a conversation. It lasted 10 minutes, and he engaged everyone else, but I didn’t have to buy a drink. On another occasion, I pulled faces at him to see if he’d notice. He didn’t, even though he verbally addressed me many times — while looking at someone else.

When we talk over email or over the phone, there’s nothing unusual, and he will look at me when we talk about something work-related. It’s just face-to-face social settings where he doesn’t look at me.

During Covid, we’ve been completely remote, but we’re just starting to reopen, and so I’ve started to notice it again. I’ve observed it pretty often now and I really don’t think I’m mistaken.

I otherwise have a good relationship with him. I like my work, and he clearly respects me professionally, trusts me with projects, and gives me opportunities. I also get along with him personally — he’s invited my husband and me over to dinner on occasions (my husband works in the same place), and shared personal details with me that he doesn’t talk about with many others — things like that.

This isn’t directly related, but worth mentioning as it may be relevant: a while ago, I made a pretty major mistake. When he caught wind of it, his response was to ring my husband up and have him talk to me (my husband’s role has no crossover with mine). He never spoke to me about it directly at all. I apologized for the mistake, but told him I needed him to talk to me directly and not use my husband as proxy. He did sort of back down, though I don’t think he really understood. And I never got a full apology, though my husband did.

What I really want to ask is, why might he be doing this? And also, should I (or even, can I) call him out on it? Calling him out in the moment seems difficult — there are necessarily other people around when he does it, so unless there’s a super subtle way of doing it, I don’t see how I can, but is it really worth having a separate conversation with him? Or should I just let it go?

A couple of years ago, I would probably have said “I don’t mind, I’m just puzzled by it.” But now, I’m starting to mind.

I wrote back with a barrage of questions: “Has this always happened, or did it only start at some point? If so, is there anything significant about the timing of when it started? Like was it right after that incident where he called your husband, or anything else that might be notable? And when he invites you to his house for dinner, does he look at you then?”

I’ve known him almost six years, and as far as I can tell, it’s always happened, though I’ve become more aware of it probably in the past three years. At least I can’t recall it suddenly starting.

He doesn’t look at me at his house either, though it’s less noticeable. Sometimes it’s just my husband and me, sometimes there’s one or two others (he has people over reasonably often). When it’s just my husband and me over, I do get the impression he’d rather be talking just to my husband, but maybe felt he had to invite me over too — to the extent that if we’re asked again, I would probably find an excuse not to go and let my husband go on his own.

Well, this is awfully weird.

Normally if someone is making such a point of not looking at you, I’d assume they were uncomfortable around you for some reason — but he’s talking to you normally and it doesn’t happen at all in work conversations! (Also, that last part makes it extra weird! The fact that he looks at you normally when you’re talking about work things but then acts as if your face is radioactive when the conversation is social — while still continuing to speak as if nothing’s wrong — is an additional layer of oddness.)

And he’s inviting you to dinner at his house. HE’S INVITING YOU TO DINNER AT HIS HOUSE EVEN THOUGH HE CANNOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT YOU. Every detail makes this stranger and stranger.

Also, the fact that he called your husband about you (!!) feels somehow connected to all this but I don’t know how.

I have no idea what’s going on, so I’m going to speculate wildly:

* You look exactly like someone who makes him uncomfortable (an ex, a dead loved one, an estranged relative, a coffee barista who once yelled at him) and he can pull it together to be normal during work conversations but just cannot do it during social conversations.

* He has wronged you in some profound way (stolen your identity? dated your mom? poisoned your lunch?) and thus cannot look you in the eye unless he’s in work mode.

* He is desperately in love with you.

* He is desperately in love with your husband.

* You have offended or alienated him in some way (you’re an anti-vaxxer / homophobe / Jordan Peterson fan). In fact, it could be about bigotry on either side — like you’re religious and he’s a bigot, or he’s religious and thinks you’re a bigot.

That’s all I’ve got.

As for what to do, you can just continue to ignore if it that feels easiest to you! But if you want to address it (and I would), the next time you’re talking privately you could ask, “Have I done something to bother you? I’ve noticed that you won’t look at me when we’re in conversations with others, even when you’re speaking to me, and I wondered if I’d done something to put you off in some way.”

