Mystery abounds, in little ways, in the industries that supply chemicals. Derek Lowe, writing in Chemical World, opens the curtain on some of those mysteries:
So the world of chemical supply is far from straightforward, and it can be affected in unpredictable ways. The last two years have illustrated some of these…
The complications become apparent. When you order a compound or reagent, it may be difficult to impossible to tell where it really came from. An extreme example is an alkaloid called sparteine, which is used in small amounts in chiral synthesis. It appears that someone isolated a very large batch of it for some reason (perhaps about 20 or 25 years ago) and nearly all the commercial sparteine since then traces back to that same drum, sold and re-sold in catalogue after catalogue. Eventually it was in short supply, and it turned out that no one was actually making it at all!
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Barred from her lab by pandemic restrictions, behavioral ecologist Daniela C. Robler caught local jumping spiders and kept them in clear plastic boxes on her windowsill, planning to test their reactions to 3-D-printed models of predatory spiders. When she came home from dinner one night, though, she noticed something strange. "They were all hanging from the lids of their boxes," says Robler, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz in Germany. She had never seen jumping spiders suspended motionless on silk lines like this before. "I had no idea what happened," Robler says. "I thought they were dead." It turns out the jumping spiders were simply asleep -- and that Robler had discovered an alternate sleeping habit of the species Evarcha arcuata, which had been known to build silk sleeping dens in curled-up dead leaves. But the real surprise came when she decided to spy on them all night. [...]
Mostly the spider just hung there. But then her legs started to twitch, and her abdomen and even her silk-producing spinnerets did so as well. Sometimes her legs curled in toward her sternum. With every spider Robler recorded, these odd movements only appeared during distinct bouts that lasted a little more than a minute and occurred periodically throughout the night. "They were just uncontrollably twitching in a way that really looked a lot like when dogs or cats dream and have their little REM phases," she says. [...] Robler and her colleagues wondered if the twitching spiders could be experiencing something like an REM phase of sleep and possibly even having dreams. "We were like, 'Okay, that would be insane,'" she says. Then she thought, "Let's figure it out," and immediately changed her research plans for the spiders.
[...] When Robler recorded 34 sleeping spiderlings, she found that their twitches were accompanied by unmistakable eye-tube movements that did not happen during other phases of sleep. [...] But it is too soon to say for sure that the spiders are experiencing something akin to REM sleep in humans. The researchers first need to confirm the spiders are actually asleep during this phase by showing that they are less responsive to their environment. Robler and her "dream team" of co-authors have already started those tests. And she points out that the leg curling is a particularly striking aspect of the spiders' REM-like phase because that pose is typically only seen in dead spiders. Spiders use hydraulic pressure maintained by muscles to keep their legs extended, and the curling could result from the muscle paralysis that typifies REM sleep. The team's initial findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, second from left, and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, right, walk out of the US Supreme Court after arguments in their case about the “Remain in Mexico” immigration policy on April 26. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
It’s easy to secure court orders blocking major policies when you can choose your own judges.
One of the biggest impediments to President Joe Biden’s ability to govern is a small crew of Republican-appointed federal trial judges, all of whom sit in Texas.
In August of 2021, for example, a Trump-appointed judge named Matthew Kacsmaryk ordered the Biden administration to reinstate a Trump-era immigration policy, known as “Remain in Mexico,” which forced many migrants to live in awful conditions on the Mexican side of the US/Mexico border. Although the Supreme Court eventually determined that Kacsmaryk egregiously misread federal immigration law, it left his order in place for nearly a year — and the Court’s most recent decision concerning Remain in Mexico makes it very easy for Kacsmaryk to seize control of federal border policy once again.
Indeed, the status of this case, known as Texas v. Biden in Kacsmaryk’s court, is changing almost by the hour. On Monday, Kacsmaryk lifted his original order requiring the Biden administration to implement Trump’s policy — something he had to do given the Supreme Court’s decision — and the administration swiftly announced that it would wind down the program.
This one Trump judge’s ability to override an elected president’s policies and assume the powers of a Cabinet secretary is just one aspect of a much larger problem. With the Supreme Court’s tacit blessing, Texas officials and other right-wing litigants can handpick the trial judge who will hear their challenges to Biden administration policies. And when those handpicked judges overreach in ways that even this Supreme Court deems unacceptable, decisions by men like Kacsmaryk can remain in place for as much as a year — effectively replacing governance by an elected presidential administration with rule by unelected Republican judges.
