Jessica Kendrick

blazepress:

Mercedes Formula 1 steering wheels from 1954 and 2014.

Weather photographer Mike Hollingshead, whose impressive storm photography we first featured around this time last year, has taken his editing a bit further by importing his supercell thunderstorm photos into Photoshop and setting them in motion. Hollingshead says these animations aren’t created like more traditional cinemagraphs, where moving elements from a video are isolated and the rest of the image is masked out. Instead, he uses only a static image and creates the animation from thin air. Most of the photos you see here were shot in Nebraska between 2004-2013. You can see many more examples on his website.

unagiiiii:

malekkleston:

IF U EVER FEEL SAD REMEMBER THERE IS A FLOWER CALLED HANGING NAKED MEN AND IT LITERALLY LOOKS LIKE PURPLE MEN WITH THEIR DICKS OUT

ISNT NATURE WONDERFUL

can i just say DO NOT go on google images and search ‘HANGING NAKED MEN’ because you will probably be traumatized for life.

these are actually called ‘ORCHIS ITALICA’ or ‘THE NAKED MAN ORCHID’

nubbsgalore:

animal photographers. photos by (click pic) stefan meyers, david schultz, igor laptev, will burrard-lucas, simon roy, vadim trunov, michaela walch, ed hetherington, chris du plessis, jim lawrence, paul soulders

Furtographers

I was laughing as I read this piece from the satire magazine, The Onion: “Personal Trainer Impressed by Man’s Improved Excuses.”

It purports to be an interview with a personal trainer who’s impressed by one of his clients — a guy who has made amazing improvements in the sophistication of the excuses he’s giving for not working out.

“Acknowledging that the progress made in such a short time was remarkable…[the personal trainer said] he is very impressed by the improvement in both the strength and consistency of his client’s excuses…’A few months ago he had really weak pretenses for not sticking to a workout plan, but he’s put in a lot of effort and now he’s sporting much more robust and powerful justifications…After seeing how he struggled early on with a simple excuse about traffic, it’s gratifying to see him push himself and dig deep for rationalizations that more believably exonerate him…[like] tackling a long, grueling story about how construction in his neighborhood aggravated his dust mite allergies.'”

I love this piece, because I love loopholes. Loopholes are so funny.  So imaginative, and so ingenious. We’re like cell phones searching for a signal — as we cast about for an appropriate loophole to let us off the hook.

As Benjamin Franklin wrote in his Autobiography, “So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do. ” When we want to find a loophole, we can always find a reason.

Note: with a loophole, we’re not mindfully making an exception, but looking for a justification that excuses us from sticking to a particular habit.

If we can spot loopholes, we can perhaps resist invoking them, and do a better job of keeping a good habit.

The ten — yes, ten — categories of loopholes are:

1. False choice loophole – “I can’t do this, because I’m so busy doing that” – this is one I often use, myself

2. Moral licensing loophole  — “I’ve been so good, it’s okay for me to do this”

3. Tomorrow loophole — “It’s okay to skip today, because I’m going to do this tomorrow”

4. Lack of control loophole — “I can’t help myself”

5. Planning to fail loophole, formerly known as the “Apparently irrelevant decision loophole”

6. “This doesn’t count” loophole – “I’m on vacation” “I’m sick” “It’s the weekend”

7. Questionable assumption loophole — “the label says it’s healthy”

8. Concern for others loophole — “I can’t do this because it might make other people uncomfortable”

9. Fake self-actualization loophole – “You only live once! Embrace the moment!”

10. One-coin loophole –“What difference does it make if I break my habit this one time?”

I love that the Onion article highlights the point that even if a person’s workouts aren’t improving, he might be improving his loophole-seeking.

What loophole do you invoke most often? I listed my own favorite as #1, the false choice loophole. But I think that others, such as #4 and #6, are more popular.

I’m doing a video series in which I discuss the various strategies that we can use for habit-formation.

Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life, and a significant element of happiness. If we have habits that work for us, we’re much more likely to be happy, healthy, productive, and creative.

My forthcoming book, Better Than Before, describes the multiple strategies we can exploit to change our habits. To pre-order, click here. (Pre-orders give a real boost to a book, so if you’re inclined to buy the book, I’d really appreciate it if you pre-order it.)

Here, I talk about the Strategy of Other People.

In Letters from a Stoic, Seneca wrote, “Associate with people who are likely to improve you,” and if you want to form good habits, this is a very important thing to keep in mind.

Other people’s actions and habits exert tremendous influence on me, as mine do on them.

What others do, say, and think rubs off on me.  For instance, in a phenomenon known as “health concordance,” couples’ health habits and statuses tend to merge over time. One partner’s health behaviors—habits related to sleep, eating, exercise, doctor visits, use of alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana—influence those behaviors in a partner. If one partner has type 2 diabetes, the other partner faces a significant increase in the risk of developing it, as well. If one partner gives up cigarettes or alcohol, the other is more likely to quit.

Also, because we’re quite susceptible to “goal contagion,” we may rapidly pick up someone else’s habits, so it’s helpful to be around people who are good role models. In fact, I’ve found that I’m more likely to be persuaded by seeing one person’s successful action than by the most impressive research. It’s a data point of one—but for me that’s a very persuasive data point.

Once I thought about it, I was startled to realize how often I’d picked up a strong habit based on someone’s passing remark.

People fall into three gears when it comes to supporting (or opposing) other people’s healthy habits.

Drive: People in “drive” mode add energy and propulsive force to our habits. They can be very helpful as they encourage, remind, and join in. However, if they’re too pushy, they may be a nuisance, and their enthusiasm can rouse a spirit of opposition. They may very well push a Rebel away from a good habit.

Reverse: Some people press others to reverse out of a healthy habit. They may do this from a sense of love, such as the food pushers who argue, “You should enjoy yourself!” or “I baked this just for you!” Or their behavior may be more mean-spirited, as they try to tempt, ridicule, or discourage us from sticking to a healthy habit.

Neutral: These folks go along with our habits. They support us whatever we do. Sometimes this is useful, but sometimes this support makes it easier to indulge in habits when we know we shouldn’t.

Have you noticed a time when you picked up a habit from someone else? Or when someone else’s habit rubbed off on you? Once I started paying attention, I was surprised by just how often this happens.

I’m a huge fan of the work of Christopher Alexander, and yesterday, for the hundredth time, I found myself urging someone to read his book, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction.

This strange, brilliant, fascinating book uses architecture, sociology, psychology, and anthropology to describe the most satisfying environments.

Instead of talking about familiar architectural styles and elements, it focuses on “patterns,” such as the Sitting Wall, the Front Door Bench, Child Caves, the Sequence of Sitting Spaces, Sleeping to the East. I love these! I want them for my own apartment!

Ever since I read this book, I’ve been working my way through everything written by Christopher Alexander. As Huckleberry Finn said of Pilgrim’s Progress, I would say, “The statements was interesting, but tough.”

A Pattern Language discusses houses, but it also covers commercial spaces and offices.

It offers insights about why certain offices are more or less satisfying to work in. Take this quiz to see how your office measures up.

I put a “yes” or “no” after each element, as it applies to my own office.

-there’s a wall behind you (so no one can sneak up behind you). Yes.

-there’s a wall to one side (too much openness makes you feel exposed). Yes.

-there’s no blank wall within 8 feet in front of you (or you have no place to rest your eyes). No, I sit right in front of a wall with a window.

-you work in at least 60 square feet (or you feel cramped). No; my office is tiny.

-your workspace is 50-75% enclosed by walls or windows (so you have a feeling of openness). Not exactly sure what this one means’ wouldn’t that give me a feeling of closedness?

