Linky Friday: Daily Routine
I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do. – Roald Dahl
Tom Ruen
Mornings
[Mo1] NY Times goes across 7 time zones and discovers some surprising commonality in morning routines.
[Mo2] Breakfast is a lie, or so claims this gastrointestinal expert. Personally, I have the best GI surgeon in the world, and he swears by breakfast, so your mileage may vary.
[Mo3] “Have a reason to get up in the morning” is very old advice, but sounds much more exotic in Japanese and rebranded as “wellness theory”.
[Mo4] If your night is what others call morning you are either partying too hard or you might be a shift worker. To the millions of folks that are, that may mean all sorts of health implications.
[Mo5] Howard Schultz, now retired from morning juggernaut Starbucks, has thoughts on climate change and coffee.
By Mikael Knut Nilsson
Eating
[Ea1] I’ve used their ACV for years and had no idea there was a hippie, medicine show element involved
[Ea2] The major Mediterranean diet study that had to be retracted. But was it wrong?
[Ea3] Fast food restaurants per capita, complete with graphs and data. Spoiler alert: Another Alabama national title, but the south isn’t the top region for density.
[Ea4] “Millennials kill X” has become its own cottage industry for writers, but this one doesn’t pass the smell test. Still, the underlying data is interesting.
[Ea5] Conagra makes a $8 Billion investment into frozen food, which has bucked the downward trend of packaged grocery.
[Ea6] Apparently the trick to getting genetically modified foods to fly off the shelves is all in the labeling.
Bundesarchiv
Meetings
[Me1] The European Union is having more meetings to answer more questions , but getting few answers and little progress.
[Me2] 10 famous business people on meetings, with the common thread being none of them like it.
[Me3] It didn’t make his timeline, but Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook reps broke bread and met with Trump administration officials, conservative commentators, and others in the latest news of Big Tech trying to make nice.
[Me4] Before those controversial policies become headline news, they start in small meetings. In the case of the current immigration row, they start in a specific office, with weekly meetings, for that express purpose.
[Me5] Video killed the radio star, or if your Roswell, GA, live streaming killed the transcription service of meetings.
Learning
[Le1] The Gates Foundation might have spent $775M on education only to make people dumber by the end of it.
[Le2] The Greek Islands have long been a refuge from the world, so if you can do mobile learning there, you can do it anywhere.
[Le3] Elon Musk does not see the point in learning a second language, while science is learning that language, -improving or learning new ones- affects all kinds of brain functions.
[Le4] Labeled data takes longer to learn-both for humans and machines-and slows down algorithms so DARPA wants to change that to speed up machine learning.
[Le5] Computational models reveal serotonin is essential to neural plasticity, or in language the rest of us understands, serotonin speeds up learning
Royal Navy official photo
Sleeping
[Sl1] Remember that false alarm Hawaii missile alert were someone fell asleep at the switch? Turns out that’s just what happened.
[Sl2] Eight hours of sleep is not enough, but who has time for that?
[Sl3] Drawbridges are modern engineering marvels. So are modern mattresses. Confusing the two can be awkward.
[Sl4] London’s Stansted airport is trying to ban sleeping. Important to note here is Stansted is a hub for discount carrier RyanAir among others, and delays both in layovers and waiting for transportation are very common, so doubt this goes over well.
[Sl5] How to annoy a new parent with a dumb question? “How are you sleeping?” to someone with a newborn is right up there.
[Sl6] We are all guilty, which means it is probably a self-explanatory answer, but The Guardian asks the question anyway: Should we sleep at work?
Mo2: I suspect the “need” for breakfast depends a lot on a particular person’s physiology. I know I do badly if I have to skip breakfast – but I eat early dinners and effectively fast from about 7 pm to 6 or 7 am. I also know if I have to do hard labor of any sort, I darnsure better have something with protein in it for breakfast.
Le3: there are other reasons than “being able to understand another person” for learning another language. Like being able to make some stabs at understanding another culture. Or thinking about the roots of your own language. I know I understood English grammar better after taking French in school, because my French teacher talked explicitly about some grammatical concepts (e.g., the subjunctive) that had been glossed over in English class. (Granted, the proper teaching of ‘grammar’ in English was pretty much dead by the time I came up through school – I can’t diagram a sentence, for example).
I dunno. I learned French in school and am refreshing it now with Duolingo, and I’m trying to learn German after having a brief class in conversational German some years back. And now I’m trying to learn Irish Gaelic, because why the heck not? (Duolingo has a free version so it only costs me time).
Maybe I’m weird but I find that kind of thing fun. Will I ever go to rural Ireland and need Gaelic, or to Germany and need German? Almost certainly not. But it’s still fun.Report
Mo2 working years of 6-6 nightshift ruined me on breakfast.
Le3 I struggled with learning foreign languages. For example I took 3 years of Spanish in HS with excellent grades and cant speak a word of it. I picked up enough German living there to order my food and function, so it may be my learning process of immersion vs academic.
My amazement with language is my German and Austrian friends that after years of study their English is so good they couldn’t understand my West Viriginian without significant adjustments. Living in Germany and realizing they have regional dialects just like we do changed my perspective quite a bit.Report
I watched a YouTube video in “Bayrisch” (the Bavarian dialect) and it broke my brain. I can understand maybe 50-75% of clear spoken German, with this video I was doing well to pick up one word in 10.
I can’t think of a comparable dialect in American English that I would have so much trouble with (but that may be the difference between being a native speaker vs. learning a language as an adult). Maybe some of the really heavy Scots accents would give me similar trouble, I don’t know.
I have known people that I would never have guessed learned English as a second language had they not told me – zero accent and not even any syntactical unusualness. I had a TA from Holland and I was shocked when he mentioned to the class he only learned English as a teenager. I figured he was a kid from California or somewhere.Report
There are parts of WV that I can take you to that will accomodate your wish for a challenging regional dialect my friendReport
German is actually very dialectical. I have a good friend that speaks Hock Deutsch as he is Austrian (also what my wife speaks) another friend speaks Schwabisch, my father learned Lieder Deutsch concurrently with English (his mother and grandparents are part of the German diaspora) and Bayerische is famously difficult.
Also, there is Plattdeutsch (low German) and Alemannisch (Swiss German). I think there is another Berlin accent, but my mother would know more as it was her aunt and uncle who ended up there, fleeing Berkeley in ’60. My high school German is about non-existant at this point.Report
Try Georgie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY4TT3VtR8oReport
Years ago I saw a British movie on TV that took place in Scotland. The accents were so thick that the production team decided that English subtitles were needed for a movie in English. This clip reminded me of that movie.Report
Le3 – I agree absolutely that learning language is mind expanding for all the reasons you describe.
The more I learn of Elon Musk’s opinions, the less impressed I am with the man. He seems like the perfect image of a clever white man who’s decided that since he has a good deal of innate intelligence, he must be able to understand everything, and sitting down to learn with his ears and mind open and mouth shut is beneath his dignity.Report
Why learn a totally useless language when you can expend the same amount of effort to learn a useful one? Is French really that much more interesting than, say, Mandarin or Spanish?Report
Depends on your reasons for learning it. If I were to learn a foreign language [1] French would be my first choice because I visit France on business once every year or so.
I mean it’s not Esperanto or something. Hundreds of millions of people speak it.
[1] It’s a pipe dream. I have an anti-knack for foreign languages. My brain vapor locks when I try to study them.Report
By that argument, why do anything that can’t advance you in business or your job? Why have a hobby when you could be working more hours?
I like to learn. I have some Irish heritage so it’s interesting to me to try to learn Irish Gaelic. I’ll never use it but it’s fun.Report
@brandon-berg In my case I want to expend the *right* amount of effort. Spanish (though I keep practicing it to keep my hand in) is too *easy*, too much like French where I’m already fluent. Mandarin is too hard for me. WAY too hard. Irish is the right amount of hard to be interesting.
(Of course I’m also desultorily studying Swahili, Russian, and German, so what do I know? But they’re all in the same “flow zone” of neither impossible nor simple to learn…)Report
Mo5: Climate change is going to cause lots of disruptions in the world. Many people seem to know this. Very few people want to deal with it or acknowledge it.Report
Le3 – It’s possible that the only 2nd language Musk learned at school was Afrikaans, which is useless internationally, and may be close to extinct by the end of this century.Report
Le3: I don’t think this says what you said it does. The finding, as I understand it, is that language learning aptitude (not actually having learned a language) is correlated with certain other aptitudes, and that first-language learning aptitude in children is correlated with different aptitudes than second-language learning aptitude in adults.
It’s possible that learning a second language will strengthen those regions of the brain and improve other aspects of cognitive ability, but I don’t see anything in the article ruling out the possibility that these abilities are fixed.Report