In another, similar case, the Supreme Court allowed a Trump judge named Drew Tipton to temporarily strip Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of much of his authority over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This is the same Drew Tipton who issued a legally dubious order six days after Biden took office, which blocked the Biden administration's call for a 100-day pause on deportations while the new administration was figuring out its immigration policies.
Meanwhile, O’Connor is widely expected to strike down the Affordable Care Act’s provisions requiring health insurers to cover a wide range of vaccinations and preventive care in a pending case called Kelley v. Becerra.
The fact that all these cases — and this is just a sample of the many policy-setting lawsuits being shunted to a handful of the most conservative judges in Texas — are winding up before a few GOP-appointed judges is not a coincidence. It is a deliberate strategy, made possible by procedural rules that effectively allow litigants to select which judge will hear their lawsuits, and by all appearances, intentionally pursued by the Texas attorney general’s office.
These Texas federal judges’ orders, moreover, appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, almost certainly the most conservative federal appeals court in the country, which tends to regard those orders with the same level of partisanship that is a feature in Kacsmaryk, Tipton, and O’Connor’s courtrooms.
So the Biden administration’s policies are routinely blocked, not because an impartial judge gives those policies a fair hearing and determines them to be illegal, but because Republican litigants can ensure that lawsuits seeking to undermine President Biden are heard by some of the most partisan judges in the country.
Why Texas gets to choose which judges hear its lawsuits
Chance normally plays a big role in federal litigation. When a plaintiff files a lawsuit, that suit is typically assigned to a district judge at random from among the federal trial judges who sit in the same geographic region. On appeal, the overwhelming majority of cases are heard by three-judge panels selected at random from among an appeals court’s judges. Only at the Supreme Court level, where a fixed panel of nine justices hears all cases, are litigants normally sure which judges will hear their case.
In Texas, however, things work a little differently. Texas is divided into four large geographic regions known as “districts,” each overseen by a federal district court. These districts are further subdivided into smaller “divisions.” Anti-Obamacare Judge O’Connor, for example, sits in the Fort Worth Division of the Northern District of Texas.
A problem arises, however, because federal law permits each federal district court to determine how cases are divided among the court’s judges, and Texas’s district courts divide their work in ways that make it easy for plaintiffs challenging a federal policy to choose which judge will hear their case.
When a plaintiff files a lawsuit in a division of one of Texas’s federal district courts, their case will typically be heard by one of the judges in that division. Some divisions, however, are fairly small and may have a single judge who hears all or nearly all of the cases. In the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas, for example, 95 percent of all civil cases are assigned to Kacsmaryk. In the Victoria Division of Texas’s Southern District, Tipton hears virtually all civil cases.
To be clear, it’s unlikely that these geographic case assignment rules arose from an intentional effort to let litigants choose their own judges — they are most likely a response to the fact that Texas is very large, and litigants don’t want to travel hundreds of miles to a federal courthouse in a distant part of the state every day for a lawsuit — but they’ve certainly had that effect. While the Texas case assignment rules would be benign in a world where federal judges can be trusted to be fair and impartial, they take on a much more sinister cast in a world where judges like O’Connor exist. It’s the combination of well-known judges who act as rubber stamps for a political party, and local court rules that frequently allow plaintiffs to select which judge will hear their case, that effectively rigs Texas’s federal court system for the GOP.
Many normal litigants still file at their closest federal courthouse. But if you are a plaintiff determined to undermine Biden, why would you file a lawsuit in Austin or Dallas when you can drive a few hours to a courthouse presided over by a Kacsmaryk or a Tipton?
The Texas attorney general’s office is particularly ruthless in doing just that, manipulating the rules to ensure that its lawsuits will be heard by the GOP’s allies on the bench.
As Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, documented in a recent amicus brief filed in the Supreme Court, “the Texas Attorney General appears to have filed 19 cases in the Texas district courts” against the Biden administration. Of these 19 cases, “judges appointed during Republican presidencies are presiding in all but one.”