-you have a view to the outside (no matter how large your office, you will feel confined in a room without a view). Yes—no nice view, but I can see outside. Having a window is enormously important to me.

-you are aware of at least 2 other people, but not more than 8 people, around you (less than 2, you feel isolated and ignored; more than 8, you feel like a cog in a machine). No, I’m all alone.

-you can’t hear workplaces noises that are very different from the kind of noises you make at work (you concentrate better when the people around you are engaged in similar tasks, not very different tasks). Yes.

-no one is sitting directly opposite you and facing you. No.

-you can face in different directions at different times. No.

-you can see at least 2 other people, but not more than 4. No.

-you have at least one co-worker within talking distance. No.

Most of us can’t change much about the design of our offices, but these elements at least furnish a few ideas.

My office is very, very small. If I had more room and space, I would love to have a horseshoe-shaped desk, with enormous amounts of surface space, as well as a treadmill desk. Oh, how I long for a treadmill desk! In Better Than Before, I describe how I did the next best thing: I bought a treadmill desk for my sister. She sometimes walks seven miles — during a work day!

I have to admit, that of all the habits that I changed, or that I helped other people to change, as part of writing that book, getting my sister that treadmill desk was one of the very most satisfying.

How does the design of your workplace measure up? Do you agree with these points? What would you add?

To state the obvious: this list sheds light on why many people don’t like the current trends in office design.

Last year was terrible for measles in the United States: there were 644 cases — the highest annual caseload in two decades. Granola-crunching Californians, wealthy Oregonians and Jenny McCarthy anti-vaccine acolytes have taken much of the blame for this spike. The Washington Post even pointed to Orange County — the location of the current Disneyland outbreak — as "Ground Zero in our current epidemic of anti-vaccine hysteria."

But that's wrong. The real story behind the 2014 outbreak isn't on the West Coast. It's in Ohio Amish country, where a missionary returning from the Philippines turned an otherwise unremarkable year for this virus into one of the worst in recent history.

That's where Jacqueline Fletcher, the public health nursing director for Ohio's Knox County, got a terrible call from a pay phone last April.

A member of the local Amish community was on the line. There was a potential measles outbreak in the town, the woman said, and the public health department should know.

Fletcher's first thought was, "Oh, shit." For a health worker, this was a nightmare scenario. She couldn't just call the woman back or ring up other potential victims; they didn't have phone numbers. This Amish community, like others in the United States, eschews the conveniences of modern technology.

"We don't have any internet or computer. We don't have a car," Ivan Miller, an Amish furniture store owner in the community struck by measles, explained. "It's not that we feel a car is wrong. It's our choice because we feel if we had a car, it would bring us to a lot more temptations in the world."

At the time, this Amish population was generally against vaccination. This, however, wasn't a matter of religious principle but one of health concerns.

In the 1990s, Miller explained, two Ohio kids allegedly got sick after they took the MMR shot, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella. Rumors about vaccine safety spread through the Amish community like a virus. "That put a scare in us and we quit," Miller says. This made it incredibly easy for measles — the most contagious virus known to man — to move through this cluster of unvaccinated individuals.

Fletcher had been with the Knox health department for 29 years. And she'd never seen anything like what she found in some of the Amish households she visited, trying to get a sense of the outbreak's size — and stop its spread. "There was a household that had six adolescent teenage children with measles, all sitting in the dark," she says. They were covered in the spotty rash that's characteristic of the virus, miserable and sick. It was a scene for the last century.

The outbreak that Fletcher spent months working to contain ultimately infected 382 Amish Ohioans by the time it was declared over in August of last year. Nobody died, but nine wound up in the hospital with more serious symptoms.

"We had never seen a case of measles before this," Fletcher says. "I just remember a man from the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] saying to me, 'You have got to get ahead of this.'"

Unvaccinated travelers drive measles outbreaks

Last summer, a team of researchers got together to try and understand an alarming trend: why had so many measles cases popped up recently?

