Teen mail boat jumpers: “Rain or shine won’t keep these mail jumpers from their appointed rounds. Each year a bunch of high school seniors try out as mail jumpers on Wisconsin’s Lake Geneva and it may be the best summer job ever. The challenge is to dash to the mailbox and race back to the boat before it pulls away. The boat slows down but never stops so you have to…”
Skype and Zoom aren’t quite as good as meeting in the physical world. But why? Pioneer and Emergent Ventures are looking to fund research on exactly how and why video conferencing interactions are different. Apply at https://pioneer.app and mention this tweet…Given the rise of remote work, the economic impact of this research could be Nobel-worthy.
I am a team leader in a very small company. My team only has two other members. A few weeks ago, one of them, Jamie, got married. A few other colleagues and I were invited to the evening reception. The other member of the team got drunk and was abusive to many guests and even knocked small children over on the dance floo When everyone was trying to leave, he started to get naked and violently abusive in the venue’s car park. Jamie asked him to leave and he hit Jamie twice, knocking him to the floor. Guests were trying to eject him, but he was throwing punches and fighting them. He also spat blood all over the bride. His girlfriend punched the bride too. Jamie did not want to spend his wedding night with police giving statements so did not press charges.
Jamie and I have stated to our employer that we do not want to work with this person. Our employer has said that the incident was outside of work so they are powerless. Jamie has been given a week to “forgive and forget” before the other member is sent back to the team.
I answer this question — and four others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.
Other questions I’m answering there today include:
Asking to take off the Friday of my first week on the job
I read my work out loud, and it’s annoying a coworker
SMASHED the BUY NOW button on this one. More North Korea!!!
The author is Ana Fifield, and the subtitle is The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un. I’ve never read a book that has so much actual information about Kim, most of all about his early time in Switzerland. Or how about this?:
Kim Jong Un’s efforts to clamp down on illegal drugs did not work.
At the time he left North Korea, Mr. Kang estimated that about 80 percent of the adults in Hoeryong were using ice [meth], consuming almost two pounds of the highly potent drug every single day…
For many North Koreans, taking meth became an essential part of daily life, a way ot ease the grinding boredom and deprivations of their existence. For that reason, drugs can never be eradicated, he said.
Men are not allowed to have long hair, the concentration camps are reputed to be worse than those of the Nazis, and there is a detailed account of the rise of the “new rich” class in Pyongyang. Plastic surgery has arrived as well.
Definitely recommended, the book also serves up the inside story on the Dennis Rodman visit to North Korea. By the way, Kim hates the showiness of the Harlem Globetrotters.
Michelle Carragher’s blog includes instructions on how to create this dragon scale effect in fabric!
“For Sansa’s wedding dress the designer Michele Clapton wanted to have an embroidered band that wrapped around which symbolistically told Sansa’s life from the Tully and Stark beginnings to the entanglement with the Lannisters,” says Michelle, “The dress colour was still very much Sansa Stark and the embroidery had pale golden tones but woven through the story are ripe red pomegranates, the red colour symbolising the growing Lannister influence over her.
I have not watched this series but these costumes are incredible.
Picture a woman in pop culture. - Largely well known and respected in her field of work by professionals and fans alike. - Has a very recognizable voice. - Married. He also works in the same field. His reputation is enough to rival her own, maybe even more successful than she is. - Once suspected her husband of committing adultery. Sometimes seen as unsupportive, even by fans. His bum ass definitely doesn’t deserve her. - Three children. The oldest is a daughter named after a color (protect her). - T H I C C
ah shit it's 11:30 on a friday night and now I have to learn about this for the next 4 hours
To provide storage space for the huge coils of wire, three great tanks were carved into the heart of the ship. The drums, sheaves, and dynamometers of the laying mechanism, occupied a large part of the stem decking, and one funnel with its associated boilers had been removed to give additional storage space. When the ship sailed from the Medway on June 24, 1865, she carried seven thousand tons of cable, eight thousand tons of coal, and provisions for five hundred men. Since this was before the days of refrigeration, she also became a seagoing farm. Her passenger list included one cow, a dozen oxen, twenty pigs, one hundred twenty sheep. and a whole poultry-yard of fowl.