I don’t think you’ll necessarily get a real answer (you probably won’t), but it might nudge him into realizing that whatever’s going on, it’s coming across really weirdly to you, and I bet he’ll make an effort to stop. However, there’s a chance (maybe a big one) that it’ll make the relationship more awkward — that you’d be swapping the not-looking-at-you awkwardness for a new kind of tension that we can’t even anticipate. So you’d have to decide, based on what you know of him and the dynamics between you, whether it makes sense to speak up or not.

But it’s weird weird weird.

Updated to add: The letter-writer has noted in the comments below that there are many women in the office besides her and he doesn’t do this with them (so it’s unlikely to be a Mike Pence won’t-talk-to-women situation), nor is she a minority of any kind (in response to speculation of racism).

junkfoodcinemas:

DUNE Trailer #2

Instagram Has Become SkyMall. "These days when I open up the app, every ad customized for me is some decidedly loopy gewgaw." [debugger.medium.com]

A thread of tips on gender inclusive icons and signage (e.g. for bathrooms). [twitter.com]

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moodbig:

elvarasokazokakurvaelvarasok:

According to Jonathan Martinis, the senior director for law and policy at a center for disability rights at Syracuse University, one of the most dangerous aspects of guardianships is the way that they prevent people from getting their own legal counsel. “The rights at stake in guardianship are analogous to the rights at stake in criminal cases,” Martinis said. “Britney could have been found holding an axe and a severed head, saying ‘I did it,’ and she still would’ve had the right to an attorney. So, under guardianship, you don’t have the same rights as an axe murderer.”

…there is also a wide range of alternatives to conservatorship that are less strict than what Spears has experienced, such as conditional powers of attorney or formal shared control of finances. As conservatorship law is written, the court is required to determine that a conservatorship is—and remains—necessary. “In practice,” Zoë Brennan-Krohn, a disability-rights attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “this is absolutely not the case. What should be happening is that a judge at a reëvaluation hearing would ask, ‘What else have you tried? Why isn’t anything else working?’ And, if the conservator hasn’t shown that they’ve tried less restrictive options, the conservatorship should be suspended. But I’ve never heard of a judge asking that in any situation.”

Here is the full New Yorker story by Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino, focusing on Britney Spears.

The post Living under guardianship is worse than you think appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post Sentences to ponder model this appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

I have been hearing nothing but good things, and lots of them, about comedian Bo Burnham’s new show on Netflix called Inside. Burnham did the entire thing by himself in his house during the pandemic — writing, music, cinematography, editing, etc. In this clip from the show, Burnham performs a song called “Welcome to the Internet”. (via waxy)

Tags: Bo Burnham   internet   music   TV   video

cricketsqueak:

elemeno-pee:

mitochondriaandbunnies:

Dan and I bought a thing called “long ziti” from the local Weird Bargain Store, largely as a joke, but…. I have never had a more unsettling pasta experience in my life. They wouldn’t bend enough to cook from top to bottom simultaneously, and while they were cooking boiling water kept spouting out from the tops of them out of the pot, like a boiling pipe organ. Then they were so long and floppy and hoselike that we couldn’t pick them up with anything other than tongs, and then they were so long and unwieldy that it was basically impossible to sauce them without them all slithering out of the bowl like wet snakes. They then proceeded to cool down almost completely within the the seconds it took to walk to the living room. Eating them was like eating a bowl full half melted drinking straws.