In 2000, the federal government declared that the United States had eliminated the disease: enough people were immunized that outbreaks were uncommon, and deaths from measles were scarcely heard of.

But in the first half of 2014 alone, there were 288 cases. And nearly all of them, the CDC researchers wrote in findings published last June, stemmed from Americans traveling abroad and returning with the disease.

"Of the 288 cases, 280 (97 percent) were associated with importations from at least 18 countries," they wrote. Many of these travelers were coming back from the Philippines, which has been dealing with a massive outbreak since fall 2013.

"What we've seen — since the epidemic of measles was interrupted in 2000 — is that we are continually getting measles coming in from overseas," says Jane Seward, deputy director of the viral diseases division at the CDC. "More often than not, it's US residents who go overseas for a trip — to say, Europe, where they don't think they need to be vaccinated. They bring measles back."

"A perfect storm" in Ohio

In the Ohio case, "patient zero" had traveled to the Philippines on a missionary trip. (In case you were wondering, he took a plane. Miller explained, "Some Amish fly. Some don't.") At the time, the Philippines happened to be facing a massive measles outbreak, with tens of thousands of cases.

When he returned to Ohio, and fell ill, a doctor misdiagnosed him with Dengue fever, so he continued to pass his disease along to friends and neighbors, many of whom had refused the vaccine out of those concerns over adverse effects.

Fletcher describes it as a "perfect storm:" an unimmunized traveler going to a place with an outbreak and bringing an infectious disease back to an unprotected community.

Measles is one of the most contagious viruses ever discovered. In most cases, it's not deadly, but it's almost always debilitating, bringing on a weeks-long fever, rash, and painful, watery eyes. Up to forty percent of people experience serious complications, such as pneumonia and encephalitis (or swelling of the brain). One or two children in 1,000 die.

The most remarkable thing about the virus, however, is that it's incredibly indestructible. A person with measles can cough in a room, leave, and — if you were unvaccinated — hours later, you can catch the virus from the droplets in the air that they left behind. No other virus can do that. It also lives on surfaces for hours, finding new hosts in the unimmunized.

"Measles is very contagious, so once [the Ohio missionary] felt better, he went to church, and the church was in somebody's house," Fletcher says. "The majority of those first cases, we linked back to him. They had all attended church in that house."

"There was a household with six adolescent teenagers with measles, all sitting in the dark."

Then, there were obstacles specific to tracing a disease through an Amish community. Trying to reach everyone who might have been exposed to the disease and get them into quarantine so they couldn't spread the infection further required a level of gumshoeing nearly reminiscent of searching out Ebola victims in rural West Africa.

"Because the Amish don't have phones, we had to go out to their homes," she says. "We're a small health department in a rural area. It was a lot of work."

Fletcher and her team patiently went door to door, collecting specimens, educating people about vaccines, making sure the vulnerable — pregnant women and small babies too young to get vaccinated — were safe from harm. CDC officials even flew in to support the effort.

An Amish man travels to the Philippines...

The actual story of the 2014 outbreak complicates the narrative that has developed in the wake of the new outbreak of measles at Disneyland in early 2015: that a growing number of parents, led by Jenny McCarthy, have begun to opt their kids out of vaccinations, letting the disease spread easily.

Federal data shows no drop off in vaccination rates over the past decade

In fact, it's only about two percent of the population that refuses vaccines outright. All 50 states have had school immunization requirements since the early 1980s, though some now allow medical and philosophical exemptions. Even so, there hasn't been a drop off in vaccination rates in the past decade, the National Immunization Survey shows. Coverage for the MMR vaccine stands at 92 percent.

It's not actually a rising anti-vaxx tide or naturopathic, private school mothers driving a return of vaccine-preventable disease here. It's not even low-income folks who wind up getting sick, and it's especially not undocumented migrants bringing in viruses, the CDC's Seward says: "The people getting measles are those that travel abroad, come back, and live in a community among people who weren't vaccinated."