That is 1865 we are talking about here, remarkably early (in my view) for laying a cable across the bottom of the entire Atlantic.
I recently engaged in some, um, consensual adult activity under the mutual understanding that it would be a temporary relationship at another person’s apartment. No work productivity was harmed in the making of this hookup.
After a pleasant night, I walked out of a room to discover that, not only did the man I spent the night with have a roommate, that roommate had a pleasant night of their own WITH MY NEW BOSS.
I’m in my mid-20s and my boss is in his mid-30s. The roommate he was seeing is closer to his age (early 30s) while the person I was seeing is closer to mine (late 20s). Neither of us are married and we live in a large city, so it’s not like either of us learned something that would be salacious gossip.
As part of my job, I have to get up very early every morning to meet a deadline. As if the experience wasn’t awkward enough, my boss (who presumably was up early to take a look at my work once I was done) joked that he could make me coffee and find out the wifi password for the apartment at 6 am as I packed up my laptop to head to a nearby coffee shop to get the work done.
I declined. This was yesterday.
So I literally never acknowledge this, right? What do I do if he ever brings it up? My first instinct is to crawl into a deep dark hole and die.
But he’s doing a marvelous job of pretending nothing happened so far, so I’m inclined just to follow his lead?
Help.
Ohhhh.
I have to admit, I laughed. I’m sorry.
I actually think your boss is handling this kind of beautifully — cracked a joke in the moment (when something had to be said — can you imagine if instead he’d stared at you in panic?) and then promptly proceeded to ignore it.
Trust me, he felt the awkwardness too. But he’s handling it well!
Similar to the letter-writer last week who matched with his interviewer on a hookup app right before their interview, the best thing to do here is to wipe it from your mind.
If he does bring it up, you can simply say, “That was awkward and my plan is to pretend it never happened.” Subtext: Never speak of this again!
But ideally that won’t happen and you will now both engage in the polite fiction that neither of you spotted the other. Ideally you will even each silently admire the other for your discretion and tact.
Also, hurrah for this being a one-night thing. This would be much more problematic (and suitable for a sitcom) if you were each dating these roommates.
Taylor found these bag bans did what they were supposed to: People in the cities with the bans used fewer plastic bags, which led to about 40 million fewer pounds of plastic trash per year. But people who used to reuse their shopping bags for other purposes, like picking up dog poop or lining trash bins, still needed bags. “What I found was that sales of garbage bags actually skyrocketed after plastic grocery bags were banned,” she says. This was particularly the case for small, 4-gallon bags, which saw a 120 percent increase in sales after bans went into effect.
Trash bags are thick and use more plastic than typical shopping bags. “So about 30 percent of the plastic that was eliminated by the ban comes back in the form of thicker garbage bags,” Taylor says. On top of that, cities that banned plastic bags saw a surge in the use of paper bags, which she estimates resulted in about 80 million pounds of extra paper trash per year.
The waste issue is better, but paper bag production increases carbon emissions. And tote bags, particularly those made from cotton, aren’t great either.
The Danish government recently did a study that took into account environmental impacts beyond simply greenhouse gas emissions, including water use, damage to ecosystems and air pollution. These factors make cloth bags even worse. They estimate you would have to use an organic cotton bag 20,000 times more than a plastic grocery bag to make using it better for the environment.
Currently, East West charges customers five cents per embarrassing plastic bag that they take. They plan to continue handing out the specialty bags for the foreseeable future, but note that they’d rather no one take them. Instead, they hope to start a conversation about single-use plastic bags, as well as influence shoppers to bring their own bags — whether they are shopping at East West or somewhere else.
