"How millennials should deal with baby boomers at work"

"Restraint, millennials on Twitter agree, is indispensable, even when boomers aren't showing any. Older colleagues may drop comments such as, “I have children your age!” Under no circumstance should you point out that you have parents their age. Just smile and don't stop smiling for the duration of your employment. If you are tempted to roll your eyes, carefully fix your gaze on your computer until the feeling has passed. The modern workplace functions best when employees of all ages are able to avoid making a big deal about the comments that annoy them most. Headphones help."

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0325-friedman-millennials-boomers-work-tips-20160325-story.html

^ too real. Like, those have been my actual workplace strategies.

"When it’s good to be bad"

"It is a common belief that to achieve a goal one must work at it constantly – not taking a circuitous path towards it when a straight one is available. Thus the Overeaters Anonymous organisation, the Atkins diet, the South Beach diet, and so on, ban a variety of ‘bad foods’; financial planners would probably advise clients against going to fancy restaurants while saving up to buy a house or car; a pastor would seek to dissuade his congregation from sin, no matter how minor. In order to achieve a goal, the thinking goes, one must not deviate from the straightest course; to allow for mistakes or failures is to torpedo your chances of attaining your goal.

And yet a new school of thinking is challenging these received ways and arguing that straying from the path, even engaging in hedonistic behaviour, might be the surest way to success...

In experiments conducted with Rik Pieters and Marcel Zeelenberg, and published in January 2016 in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, do Vale surveyed the way people go about achieving their goals. She concluded that it is better to make plans to fail intermittently – to splurge on occasional luxuries when saving for a house; to have a slice of chocolate cake when trying to shed a few pounds – than to end up failing anyway and getting so demoralised you give up your goal altogether.

‘It’s something that’s so obvious, but no one has ever studied these phenomena,’ do Vale told me. ‘We all plan for breaks during the day – coffee, a nap – and we know that we will feel better after these rests. But with goals we simply don’t think like this.’...

‘Slack’, which allows a person to use more of their cognitive and emotional resources, comes from having a cushier social and financial safety net, according to Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of economics at Harvard University, and Eldar Shafir, a behavioural scientist at Princeton University. Slack is often a better indicator of potential success than grit. It’s the reason the impoverished single mother, gritty and hardworking though she might be, is likely to have a tougher time succeeding than a young man from an affluent family."

https://aeon.co/essays/the-road-to-excellence-is-paved-with-a-few-lapses-on-the-way

I really appreciate the end of this article, which asks us to reflect on why we have the goals we have, and why we make the priorities we do.

Other related myths about success and perfection - the self-reliant person

FB:
"In fact, the mindset needed to maintain persistent forward motion can be its own setback. People who are obsessive and who want the very best for themselves tend to be the grittiest; they also tend, as University of Texas psychiatrist Monica Ramirez Basco writes in her book Never Good Enough (2000), to be ‘more vulnerable to depression when stressful events occur’...

why do some people have significantly more willpower – and thus the potential for higher grit – than others? It might boil down to the types and number of decisions they must make each day, factors that are primarily influenced by one’s socioeconomic class."

"Latinx: An Intentionally Inclusive Language"

"many feminists in Latin America have dubbed Spanish an innately sexist language. Imagine a room full of women, we can refer to ourselves as nosotras las Latinas, but the MINUTE one man enters this primarily female space we become: nosotros los Latinos...

2014 I met with LGBTQIA folks in El Salvador and became particularly aware of the “X” as intentional inclusive language, as in Latinx (La-teen-ex). A Salvadorian human rights protector/activist/intersex/trans/queer feminist friend of mine Nicole Santamaria wisely told me:

“I use X because everyone shares an X chromosome, and I do not have to categorize people into genders that may or may not apply to them. So in progressive LGBTQIA circles in Latin America and the Caribbean, there has been a move toward addressing a room as: nosotrxs lxs Latinxs.”

http://www.vivala.com/womens-issues/latinx-intentionally-inclusive-language/3482

Smell and Cognitive Development -- "Sex bias in copy number variation of olfactory receptor gene family depends on ethnicity"

"the most polymorphic CNV-enriched OR cluster in the human genome, located on chr 15q11.2, is found near the Prader–Willi syndrome/Angelman syndrome bi-directionally imprinted region associated with two well-known mental retardation syndromes. As olfaction represents the primitive cognition in most mammals, arguably in competition with the development of a larger brain, the extensive retention of OR pseudogenes in females of this study, might point to a parent-of-origin indirect regulatory role for OR pseudogenes in the embryonic development of human brain."

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fgene.2013.00032/abstract

I have a vague memory of reading about the link between cognitive evolution and olfactory (smell) receptor genes. I was putting together a presentation on the neurogenetics of smell for a continuing education day for science teachers, and I stumbled on this paper.