Texas achieved this feat by being very selective about where it files lawsuits. As Vladeck writes, Texas filed 12 of its 19 lawsuits against the Biden administration “in divisions where judges appointed during Republican presidencies preside over 100 percent of newly filed civil cases.” The remaining seven “were filed in divisions where judges appointed during Republican presidencies preside over 95 percent of new civil cases.”
Notably, the Texas AG’s office has not filed a single case in Austin — the city where that office is actually located — a choice that most likely can be explained by the fact that half of all federal cases filed in Austin are heard by Judge Robert Pitman, an Obama appointee.
The Supreme Court has largely encouraged this behavior
Although the Supreme Court has, at times, disagreed with the judges Texas’s Republican leaders selected to hear their lawsuits, it’s done nothing to discourage the Texas AG’s judge-shopping. Indeed, if anything, it’s encouraged it.
Recall, for example, the Supreme Court’s decision in Biden v. Texas, which determined that Judge Kacsmaryk mangled federal immigration law when he ordered the Biden administration to reinstate the Remain in Mexico program. While that was a victory, both for Biden and for the rule of law, it was an exceedingly narrow one.
Ten months before the justices handed down their decision rebuking Kacsmaryk, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to block his order while the case was making its way through the appeals process. But the Court refused to do so, with only its three Democratic appointees registering their dissent. That meant that Kacsmaryk wielded much of DHS Secretary Mayorkas’s policymaking authority for nearly an entire year.
Then, even when the Court did rule against Kacsmaryk in its Biden decision, it explicitly left open several legal questions which Kacsmaryk could easily latch onto to seize control of federal border policy once again. Texas has already asked Kacsmaryk to do so.
Just a few weeks after its decision in Biden, moreover, the Court issued a similar order to the one allowing Kacsmaryk to set border policy for 10 months. In this case, Judge Tipton effectively placed himself in charge of ICE’s decisions about which immigrants to target for enforcement actions by striking down a memo from Mayorkas that set enforcement priorities for the agency.
Tipton’s order is egregiously wrong — among other things, a federal statute explicitly gives Mayorkas the power to establish “national immigration enforcement policies and priorities.” Nevertheless, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to leave that order in place, at least until the justices can fully consider the case later this year. Even if the Court does correct Tipton’s error in this case, it could feasibly not hand down its decision until June of 2023 — leaving Tipton as the de facto head of ICE for nearly a full year.
Notably, the Court was far quicker to intervene when lower court judges blocked Trump administration policies. In early 2020, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that her GOP-appointed colleagues were “putting a thumb on the scale in favor of” the Trump administration in cases asking the Court to temporarily block lower court decisions while a case was still on appeal.
Around the same time, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch complained about a system where any one of the “more than 1,000 active and senior district court judges, sitting across 94 judicial districts” could block one of the Trump administration’s policies. Although liberal litigants typically did not engage in judge-shopping to the same degree that Texas now does, litigants suing the Trump administration would often file lawsuits in left-leaning districts such as the Northern District of California.
In any event, Gorsuch appears to have lost interest in solving the problem of judge-shopping and nationwide injunctions after a Democrat moved into the White House.
So what can be done?
Every year Chief Justice John Roberts releases a “year-end report on the federal judiciary.” The document is normally quite brief; his 2021 report was only nine pages long, and three of those pages were charts and statistics describing the workload of the federal courts.
And yet, Roberts devoted a considerable amount of that report to what he described as “an arcane but important matter of judicial administration.” Patent litigators throughout the country were taking advantage of the same judge-shopping rules that Texas uses to its advantage in order to shunt a high percentage of patent infringement suits to a single federal trial judge in Texas (not one we’ve discussed here). And Roberts announced that he’d asked one of the federal judiciary’s internal governing bodies to look into this problem of judge-shopping in patent litigation.
In what was likely a response to Roberts’s rebuke, the Western District of Texas recently announced that it would randomly assign patent cases to one of 12 judges, thus ending this one judge’s monopoly over so many of these cases. But Texas’s federal courts have not taken similar action to stop Texas Republicans from shopping around for sympathetic judges. And Roberts has not urged them to do so.