It’s a fun idea but as several people on Twitter remarked, the idea that people should be embarrassed about watching porn or seeking medical treatment is anachronistic. Besides, these bags might become a cool thing to have and use — an ironic fashion statement of sorts — defeating the original purpose in the process.
Have I watched the movie in the last decade or more? No. Do I have iron clad evidence to support my argument? Yes.
1. She’s the most knowledgeable about candy. She’s committed to it, and knows her stuff. When Wonka holds up a little yellow piece across the room, she recognizes it immediately. She was able to switch to candy bars for the sake of the contest, so we know she has personal discipline and is goal oriented. Also, two major projects play directly into her strong suits: the 3-course-meal gum that Wonka failed to make safe (gum) and the neverending gobstopper (longevity).
2. She’s the most fit to run a business. Violet is competitive, determined, hard working, and willing to take risks. Her father is a small town car salesman and politician, so she could easily pick up knowledge and support from him. (Veruca’s dad is also a business man, and in a compatible market (nuts), but it’s made very clear that Veruca has no respect or knowledge of business practices or hard work.)
3. She’s the most sympathetic to the Oompa Loompas. She critiques Veruca when Veruca demands to buy one. More importantly, Wonka has been testing the 3-course-meal gum that ‘always goes wrong’ on Oompa Loompas while he presumably just watches. Violet is ready to put herself on the front line, instead of treating the Oompa Loompas as disposable, and would therefore be a better boss.
4. Her personality ‘flaw’ is the most fitting for the company. In the moralizing Oompa Loompa song, they just say ‘gum is pretty cool, but it’s not socially acceptable to chew it all day‘. The thing is, we already know that she can stop if she wants, because she already did that to win the golden ticket. And yeah, she is defensive about the perceived impoliteness of her hobby (like when her mother tries to shame her about her habit during a televised interview) but the obsession with candy and neglect of social norms is EXACTLY what Wonka is all about. This is on brand.
5. Her misstep in the factory is reasonable. Wonka shows everyone a candy he’s very proud of. Violet is like “oh sick, that’s gum, my special interest.” Wonka is then pulls a “WRONG! It’s amazing gum!” So in the very moments before she takes the gum Wonka has mislead her just to belittle her. So when he’s like “I wouldn’t do that” why should she give a shit what he has to say? She’s not like Charlie over here who’s all “Sure Gramps, let’s stay behind while the tour leaves and secretly drink this thing that has been explicitly stated to fill you with gas and is too powerful for safe consumption, oh and also I just saw what happened to Violet so I actually KNOW what this stuff can be capable of” Also, Violet is not selfish about her experience, she tells everyone what she’s tasting and feeling, and everyone is eager to hear it. Taking a personal risk to share knowledge with everyone. Violet is Prometheus: fact.
So Augustus contaminates the chocolate river. Charlie sneaks around and contaminates the vent walls. Veruca destroys and disrupts the workspace. Mike knows exactly what will happen to him and transports/shrinks himself deliberately. Violet had no idea what the gum could potentially do to her, and caused no harm to anyone or anything but herself.
Lastly: Can you imagine Charlie filling Wonka’s shoes? That passive, naive boy? Violet is already basically Wonka. She’s passionate, sarcastic, candy-obsessed, free thinking, and a total firecracker. She’s even better than Wonka, because she doesn’t endanger others.
Violet should’ve been picked to inherit the chocolate factory.
On the internet, a fierce debate rages. Are hot dogs sandwiches? Are Pop-Tarts ravioli? Is sushi toast? Into the fracas steps @phosphatide with their brilliant Cube Rule of Food. The idea is that you can fit all food into one of seven categories based on where the starch in a dish is positioned:
For example, enchiladas, falafel wraps, and pigs in a blanket are all sushi because the starch covers four sides of the cube like so:
Likewise, pizza is toast, a quesadilla is a sandwich, a hot dog is a taco, key lime pie is a quiche, and a burrito is a calzone.