Bringing back Long Ziti for another round because it’s just too funny

real life creepypasta

There's going to be an annular solar eclipse on June 10 that will be partially visible in the US, particularly on the East Coast. "From New York City, the eclipse magnitude will reach a whopping 0.80 (80%)." [earthsky.org]

N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth trilogy will be adapted into something (movie series? TV series?) by TriStar & Jemisin herself. [deadline.com]

Great profile of Mare of Easttown's Kate Winslet. "But she is not Daniel Day-Winslet; she is said to be fun once the shooting wraps for the day." [nytimes.com]

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Ever since I learned about bonsai trees as a kid, I’ve been fascinated with them. In my 20s, my girlfriend bought me a juniper bonsai for my birthday. I was really excited to see what I could do with it, but it was dead in a month and a half, forever dimming my enthusiasm for ever practicing bonsai myself. But I still love observing the process and seeing the results, so I’ve enjoyed watching Bucky Barnes’¹ Bonsai Releaf videos. His latest video (above) documents the year-long transformation of a Japanese larch tree he purchased for £30 into something that looks like it’s been majestically clinging to a windswept cliff for hundreds of years.

Observation, healing, experimentation, growth, making irreversible choices — so many lovely little themes, lessons, and moments in this video. At one point, well into the process, he clips off most of a long branch and I exclaimed “Oh my God!” out loud. I guess I still need to work on letting go of attachments.

1. No, not that one.↩

Tags: bonsai   Bucky Barnes   video

Gymnast Simone Biles won her 7th US Gymnastics Championship this past weekend, further cementing her status as the world’s best gymnast and one of the most dominant athletes of all time in any sport. In her floor exercise routine on the first day of the competition, Biles absolutely nailed a triple double — that’s three twists while doing two backflips. Timothy Burke took the footage and slowed it down so that we can see exactly what’s going on in the air. And, Jesus, I was NOT prepared for what I saw. The two handsprings that set up the final move are beautiful slowed down, leisurely even. But then Biles launches herself impossibly high into the air — like absurdly and spectacularly high — and starts twisting and flipping at a speed that seems fast even for slow motion. And the landing — it’s like she was standing there all along, waiting for the rest of her spirit to join her. Watching the routine at regular speed makes you appreciate the move even more.

In reaction to this move, NBA head coach Stan Van Gundy, who has seen his fair share of elite athletes doing amazing things over the years, exclaimed: “How is that even humanly possible?” As if to preemptively answer him and everyone else watching, the sparkly leotard that Biles wore during her routine had a picture of a goat sown into it because she is the GOAT.

See also Who Could Jump Higher on a Trampoline, LeBron James or Simone Biles? (via the kid should see this)

Update: Physicist David Young analyzes Biles’ triple-double:

Assuming her rotation rates around each axis remain constant, to get three full flips in would require an extra 0.65 seconds, which requires a launch speed of 22.6 miles per hour, all other things being equal. This is not possible, even if we assume her max launch speed is 18 miles per hour, which is apparently her top sprinting speed.

However, if she could do three full flips, she would also be able to get in one-and-a-half more twists at her current rotation rate! What would this even be called?! What might be more likely would be to try to gain an extra half twist so that she would take off facing left and land facing right, still only completing two full flips.

(thx, donny)

Tags: David Young   gymnastics   mesmerizing   Simone Biles   slow motion   sports   Stan Van Gundy   Timothy Burke   video

This post, I’m ready to rage-quit my job — am I being unfair to my boss? , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I am a department head at a small business. My boss, Alex, is the owner/founder. I was an independent contractor for most of my career, and this is the first time in years that I’ve had a boss.

I have strictly enforced work/life boundaries, so when I’m out of the office, my staff knows not to contact me unless it’s a true emergency. In turn, I don’t contact them at all during my vacation.

There have been a few times when my team has decided to set aside non-urgent tasks for me to complete when I get back from vacation. This is minor stuff that’s still best left for me to handle, like responding to a friendly message from a vendor who knows me personally. Unfortunately, in these situations, Alex tends to step in and “help” without knowing the full context of the situation, ultimately creating confusion and stress.

This meddling behavior also occurs when Alex is out of office himself. Every time Alex preps for PTO, he says something like, “I’m disconnecting completely, don’t expect to hear from me. I trust you to handle anything that comes up,” leaving us with what seems like a clear set of expectations.

However, he’ll randomly violate those expectations. He’ll often get basic details wrong, because he reacted impulsively and without proper context. For example, we’ll think he’s surfing in the middle of nowhere but receive a contradictory email response from him on a thread we’ve already resolved, calling our judgment and authority into question with clients.