Some years, we get 40 "importations." Last year, there were about 65. "This is more than normal," she added, "and it reflects travel patterns and where measles is active globally."

The travelers spark outbreaks when they hit geographic clusters of unvaccinated people, like the one in Ohio. These infectious disease powder kegs exist all across the US, waiting to be sparked. Their low rates of vaccine coverage are hidden in the statistics about national averages, and they are by no means guided by a singular ideology. They may be the hesitant Amish of Ohio, vaccine-opposing Christian Scientists, or simply worried parents who delay immunizing their kids.

Last year, the Amish outbreak in the United States mirrored an uptick in Canadian cases. A population of Christian Dutch Reformers in British Columbia, which had refused vaccines out of concerns over safety, drove an outbreak of more than 400 measles cases. According to the World Health Organization, there were only 512 cases in Canada in total last year.

Miller, the Ohio furniture-store owner, says the measles episode in Knox changed his mind about the MMR vaccine. His wife got a bad case, and so did his son-in-law. "On their worst days, we were wondering if they're going to make it," he says.

"We all took the vaccine after that. I had one shot, and I still took the other one and we had all our kids vaccinated, too. After people saw how sick people got, they changed their minds."

I just read Stephen Grosz’s The Examined Life: How We Lose Ourselves and Find Ourselves. It’s a series of essays by a practicing psychotherapist about some of his observations about human nature.

In his discussion of one patient’s experiences, Grosz observes,

There are various ways to circumvent depressed, anxious feelings…It’s…not uncommon to use some large scale calamity, or someone else’s personal disaster–the newspapers are full of both–to distract oneself from one’s own destructive impulses.

I was particularly struck by this passage, because I’ve noticed the same pattern, in the realm of habits.

When trying to stick to a good habit, many people are challenged by the dangerous allure of “potato-chip news.”

“Potato-chip news” is news that’s repetitive, requires little effort to absorb, and is consumable in massive quantities: true crime, natural disasters, political punditry, celebrity and sports gossip, or endless photographs of beautiful houses, food, clothes, or people.

Its information is usually sensationalized to carry the maximum emotional effect—to make people feel shocked, frightened, envious, outraged, insecure, or indignant.

Most of us enjoy potato-chip news occasionally—to track the Oscars or the Olympics, for instance. But those who regularly spend hours indulging in it may find they’re angry with themselves for devoting so much time to it, and distraught by what they’re watching, yet unable to step away.

I hadn’t thought about the fact that perhaps people use potato-chip news as a way to manage anxiety or other negative emotions, but that rings true to me. What do you think?

Potato-chip news matters for habits for two reasons:

First, many people consider spending excessive time on potato-chip
news as a bad habit in itself.

Also, it can inflame other bad habits, because people get so agitated by it that they lose self-command and turn to bad habits for comfort. One person wrote, “I was so worried about the election that I ate half a pan of peanut-butter brownies in front of CNN.” It’s important to follow the presidential election, of course, but still, we need to deal with remote events in ways that don’t derail our attempts to manage ourselves.

As always, for habits, it’s important to make sure that the things that we do to make ourselves feel better don’t end up making us feel worse.

So the question becomes: what do you do if you find yourself attracted potato-chip news, in a way that’s not helpful?

In Better Than Before, I identify all the strategies that can be deployed to master our habits, and in this situation, the Strategy of Distraction can be of particular help.  By mindfully shifting attention away from potato-chip news, people can break free from its time-sucking, de-energizing  grip.

You can read a novel, play with a dog, do Sudoku, anything to pull away from the screen. Sometimes people limit themselves to written news accounts (which tend to have more information and less sensation) or establish time limits, to manage their desire to consume potato-chip news.

How about you? Do you feel the appeal of this kind of news? If so, have you found any good ways to manage it?