The zero-eth category is a salad, i.e. anything that doesn’t include starch (like a steak) or in which the starch is distributed throughout the dish (like fried rice, spaghetti, and soup (“a wet salad”)).
This is very very fun! I saw it BEFORE Jason posted it, which is a feat, even for me!
Mark Rober is straight and married, this may affect your enjoyment of the video
This is pretty nerdy and entertaining. After someone stole a package off of his porch, Mark Rober spent months designing and building a fake package to get revenge on the next person stupid enough to try it. He outfitted the box with GPS, motion sensors, four cameras that auto-uploaded to the cloud, a glitter bomb that detonated when the package was opened, and a canister of fart spray that sprayed periodically until the thief threw the package out. Genius.
Update: At least some of the package robberies in this video were staged.
But shortly after the ode to all the packages we’ve lost before swept across the media landscape, viewers on the internet did what they do best: pick it apart.
They noticed some strange coincidences, like how one of the porch bandits seemed to live directly next door to Rober’s friend, Cici, and that the car used in one of the heists, a black Ford Focus with a rosary hanging on the mirror, was parked right in front of her house in Pittsburg, California.
In Britain, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, no coal has been used to produce power for the last 11 days. This is an arresting chart of how quickly the country’s reliance on coal has been reduced:
Britain is setting new records for going without coal-powered energy. In the latest milestone, it has gone for more than eight days without using coal to generate electricity — the longest such period since 1882.
The coal-free run comes just two years after the National Grid first ran without coal power for 24 hours.
Phasing out the heavily polluting fuel is a key step in the transition towards a net-zero carbon economy and essential to averting catastrophic climate change.
Britain still derives ~50% of its power from natural gas, but this is a very hopeful chart. “Gradually then suddenly” works against us in dealing with climate change but it also could work in our favor.
Something happened to me at work and I honestly have no clue what to do.
My coworker (let’s call him Mark) and I have been equally working on a project for over a year, developing some software for our specific job function. My boss all of a sudden decided that he wanted a different team located off-site to do the development. We do not understand his reasoning for this and it honestly doesn’t make sense, as we do very niche work and it would be hard for an outsider to do this, so we needed to be heavily involved anyway.
When it came time for the first planning meetings, I was excluded from the invites by my boss. I gather he implied it was because our other coworker wastes time with long-winded, off-topic explanations, and just having Mark there would be more efficient. When my performance review (which was a stellar rating and I was highly praised) came up, I said I would like to be involved in the project again as I felt I had a lot to contribute and that time would not be wasted since the other coworker had retired. My boss said that was fine and that I could bring the new team member up to speed and she could attend too.
At the next meeting, I was a participant and the head of the other team doing the project asked who needed to be on the project update email list. I asked for me and the new team member to be added, and she looked kind of incredulous and asked if we were sure, but did it.
At the next meeting, someone asked a question and I was directly answering the question succinctly, as it was in my area of expertise, when a chat message pops up on the big screen we were all looking at. It was my boss with a message that said, “And this is why I didn’t want her on the project.” It was a shared screen from the project head’s computer and someone else was controlling her screen.
I am almost sure he thought the message would be private to her. I saw it and just sat there avoiding looking at my boss for the rest of the meeting and left right away. He avoided me completely for about two weeks. In a phone meeting with my boss and Mark, he heavily implied that only one of us need attend the software meetings and said, “Mark, why don’t you go?”
I asked Mark and others afterwards what I was doing or could change, but no one thinks I was doing anything wrong or inappropriate. It hasn’t been brought up, but since then my boss has excluded me from other projects. I was once the star of my team and am a very hard worker who gets things done. I just let it go since I didn’t think I could respond in the moment professionally without getting angry, but what could/should I have done?
I’m sorry — that must have been awful to see!