If the courts want to solve the problem of judge-shopping, it would not be hard for them to do so. One solution is to apply the same rule to Texas’s anti-Biden litigation as the Western District of Texas now applies to patent litigation — if a party seeks an order blocking a federal policy, that case will be randomly assigned to any judge within the entire district court where it is filed, not just one in the smaller division.
Alternatively, a court could assign lawsuits seeking a nationwide injunction against a federal policy to a panel of three judges. That’s the solution Fifth Circuit Judge Gregg Costa proposed in a 2018 piece published by the Harvard Law Review’s blog.
In any event, the details of such a solution don’t matter all that much. The important thing is that litigants who are actively trying to sabotage the United States government should not be allowed to handpick judges who share their agenda. For the moment, however, the courts seem to lack the will to address this problem. Texas Republicans can shop around for the judges they want, and that seems to suit a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees just fine.
The new One-Punch Man chapters 166, 167, 168 are the most thrilling yet -- cosmic Garou, space farts, time travel -- and they actually have some SERIOUS science to break down! Come Genos!
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In July, Abbott authorized state law enforcement to transport migrants to ports of entry. It’s unclear how and why migrants are being detained, raising civil rights concerns and questions about whether the state is overstepping federal authority.
"I'm turning 41 this month, and something's got to give," Williams told Vogue. She attributed the choice to the competing urges of wanting another child while facing off with the world's best players.
Usually I talk about movies, but for this occasion I’ll celebrate the TV shows I love, old and new. With so many genres of shows to choose from, I’ll just focus on 5 shows I love, not necessarily the top shows in any particular order. What are some of your favorite TV shows?
Dozier died at 81. As part of the songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland, he co-wrote dozens of hits, including "Baby Love," "Heat Wave" and "Reflections," helping to define the Motown sound.
(Image credit: Chelsea Lauren/Getty Images for BMI)
The tropics are beginning to resemble what is more normal for this time of year, but the good news at least for us is that there’s nothing of immediate concern on our radar. We will start to pick up the cadence a bit, however.
Tropical outlook in a sentence
While no activity is anticipated to directly impact Texas, there are several disturbances we will be watching over the next week or so.
Invest 97L
The first item up for discussion is Invest 97L, way out in the deep Atlantic. Recall, invests are just a naming convention for disturbances that the National Weather Service believes merit further investigation. They cycle from 90 to 99 and then repeat. It allows us to see more data, input better data into our regular weather models, and see some initial runs of specialized tropical models on the disturbance.
In this case, Invest 97L is chugging along southwest of the Cabo Verde Islands.
A look at Invest 97L this morning is rather uninspiring. Nevertheless, some models do develop this as it comes west. (Weathernerds.org)
The satellite image above does not inspire much enthusiasm for this disturbance at this point. It has a minimal amount of thunderstorm activity (convection) around it, and it seems to be struggling a bit in a rather hostile Atlantic environment. If the first batch of wind shear near it does not completely shred it, the second batch just east of the islands probably will.
Wind shear is quite expansive and impressive between the Caribbean and the open Atlantic, which will make life difficult for any developing systems as they come west until it dissipates. (University of Wisconsin)
With this sort of wind shear around right now, it would seem that anything coming west is going to struggle. Weather models are split on how this looks over the next week or two, with the GFS knocking back the shear some, and the European model keeping the party going. But as long as this shear is in place, it’s good news for us with respect to anything coming off Africa.
The starting lineup
Speaking of, the “wave train” predicted to emerge off Africa is rather congested right now. We have two in line to emerge over the next week or so, and there’s a third in eastern Africa that should emerge sometime next week.
There are several disturbances waiting in the wings to emerge off Africa over the next 10 days or so. While none appears to be a significantly viable development candidate, it’s August, which means we’ll be watching. (NOAA)
While these disturbances are lined up and ready to play in the Atlantic, again, the wind shear story is one that will have to change for any of them to have a chance. It’s also somewhat notable that there’s a pretty healthy gap between the first two disturbances and the third one. Quiet in late August would be rare. All in all, you probably couldn’t paint a better picture right now in the Atlantic; some activity to watch but nothing imminent.
Gulf update
Seasons like this can lull you to sleep, but I want to just close today with a look at the Gulf. Because of the situation in the Atlantic, the most risk in Texas for the rest of August may come from something much closer to home in the Gulf. Do we see anything worth watching? The short answer is no.
