Week of October 1, 2018

A few things of note from around the Internet this week…

Determined

Gwen Jorgensen’s transformation from Olympic gold-medal winning triathlete to marathoner:

Still, if Jorgensen could pull it off, Johnson says, “It would be the most amazing athletic feat of my lifetime.” One he believes even her greatest naysayers are internally rooting for. “Part of you wants to believe it’s possible, like it’s reminding us of what we dreamed as a little kid. That’s the goal: to dream big.”

Stress

The rest of the Pavlov story:

Pavlov spent months testing the dogs after the flood. His work shows him to be nearly as interested in what psychological trauma did to their behavior as the famous drooling before the flood.

He summed up what the flood did to his dogs, and how it applies to humans: Different conditions productive of extreme excitation – such as intense grief or bitter insults – often lead to profound and prolonged loss of balance in nervous and psychic activity.

Hard-core stress sticks around and changes behaviors that were ingrained before the stress occurred.

Contradiction

I would be surprised if most of the politicians and public figures championing inhumane immigration policy don’t have stories exactly like this.

Why would the Nuneses, Steve King, and an obscure dairy publication all conspire to hide the fact that the congressman’s family sold its farm and moved to Iowa? I went to Sibley to find out. Things got a little strange.

Smart

Interesting look at employees completely automating their jobs. I would counter that if you have the ability to obviate your job entering data or some other relatively menial task then you should probably be employed doing something else.

Self-automators are acting alone, deciding when and how to replace their own job with code. Ideally, automation decisions would happen collectively, with colleagues’ and peers’ input, so, the gains could be evenly distributed.

Rage

Jessica Valenti on Kavanaugh:

And with that, the hearing stopped being about Blasey Ford’s experience or even Kavanaugh’s fitness for the job, and instead became a stage for broader and bitter male resentment — furious over the seemingly new expectation of accountability, and raging over not immediately being given what was promised to them.

That Blasey Ford was so accommodating and kind throughout the day — repeating multiple times that she just wanted to be helpful — only drove home this feeling: Even as women calmly and expertly explain the ways in which men have hurt us, our pain is immediately drowned out and glossed over by men’s belief that they should not have to answer to us, of all people.