If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that you’ve gotten a glimpse of something your boss thinks but wasn’t saying to you directly. Which can be painful, but ultimately still useful. Unfortunately, the meaning of this glimpse isn’t entirely clear.
You noted that your boss originally excluded you from these meetings because he thinks your coworker wastes time with long-winded, off-topic explanations. Is there any chance … he was referring to you, not your coworker? Or to both of you? One interpretation of what happened is that he excluded you from the meeting originally for that reason but re-invited you when you directly asked to be included, and that’s what he was commenting on in the chat message that popped up while you were speaking. That could also be why he decided to have a different team do the project development, despite not having a reason that made sense to you and Mark. This might have been the reason.
Or not! It’s hard to know, because your boss isn’t being up-front with you. (More on that in a minute.) But clearly he meant something by saying “this is why I didn’t want her on the project” while you were talking. (Or, complicating this further, maybe that wasn’t about you at all! Maybe it was about someone else, and the timing obscured that. But his awkwardness afterwards suggests it was about you.)
It really, really sucks that your boss didn’t talk to you about this afterwards. It also really sucks that he hasn’t been straight with you about what’s going on. If you are in fact too long-winded, then it’s his responsibility as your manager to share that with you, so that you know and can work on fixing it. Of course, many managers are terrible at giving feedback or feel like it would be unkind to tell say something like that (it’s not), but in that case he needs to keep it entirely to himself, not make snide comments about it to other people, especially while you’re in the middle of speaking at a freakin’ meeting. He’s acting like an annoyed coworker rather than a manager with agency and responsibility.
And then, after putting you in an incredibly awkward and undermining position, he avoided you for two weeks and now is excluding you from other projects! He should have come to you right after that meeting, apologized for the chat message, and brought into the open whatever concerns are on his mind. Instead, he left you with no information, stuck wondering what’s going on, and getting shut out of projects. He’s terrible.
The best thing you can do is to refuse to let this remain a weird, awkward thing that no one is talking about. Insist on talking about it! It’s affecting you at work, and you’re on perfectly solid ground in raising it. Go to your boss and say something like this: “At a meeting a few weeks ago, a chat message from you to Jane popped up on her shared screen while I was talking, saying ’this is why I didn’t want her on the project.’ I should have asked you about it right afterwards, but honestly, I felt awkward! But since then, we haven’t talked as much as we normally do and I’ve been left out of projects like X and Y that I’d normally be part of. I’m concerned that there’s a problem with my work that I don’t know about, and whatever it is, I’d much rather be able to talk openly about it. If you have concerns about my work, I’d be grateful for the chance to talk about them so we can figure out how to move forward.”
If he’s evasive and doesn’t give you a real answer, it might be worth saying, “Can I ask — do you feel I’m overly long-winded? That was the sense I got, and it would be really helpful to know if that’s the case since it’s something I can work on.”
(And of course, do your own self-assessment of that too. I know you’ve asked coworkers about what you can change, but peers often won’t feel comfortable sharing this kind of thing, so I wouldn’t rely on them for definitive answers. You’re better off doing things like comparing how much air time you use versus how much others do, whether you give quick, to-the-point answers without tangents or fillers, and how engaged or distracted/impatient people seem while you talk. More on that here and here.)
But ultimately what you need is an open conversation with your boss about what’s going on. He should have initiated it, but since he didn’t, it falls to you to do it. What you shouldn’t do is let this go on being the elephant in the room that no one is willing to touch. It’s your career! You’ve got to touch it, awkward as it may feel.
SNL’s Kate McKinnon, masquerading as Reese Witherspoon, joined Billy on the Street‘s Billy Eichner for a sweltering run around NYC’s Chelsea District, to see just how clueless New Yorkers are about their Legally Blonde stars.
Just want to remind you all that if you ever were part of Tufts Chorale you know that Scaramucci's kid is an offender of replying all to a replyallcolypse
A reader writes:
Can we get a definitive ruling on the etiquette when someone accidentally emails an incorrect distribution list in a large office? Today I went to lunch for 40 minutes and came back to 239 emails — someone emailed the wrong distribution list for a request (I heard there were over 1,000 people on this list, though I don’t know for sure). It always starts with few people emailing back and replying to all that it’s the wrong list, but then more people pile on. Soon we are in a “reply all” hell of emails saying “please remove me from this list” or “I received this in error.” Then it inevitably descends into “please stop replying all” and “why are people replying to all?”
Today it got so bad that my Outlook crashed. I have now received 430 emails less than 70 minutes, it’s descending into madness! Senior people are even replying to all. (They should know better!) I’ve seen it maybe 12 times in my 10-year career so far and every time I just delete after I see that the person has been alerted and I don’t reply all. Shouldn’t all of us just delete after we see the first couple emails alerting the person to what happened? Why are people piling on? People are saying they need to be removed from the list when these are large lists that include everyone in a division and obviously are needed for some reasons to communicate certain messages to everyone. Plus replying all doesn’t remove you, you have to email the administrator of a list in most cases. (I used to do that job in an old role.) Note: This is for internal email lists of employees only, no one external if that changes anything.
P.S. In the time I wrote this email, it climbed to 495 emails in less than 90 minutes! My Outlook is having so much trouble processing it that I haven’t been able to delete as the emails come and at this point would really like to see how high it goes…
The definitive ruling you’ve requested is: STOP REPLYING TO THE LIST.
But it won’t work.
It’s a fascinating riddle of human behavior that otherwise reasonably computer-savvy adults who know how this works still cannot resist the impulse to reply-all to these threads. It’s like people who lean on their horn in traffic — they know it’s not going to make things move any faster, but they have an overwhelming desire to express their aggravation and so they do. The “please remove me” and the “stop replying!” emails are the horns in the traffic jam.
To be fair, there are also people who truly don’t get how this works — who don’t realize they’re replying to the whole list, or who haven’t yet read the other 238 emails and thus don’t realize they’re not helpfully pointing out something that hasn’t already been spotted.
But most people are doing the equivalent of leaning on their horns in frustration.
It’s counterproductive but they get an instant of satisfaction.
The best thing to do when you’re in the middle of this kind of reply-all madness is to sit back and be entertained. You are witnessing a large-scale demonstration of humans being weird, and not all of those are funny but this one is, and when you can laugh, you should.
I have an odd question concerning a new coworker. For context, I work in the communications department, and everyone on my team is fairly young (30s or younger). All members of this team are working professionals, and all of us have worked in other public-facing jobs before. Recently, our boss hired a new associate to help us with some of the day-to-day work, named Thor. Thor is extremely enthusiastic, in his early to mid-twenties, and incredibly nice. Which just makes the problem all the more frustrating.
The issue is that Thor refuses to stop saying “Yes ma’am” or “Yes sir” to everyone in the office, regardless of age. It’s hard to explain how odd it is to hear someone your own age (or within two to three years) constantly say “Yes ma’am/sir” to you, but the effect is quite jarring. This has been brought to his attention multiple times (by us, his colleagues, as well as his boss) in a variety of different ways. We’ve joked about it (“Thor, you have to put a nickel in the “Ma’am” Jar!), directly asked (“Stop calling ma’am/sir”), etc., but these attempts have had zero effect. At this point (several months in) we have all given up and just let him call us ma’am/sir.
Thor’s refusal to adopt what I would call an office norm is baffling to me. He once explained to me that he just wants to be “polite” but honestly I think it’s not polite to keep addressing people in a manner they find off-putting after being informed multiple times (by boss and colleagues) to stop doing it. However, it feels weird to keep asking someone to stop doing something that technically has no bearing on their work.
Because this might come up: He isn’t from a different cultural background than most of the other employees working here. And our office is located in the South (so most of the employees here — myself included — have a story about having to breaking this habit upon entering a “professional” environment).
Am I overreacting to this, and if so, is there a way to just accept it/tune it out?
This is interesting because in some ways it’s a small issue, but the ways someone does or doesn’t fit into a workplace culture can be a big deal. I’m not talking about stuff like “he won’t go out drinking with us!” or “why doesn’t she want to celebrate Christmas at work?” but basic cultural issues like “we address people the way they want to be addressed” and “we cultivate a warm, less formal tone with clients” matter.
In any case, I don’t think you’re overreacting — it’s legitimately off-putting to have someone refuse to address you the way you’ve repeatedly requested — but I also think you’re going to have to live with it.
If you hadn’t already been very direct, though, I’d suggest trying that before giving up. Like if you’d just made jokes about it or hinted, I’d say that you needed to say really directly: “Thor, please stop calling me ma’am. That’s not the way we address people in this office, and it makes me uncomfortable.” But it sounds like you’ve been that direct, and he’s still doing it!
His explanation to you that he wants to be polite sheds some light on what’s going on here, but as you point out, it’s not polite to insist on addressing someone in a way they’ve told you repeatedly they don’t want. That’s a very rigid definition of “polite” — a rigidity that this case is crossing over into impolite — and it won’t serve him well in his career.
Even if Thor were from a cultural background where this is The Way Things Are Done, he’s got to be able to adapt to workplace cultures that don’t operate that way.
Ideally his boss would sit him down and work through this — asking why he’s been resistant to addressing people the way they prefer and explaining that rigidly adhering to his own standards of politeness is alienating people. If it’s likely to hold him back professionally, she should say that too (like if she’d be hesitant to pair him with certain clients because this would interfere with relationship building, or so forth).
But for you as a peer, where you don’t really have standing to that, I’d try to just see this as a quirk and let it go. He might grow out of it in time or he might not, but meanwhile it only has to be as annoying as you decide it is.
Specifically, Sansa perfected Littlefinger's early work in chaos theory.
The story goes that modern chaos theory was birthed by Edward Lorenz’s paper about his experiments with weather simulation on a computer. The computing power helped Lorenz nail down hidden patterns that had been hinted at by computer-less researchers for decades. But the early tenets of chaos theory were not the only things that were hidden. The women who wrote the programs that enabled Lorenz’s breakthroughs haven’t received their proper due.
But in fact, Lorenz was not the one running the machine. There’s another story, one that has gone untold for half a century. A year and a half ago, an MIT scientist happened across a name he had never heard before and started to investigate. The trail he ended up following took him into the MIT archives, through the stacks of the Library of Congress, and across three states and five decades to find information about the women who, today, would have been listed as co-authors on that seminal paper. And that material, shared with Quanta, provides a fuller, fairer account of the birth of chaos.
The two women who programmed the computer for Lorenz were Ellen Gille (née Fetter) and Margaret Hamilton. Yes, that Margaret Hamilton, whose already impressive career starts to look downright bonkers when you add in her contributions to chaos theory.
Said Rogen: “We do not want people to feel bad when they’re watching our movies. I’ve had people come up to me and be like, ‘That made me feel like sh*t when I was in the movie theater and everyone was laughing about that.’ Like the ‘How I know you’re gay’ thing [from The 40-Year-Old Virgin], it’s something people have been like, ‘It’s not fun to be in the theater when people are laughing at that, knowing what they’re probably actually laughing at.’ And I don’t want anyone to have that experience watching our movies.”
I get embarrassed when I submit receipts for fast food!!!
A reader writes:
I work in a nonprofit recovery organization and as the department admin, I schedule a lot of the staff for the conferences and travel and handle the receipts.
My office is in a tense space right now. Several of our staff were fired last month due to a very big, very embarrassing, very avoidable HIPAA breach and one of the people fired was our assistant director’s girlfriend (yeah, he was openly dating a subordinate.). People took sides, management was split. HR is doing a lot of mediation. Just send in the clowns and it’s a circus.