My response is to reach out and say something like, “We’ve got it under control, please let us handle this. Hope you’re having a good break!” Alex’s replies are often extreme — “I just spent hours arguing with my wife, work is the only good thing in my life, I’m just trying to be happy again, why can’t you let me have that,” or “oh, so I’m not allowed to check my email now? I was just trying to help!” Awkwardness aside, it’s unsettling that he’s treating this business, which is in serious financial trouble, as a source of emotional comfort.

This pattern has started making me angry to a degree that might be unfair to Alex. I’ve almost quit on the spot the last couple of times he’s done this. (I didn’t, though, because I think about my actions at work, which seems like a pretty standard professional thing to do.) This feels like an overreaction on my part. Though annoying, these situations are ultimately minor and infrequent.

If I had an employee who behaved the way Alex does, I’d tell them to stop “helping” and trust that the team can function just fine without them. The ability to step away completely is a good thing! But I’m not Alex’s boss, and though he’s never explicitly said “this is MY BUSINESS—I’m the boss and I can do what I want,” that message feels pretty heavy in the subtext.

So … what should I do? I feel like rage quitting is the wrong answer, but it also doesn’t feel right to just stand by and watch this happen without doing anything.

Rage quitting isn’t a great answer, but regular quitting (after lining up another job) might be.

If Alex were otherwise an excellent boss who just had trouble disconnecting when he was on vacation, I’d encourage you to try to let that go. Some bosses are like that. It’s annoying and it’s inefficient, but if everything else is good, it’s not worth leaving a job over.

But you have:
* a small business that’s in serious financial trouble
* an owner who regularly delegates authority to you (“I trust you to handle anything that comes up”) and then takes that back
* an owner whose “help” creates stress and confusion and calls your judgment into question with clients
* an owner who personalizes routine work conversations in inappropriate and uncomfortable ways (“I’m just trying to be happy again, why can’t you let me have that?”)

I’m guessing these aren’t the only issues with the way Alex runs things.

I’m assuming, of course, that you’ve tried speaking with him about the problems this behavior causes — that you’ve pointed out that he’s causing confusion and stress and undermining you with clients and sending contradictory messages about how things should run when he’s out. If you haven’t, you should — it’s worth having that conversation at a time when he’s in the office, not on vacation, and giving specific examples of how it’s impeded people’s work.

But my hunch is that it won’t change much, particularly because Alex seems to want to use his business as a way to nurse emotional wounds rather than to run it effectively. Changing that would probably require a significant mental shift from him, and it’s not easy to nudge someone into that shift from below. It’s still worth trying because you never know — and also because the way that conversation goes will probably help you decide if there’s any point in expecting anything different in the future.

That said … there’s another option here, which is to decide that you simply don’t care. If you otherwise like the work and the business isn’t so unstable that your job is at risk, it is an option to just accept that this is how Alex will operate, expect interference when he’s away no matter what he promises, and just work around it as best as you can. A fair number of people find their way to reasonable contentment at jobs with highly flawed managers. You’ve got to be able to let it kind of flow off of you though (I once had a coworker at a dysfunctional job who repeated “like water off a duck’s back” as a mantra to herself all the time, and it did seem to mostly work) so you’d want to figure out if you can do that or whether you’re too fed up and will be on-edge the whole time you’re there if nothing changes. If it’s the latter, work on getting out.

An AI tries to finish a 15-second clip of the Spice Girls' Wannabe in the style of Nine Inch Nails. [youtube.com]

A profile of Shayne Bushfield and the relatively small online community he runs, LearnedLeague. "What Bushfield wants is to re-create, over and over, the experience of playing trivia with his friends at the office." [newyorker.com]

"Contemporary German parents give their children a great deal of freedom — to do dangerous stuff; to go places alone; to make their own mistakes, most of which involve nudity, fire, or both." [slate.com]

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anarcho-gamerist:

extervus:

extervus:

Most fucked up animal by far is the aardwolf

Like just what the fuck is all this then

Fucking awesome is what it is

dankmemeuniversity: