Don’t think too positive “Positive thinking can make us feel better in the short term, but over the long term it saps our motivation, preventing us from achieving our wishes and goals, and leaving us feeling frustrated, stymied and stuck … Positive fantasies fool our minds into thinking that we’ve already achieved our goals – what psychologists call ‘mental attainment’. We achieve our goals virtually and thus feel less need to take action in the real world. As a result, we don’t do what it takes to actually succeed in achieving our goals. In multiple experiments, we found that people who positively fantasise about the future don’t, in fact, work as hard as those with more negative, questioning or factual thoughts, and this leaves them to struggle with poorer performance.”
Tuesday, July 26th
Crisis on high “Deep in the Himalayas sits a remote research station that is tracking an alarming trend in climate change, with implications that could disrupt the lives of more than 1 billion people and pitch the most populated region of the world into chaos. The station lies in the heart of a region called the Third Pole, an area that contains the largest area of frozen water outside of the North Pole and South Pole. Despite its relative anonymity, the Third Pole is vitally important; it is the source of Asia’s 10 largest rivers – asdf including the Yellow, the Yangzi, the Mekong, the Irrawaddy and the Ganges – and their fertile deltas. Flows from the glaciers that give the pole its name support roughly 1.3 billion people in China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, and the glaciers are melting fast. Chinese authorities have opened up a remote research station on the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau and revealed alarming research on the pace of global warming. Half a century of research shows the temperature has increased by 1.5 degrees in the area, more than double the global average. More than 500 glaciers have completely disappeared, and the biggest ones are retreating rapidly.”
Eating meat and animal rights “Most of us live in ‘carninormative’ societies where meat eating is so normal that no matter how many qualms we might have about it, it just doesn’t feel wrong to most of us. … A utilitarian focus on the traceable consequences of action also means that there is a surprisingly vibrant debate among animal ethicists about whether an individual’s choice to eat meat is morally important. The problem is that modern food chains are insensitive to individual buyers’ choices and hence the principled vegetarian’s refusal to eat meat does not save a single animal life. The only consequence of abstinence is a sense of moral superiority and purity. This is the kind of nonsense that could only be spouted by a philosopher (or perhaps an economist) in the grip of a reductive, mechanistic theory that reduces morality to algorithms of cause and effect.”
The last VCR will be manufactured this month “Japan’s Funai Electronics, which makes its own electronics, in addition to supplying companies like Sanyo, will produce the last batch of VCR units by July 30. The company cites difficulty in obtaining the necessary parts as one of the reasons for halting production. VCRs were launched about 40 years ago. With the rise of DVDs, Blu-ray and streaming services like Netflix, they’ve become completely obsolete. At its peak, Funai sold 15 million units of the home video system, Last year, it reported 750,000 in sales. Excluding hardcore fans, demand for VCRs is virtually nonexistent. Already there’s at least one generation that likely doesn’t know the joy of having a separate device dedicated to rewinding your tapes because that function ceased to work on the VCR—or the pain of being charged a fee for failing to return a rental tape fully rewound.”
The terrible beauty of fire (photos) “Photographer David McNew has been covering Californian bushfires for more than a decade, and has an eye for finding the visual beauty amid the horrible destruction and efforts to battle these blazes.”
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