Where do I even start documenting and covering my butt with this nuclear bomb I found on my desk this morning?
I don’t report to the assistant director, but he is well-liked, hence why nobody really looked twice at him dating a subordinate. While processing his receipts from a training in a big flashy fun city last week, there are multiple charges to his room for food for meals for two, liquor bills which aren’t allowed on company cards, and he upgraded the hotel to include a couple’s package and the hotel called and advised me of a cleaning charge because of some romantic “paraphernalia and stains” were left behind (oh barf).
All told, the bill came out to three grand, which is $1,800 more than the allowed budget for the trip. He also submitted a very wonky looking reimbursement request for a second plane ticket that he had to pay for out of pocket, his reasoning being I booked the flight wrong (it’s his girlfriend’s ticket). There are pictures of them all over social media on the plane and in the hotel room and doing touristy things all week. He definitely took his girlfriend, who happens to have been fired from our company, on an expensive and kinky-sounding vacation he thinks we’re going to pay for.
I have to report any staff misuse of the company cards to my boss immediately. My boss is very good friends with the associate director and can’t look past his shortcomings and managerial misconduct because of it. He’s going to blow it off and accounts receivable is going to want a full account for what was spent and why. I know I can’t be held accountable for him being disgusting but I’m just sick of the way this department is being run after the last few months of debauchery. This used to be a great place to work.
Good lord.
Here’s yet another reason why managers really shouldn’t be friends with their employees, because when one of them has a paraphernalia-fueled sex romp on the company dime, people get nervous about reporting it.
Of course, this is a company that apparently let a manager openly date a subordinate, so I suppose a manager’s too-close-to-be-objective friendship isn’t surprising.
Anyway. If you weren’t required to report this to your boss/the associate director’s friend, I’d suggest just reporting it all to whoever manages your finances and letting them sort it out. But since you’re required to talk to the boss/friend, just be very, very factual. For example: “Bob submitted receipts for $1,800 over the maximum limit approved for the trip. Here are his receipts. It looks like some are for things we’re not permitted to approve, like liquor, meals for two, a couple’s package at the hotel, and a special cleaning charge because of damage to the room. He’s also submitting for a second plane ticket and said it was because the first was wrong — but the first ticket was used and the second was for the same flight (or whatever is true here), so we can’t reimburse the second. Based on these expenses and the photos he’s posted on social media, it looks like he had his girlfriend join him, which I assume we’re fine with as long as we’re not paying her expenses. I’m passing all this along to Finance to sort out and realized I’m supposed to give you a heads-up as well.”
In fact, you might fill in Finance before you talk with your boss, so that the information is out there and he can’t order you not to send it to them. (And send it to the highest-up person on that team; you want someone with real authority seeing it.) If your boss is upset that you’ve already sent it to them, you can express confusion — “They’re the ones who handle reimbursements so I thought I’d need to send it all over to them like I normally would?”
If you get the sense that your boss is going to blow this off, you have the option of escalating it to someone with more authority than him (or possibly to HR, if they’re decent and have either power of their own or power to get the ear of someone else). Whether or not to do that depends on how vindictive your boss is or isn’t, as well as how fed up you are. But you can get some cover by just being matter-of-fact about your actions, meaning that you act as if of course you’re flagging it for others — you’re not acting out of malice or with an agenda, you’re just dutifully fulfilling your obligations as of course the company would expect you to.
TARPON SPRINGS, Fla. - Polish artist and Tarpon Springs resident Piotr Janowski recently covered his home, including the concrete driveway and the surrounding palm trees, in sheets of aluminum foil.
The project, entitled “402 Ashland Ave”, is intended to make people think in uncommon ways about common goods.
For protection
against the aliens
okay but how did he get it so cleanly done
do you know how much chicken I could bake with this