The paper starts from the fact that there is a lot of variation between humans in the number of copies of certain olfactory receptor genes. This means that some people might have a lot more of a certain receptor than others, and be more sensitive to certain odors or have the ability to distinguish similar odors that other people can't.

The authors basically find that this copy number variation might be associated with a gene-regulation change that causes mental retardation. They suggest that the olfactory system competes with higher cognition (thinking, attention etc...) for resources during development, so that if you have a lot of different receptor genes and

"The Enduring Mystery Of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun"

"Linguists have long been fascinated by the peculiar mid-Atlantic mutations of words like “water” and “creek” (in Philadelphia parlance: “wooder” and “crick”) and an unusual lexicon that includes words like hoagie and jimmies (sub sandwich and sprinkles as on ice cream, respectively), but nothing has captivated them quite like “jawn.”

The word “jawn” is unlike any other English word. In fact, according to the experts that I spoke to, it’s unlike any other word in any other language. It is an all-purpose noun, a stand-in for inanimate objects, abstract concepts, events, places, individual people, and groups of people. It is a completely acceptable statement in Philadelphia to ask someone to “remember to bring that jawn to the jawn.”...

Ben Zimmer, a linguist and language columnist who’s written and talked about “jawn” before, agrees, writing in an email that “‘jawn’ evidently developed as a Philly variant of ‘joint’ in the '80s,” following the release of the popular 1981 single “That’s The Joint” by Funky Four Plus One, an early hip-hop group from the Bronx... Usually semantic bleaching works like that, little chips at the word’s original meaning. But joint/jawn, in Philly, has come to be so broad as to encompass basically anything...

White Philadelphians, notes Jones, are quick to note that they too use the word jawn, and that it’s a Philly thing and not just a black Philly thing. The data from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus is a little too outdated, Jones thinks, to make a definitive statement either way, but he opined white Philadephians seemed to use it in a more limited way, not really exploring its full breadth and range...

A possibility is that the mutation happened in such an extreme way because Philadelphia is, in some ways, an extreme kind of place. A recent feature from 538 placed Philadelphia as the fourth-most racially segregated major city in the country, behind only Chicago, Atlanta, and Milwaukee. Jones says that it’s possible that Philadelphia’s segregation encouraged the changing and adoption of jawn; black Philadelphians and white Philadelphians don’t mingle nearly as much as, say, black New Yorkers and white New Yorkers, so a word created or altered in the black community can develop without outside influence."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-enduring-mystery-of-jawn-philadelphias-allpurpose-noun

Woah.

“Sexism is Hard to Explain”

"I thought of the men on Reddit who call women cunts because some ladies don’t want the door opened for them. Every time I read the men’s wounded lash-outs, I sadly laugh at how they think the thing is the thing. The door isn’t the thing. For me, the incident this morning was a bang-on metaphor for my experiences as a woman. The millions of small ways that I’ve been forced to surrender to men, who made me move or change or come to them because they felt like it. The ways that I’ve had to change my path in magnitudes great and small...

I can tell a man what it feels like when I’m walking down the street and men lean out of their vehicles to hoot at me. I can tell a man what it feels like to walk through a busy mall and feel sets of eyes fix on you and shamelessly stare at every inch of you while you pass... They think I’m trying to tell them that I don’t like doors opened for me. I won’t ever be able to explain it."

https://medium.com/@Kelcie/sexism-is-hard-to-explain-c0679a8deaae

FB: this is very short and very perfect at illustrating how impossible it is to communicate the experience of sexism.

"Story of cities #5: Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace"

"Benin City, originally known as Edo, was once the capital of a pre-colonial African empire located in what is now southern Nigeria. The Benin empire was one of the oldest and most highly developed states in west Africa, dating back to the 11th century...

Pearce writes that these walls “extended for some 16,000 km in all, in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries. They covered 6,500 sq km and were all dug by the Edo people … They took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct, and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet”... Benin City was also one of the first cities to have a semblance of street lighting...

Benin City’s planning and design was done according to careful rules of symmetry, proportionality and repetition now known as fractal design. The mathematician Ron Eglash, author of African Fractals – which examines the patterns underpinning architecture, art and design in many parts of Africa – notes that the city and its surrounding villages were purposely laid out to form perfect fractals, with similar shapes repeated in the rooms of each house, and the house itself, and the clusters of houses in the village in mathematically predictable patterns.

As he puts it: “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganised and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”...

Then in 1897, the city was destroyed by British soldiers – looted, blown up and burnt to the ground. My great grandparents were among the many who fled following the sacking of the city; they were members of the elite corps of the king’s doctors."

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/18/story-of-cities-5-benin-city-edo-nigeria-mighty-medieval-capital-lost-without-trace

We never got to learn about this stuff in school. The Europeans weren't there at the time, so who cares, right?

I mean, in order to describe it, the author has to spend a bunch of time comparing it to European cities.

Got mistaken for a shoplifter today (by two different workers in the store), feeling very salty about the representation of black people.