Partisan divides in media trust widen, driven by a decline among Republicans

 

Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.

Charles Bukowski

“I have never been remotely ashamed of having been depressed. Never. What’s there to be ashamed of? I went through a really tough time and I am quite proud that I got out of that.”

— J.K. Rowling

Life is full of surprises, full of ups and downs,

And so to have a silver lining,

first there must be cloud.

 

There's no sense in worrying if things start going wrong,

Obstacles can all be overcome,

If you never lose hope, you're sure to cope and carry on.

 

Every cloud is silver-lined, even when it rains,

So don't get too downhearted,

as things are bound to change.

All you've gotta do is wear a smile

and you will find

Your sun will shine.

R U OK? Day, held Thursday 9 September, is a national day of action that reinforces the importance of staying connected with friends, family and colleagues through all life’s ups and downs, big or small.

The Bizarre Civil War-Stoking Impulses of the Professional-Managerial Class in the US

The professional-managerial class looks to be igoring Sun Tsu’s warning: “Tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat.”

Australia’s government scares me more than the Saudi government

I left Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most oppressive regimes. But the Australian government’s recent draconian rules remind me so much of home. 

By Manal al-Sharif Sep 8, 2021

Denmark To Scrap All Covid-19 Restrictions | ZeroHedge.

Hard to imagine how they could give up a fear of death (hardly the same as love of life) and political despotism in order to resume ordinary living.

My research, published in my new book about leadership in professional organizations, shows that our tendency to overwork and burn out is framed by a complex combination of factors involving our profession, our organization, and ourselves. At the heart of it is insecurity. As one senior business unit leader in a law firm admitted to me: “I just come in here and work as hard as I can all the time. I feel like I’m doing a good job, but it’s hard to measure. That’s the nature of what we do: It’s feast or famine. And we all tend to be such insecure people that we’re all scared all the time.”

If You’re So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week?

Partisan divides in media trust widen, driven by a decline among Republicans

In just five years, the percentage of Republicans with at least some trust in national news organizations has been cut in half – dropping from 70% in 2016 to 35% this year. This decline is fueling the continued widening of the partisan gap in trust of the media. Nearly eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (78%) say they have “a lot” or “some” trust in the information that comes from national news organizations – 43 percentage points higher than Republicans and Republican leaners (35%) – according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted June 14-27, 2021. This partisan gap is the largest of any time that this question has been asked since 2016. And it grows even wider – to 53 points – between liberal Democrats (83%) and conservative Republicans (30%)…”

“Self-help for the aspiring ratiocinator.” What to think about the raft of books that purport to train us to be better thinkers

Why We Work Too Much

The ubiquity of overwork is a serious obstacle for many of the ideas about how we might reshape our professional lives in the months ahead. - The New Yorker 2021

distilled Why are hyperlinks blue?: “The internet has ingrained itself into every aspect of our lives, but there’s one aspect of the digital world that I bet you take for granted. Did you ever notice that many links, specifically hyperlinks, are blue? When a co-worker casually asked me why links are blue, I was stumped. As a user experience designer who has created websites since 2001, I’ve always made my links blue. I have advocated for the specific shade of blue, and for the consistent application of blue, yes, but I’ve never stopped and wondered, why are links blue? It was just a fact of life. Grass is green and hyperlinks are blue. Culturally, we associate links with the color blue so much that in 2016, when Google changed its links to black, it created quite a disruption.

But now, I find myself all consumed by the question, WHY are links blue? WHO decided to make them blue? WHEN was this decision made, and HOW has this decision made such a lasting impact?  I turned to my co-workers to help me research, and we started to find the answer. Mosaic, an early browser released by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina on January 23, 1993, had blue hyperlinks. To truly understand the origin and evolution of hyperlinks though, I took a journey through technology history and interfaces to explore how links were handled before color monitors, and how interfaces and hyperlinks rapidly evolved once color became an option…”

Google Earth’s new Timelapse feature shows 40 years of climate change in just seconds – “Google Earth latest feature, Timelapse, lets users see how 40 years of climate change have impacted places all over the world.”

• Google Earth Timelapse “is a global, zoomable video that lets you see how the earth has changed over the past 37 years. Explore Timelapse in 3D using Google Earth. Timelapse is a global, zoomable video that shows how our planet has changed since 1984. Available for the first time in Google Earth, users can now explore the imagery on the 3D globe, giving a whole new perspective to planetary change. Using Earth Engine, we combined more than 15 million satellite images from the past several decades collected by five different satellites. The majority of the images come from Landsat, a joint USGS/NASA Earth observation program that has observed the Earth since the 1970s. Since 2015, we have combined Landsat imagery with imagery from the Sentinel-2 mission, part of the European Union and European Space Agency’s Copernicus Earth observation program. To put the global change in context, we partnered with Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab to show how human impact is changing our forests and waterways, how cities are growing around the world and just how beautiful the delicate ecosystem of our world is.”

This Periodic Table illustrates how we interact with each element

considerable -“The Periodic Table of Elements, in Pictures” places the elements in our everyday lives. I wish my science teachers had showed us a poster like this. Designed by software engineer Keith Enevoldsen and spotted by Mental Floss, “The Periodic Table of Elements, in Pictures” puts the elements in our everyday lives, showing how we regularly interact with them. Enevoldsen’s graphic packs in a lot of information without overwhelming students (or adults!) with facts and figures that probably aren’t relevant to them, like atomic weights and valence numbers. “The table is color-coded to show the chemical groupings,” he explains. “Small symbols pack in additional information: solid/liquid/gas, color of element, common in the human body, common in the earth’s crust, magnetic metals, noble metals, radioactive, and rare or never found in nature.”…