The longer answer is that we have a couple fronts trying to nudge their way to the coast over the next week or two that we should probably keep a side eye on. But at this point in time, there’s nothing signaling anything of legitimate concern.
I’m off today. This was originally published in 2015.
A reader writes:
I am a newly promoted manager and am stumped on how to handle something bizarre that happened in a meeting today, primarily because my sense of humor is getting in the way. I asked one of my employees to explain the progress he’s made in the assignment he’s been working on, and he said, “I would love to tell you…in song.” He proceeded to pull out a harmonica and “find his note,” before erupting into a musical ditty explaining everything in detail. It was so weird…that I did not know how to respond in the moment. Making it worse is that I find this hysterical, and I could not stop smirking the rest of the meeting. Whenever I think about the occurrence, I start to laugh again.
However, that doesn’t mean I find it acceptable, and intend to have a serious discussion with him tomorrow. But I’m curious to know how you would address it, particularly since my potential laughter and smiling will not convey how unacceptable I find his behavior. I do not want this to seem like a suggestion. Am I immature in not being able to hide these emotions? Am I making too big a deal about the situation? I never thought I would have to deal with this as a manager.
I actually think this is hilarious. Is there a reason you find it unacceptable and want to address it with him? I mean, obviously you don’t want all status updates being delivered in song, but unless it becomes a pattern, I’d just assume it was an amusing one-off from someone having a good time (which is not a terrible thing if it doesn’t impede people’s work) and leave it at that.
I’m not saying this is necessarily happening with you, but some managers — especially newer managers — have a tendency to feel like they have to establish capital-A Authority and sometimes see casual behavior or things that deviate from the norm as Things That Must Be Stamped Out. But if you’re having that impulse, it’s important to ask yourself why. Does the behavior in question really have an impact on the work? Is it something where you’ll do more harm than good by coming down on someone for a one-time occurrence? Is it really a significant problem?
If there’s more to this — like you didn’t get important information you needed or you think he has a habit of not taking work as seriously as you need him to — you should address that. But if it’s just a single song? Let yourself laugh (with him, not at him), appreciate his musical talent, and move on. It’s okay to have a little silliness at work.
I’m off today. This was originally published in 2012.
A reader writes:
I am eight days into a new job. It is a rather large corporation. When I was hired, I inquired about an assistant to answer my calls, emails, etc., because I had one at my previous job. My boss, the CEO, mentioned they would look into this after a month or so of me working to evaluate whether I would need the help.
His assistant is great. I noticed that because she is so quick and precise with her projects that she sometimes helps out other departments when she has some free time during the work day. I figured this might be because she doesn’t have enough assignments of her own. I asked her to help me on something a few days ago, but she said she was unable to help me on finance-related projects without expressed permission from her boss. She did let me know that there were other assistants in the finance department that might be able to help me, but they were all busy at the time.
He was out for the day, and she didn’t feel like it was appropriate to disturb him to ask him about this issue. I understand this and appreciate it, but I don’t think the project is what she thought it was. I am actually pretty sure she could have helped without the CEO having an issue with it.
I would like to approach the CEO about borrowing his assistant when she has free time to act as my assistant until the company appoints me one, but I am unsure of how to phrase my request in a way where it won’t undermine his position and what he told me about an assistant when I was hired. I don’t want to come off as sounding that I am entitled to an assistant, but his assistant is bright and quick, and seems to have a great grip on the industry. I am new to the industry and would like to make the most of my new situation. I also think that sharing an assistant with my CEO would give a chance to make a impression and prove myself at this job. I would love for him to mentor me since I am new to the industry and the work world in general.
I should note that I am a supervisor and have one other employee under me who is a designer and doesn’t have any assisting responsibilities. I would ask the designer to stand in for one, but it would seriously cut into their other work duties.
How do I go about asking the CEO this? How do I sell it as a benefit for him? Am I out of line in asking?
What?! Dear god, no.
Do not ask him.
Do not ask his assistant for help again.
Do not under any circumstances ask anyone else to be your assistant either.
Do not, do not, do not.
When you asked about an assistant originally, the CEO was skeptical. He then said they’d consider it after you’d been working a month. If you ask to start borrowing his assistant after eight days, you will look like you’re ignoring what he said earlier.
And, actually, I think you probably are ignoring what he said earlier. For instance, you wrote, “until the company appoints me one.” But there’s no “until” here, because it’s not a given that it will happen — the CEO said they’ll assess in 30 days whether you need one. That means it might not happen, ever. (It probably also means that he really doubts you’ll need one. And it’s pretty unlikely that he’s going to create a whole new position unless you can really demonstrate it’s needed.)
Most jobs don’t come with assistants — for anything, but especially not to answer calls and emails. In most offices, you’re going to be pretty high up before you have a dedicated assistant (if ever), and it’s especially unusual to have someone else handling your emails and calls. If other people at your level don’t have that in this office, you need to accept that that’s just part of the deal with this job and this particular culture.
Pushing for an assistant in a culture that doesn’t operate that way is a really good way to signal “this is not a good fit.” So proceed with caution.
And holy crap, do not try to get your designer to act as your assistant. Not only would it cut into her other work, as you noted, but that’s not the job she signed up for. You will alienate her, and probably piss off your CEO too (who, again, explicitly told you the company isn’t prepared to pay someone to assist you). If your job doesn’t come with an assistant, do not try to co-opt someone else’s job to fix that for you. That is not nice, and it’s not playing by the rules you were hired under.
I have been covering for a coworker who is the lead for our shared role for the past two months. Covering her for a few days would normally have been no problem, but due to our clinic being short-staffed and an increase in clientele, this is starting to take its toll on my productivity and mental health. Conversations with my managers haven’t been productive — they say a bunch of stuff but nothing happens, no help gets hired in, and I’ve had no increase in pay.
I’m over two months behind on my paperwork because I’m balancing doing four people’s jobs some days. The job I originally was hired to do has become my last priority most days. I feel like a failure because I’m crying every day, I’m not being paid enough to even function (my car is literally on its last leg), and I’m being overworked so much that I can’t look or interview anywhere else. I get in at 7 am to try to get a head start and usually skip my lunch and I don’t leave until 5:30 or 6 some days. I even tried for a promotion to escape from the work and they thought I wasn’t qualified … even though I’m nearly single-handedly running a clinic in less than nine months since I started.
I can’t just decide to go back to working eight hours a day because of the number of clients who are now being scheduled. I don’t have the option of electing to see only half of the people who are scheduled with us. I then have to enter in all the data from those visits or else it goes unprocessed and leaves an even bigger mess for me to crawl my way out of. Plus, if our paperwork isn’t done in a timely fashion, it could affect our future funding. So I feel stuck working all these hours, and my managers won’t help. How do I escape this situation?
Our summer-long battle with high pressure has mostly been futile, but over the next several days the good guys should win. We’ll see an influx of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, which should in turn drive up rain chances and bring down temperatures slightly. I don’t think we’re looking at any type of flooding conditions, but much of the region should pick up one-half to one inch of rain through Sunday, and after today high temperatures should be more reasonable, in the lower 90s for much of the area, for a little while.
Tuesday
Highs today should reach the mid- to upper-90s for inland areas, as mostly sunny skies prevail. However, as the sea breeze kicks up we’ll see some isolated to scattered thunderstorms move inland from the coast, and for some locations that will bring the mercury down this afternoon. Rain chances are probably about 20 or 30 percent. Winds will generally be light today, out of the south or southeast at around 5 mph, except where storms develop.
Wednesday
Conditions will be slightly cooler, with slightly higher rain chances on Wednesday as Houston’s weather starts to become more influenced by the Gulf. Look for highs in the mid-90s, with rain chances in the 30 to 50 percent range. Nighttime temperatures will remain sticky, only briefly dropping below 80 degrees for most locations.
High temperatures on Thursday should be a couple of degrees cooler than normal for many locations. (Weather Bell)
Thursday and Friday
A couple of atmospheric disturbances will combine with Gulf moisture to raise rain chances to around 70 percent for both of these days. While chances will be moderately higher closer to the coast, and east of Interstate 45, much of the region should see intermittent light to moderate rain showers. Both days should bring partly cloudy skies, and in addition to this, rain-cooled air may hold highs in the upper 80s to 90 degrees. Rain showers will be most likely during the afternoon hours on both days.
Saturday and Sunday
Rain showers will be more hit or miss this weekend, with slightly better coverage on Saturday than Sunday. I’d expect these to be mostly sunny days, with highs generally in the low 90s for Houston, and likely a bit warmer further inland in places like College Station.
NOAA rain accumulation forecast for now through Saturday. (Weather Bell)
Next week
It appears as though high pressure will start to reassert itself next week, with high temperatures likely to push back up into the mid- to upper-90s for much of the Houston area, to go along with diminished rain chances. I don’t think we’re looking at a ridge-of-doom type scenario, but it’s the middle of August so generally that means rather hot weather around these parts.
English-Australian singer, songwriter and actress Olivia Newton-John has died at age 73. She was one of the the biggest pop stars in the 1970's and early 1980's.
Many items are added to the Internet Archive’s collections every month, by us and by our patrons. Here’s a round up of some of the new media you might want to check out. Logging in might be required to borrow certain items.
Notable new collections from our patrons:
Programming Books: Books on programming, computer languages, and development.
This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:
The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Explore.
Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.
The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming (all with artist permission). Explore.
Install Raid for Free ✅ Mobile and PC: https://clik.cc/sfh3H and get a special starter pack 💥 Available only for the next 30 days 💥
Usually I talk about movies, but for this occasion I'll celebrate the TV shows I love, old and new. With so many genres of shows to choose from, I'll just focus on 5 shows I love, not necessarily the top shows in any particular order. What are some of your favorite TV shows?
88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be in 1988
Whisenant
1988
Submitter: This may be the very definition of a book with outdated information. While doing some weeding I recently came across this gem that has somehow managed to remain in the stacks until 2022. We are an academic theological library, and while we try to represent a wide range of theological perspectives, it’s hard to imagine how this ever ended up in the collection. Interestingly, it seems that this is not Whisenant’s first or last attempt at predicting the end of the world.
The reservoir continues to suffer from a 22-year drought that now has water levels at only 27% of capacity. That's surfaced four sets of skeletal remains in the past four months.
(Image credit: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)
I have a long-time employee who I’ll call Joe. I’ve been his line manager for the last five years or so.
Before my time, Joe expressed a desire to wind down to retirement. The organization supported that with a part-time arrangement which went on for several years — well past Joe hitting and sailing past the usual age of retirement. Unfortunately, upper management then removed our ability to offer part-time work and when given the choice to retire or come back full-time, Joe elected to come back full-time. At the time we were fine with that — he was a good operator.
However, in the last few years Joe has been experiencing health issues. It has slowed him down considerably and changed his attitude to work. Despite many many months of meeting regularly and trying to communicate (gently and then increasingly bluntly) that he needs to do the job more efficiently, the timeliness of his delivery has not improved. If anything, it’s gotten worse. I estimate that I’m getting less work from him now than when he was working part-time despite my best efforts at managing and supporting him.
His attitude toward me and our organizational leadership has deteriorated too. His attitude has moved from positive and constructive to using every opportunity to deliver long-winded lectures about “in his day” and lectures about outdated management practices and how I, my boss, and upper management are not doing our jobs well. He has completely lost the ability to communicate concisely about projects and issues, and people turn off when he talks.
I’m now getting pushback from other staff, upper management, and outside stakeholders who no longer want to work with him because he wastes their time and doesn’t deliver. People have stopped answering his calls.
I have been having conversations about the need for improved, timely outcomes and his communication style with Joe for some time. I have given him a middle of the road workload with clear deliverables but he’s dawdling when we need him to deliver. When I started to ask for the deliverables by specific dates, he complained of stress and anxiety.
Given the nature of his ongoing health issues and the respect I have for his stage of life (now 80s) and historical performance, I am loath to go down a performance management/PIP route lest I literally kill him, but this isn’t fair on the rest of the team who are delivering and pushing out higher volumes of work.
He has said, in response to a frank conversation about retirement, that he can’t do the active things he wanted to due to his health, so he can’t see the point in retiring — he’d be bored.
What can I do here? Do I just need to performance manage him officially even if it worsens his health? It feels like an ignoble end to a long and overwhelming high performing career. On the other hand, I can’t in good conscience let him stay and under deliver when he has no plans of retiring just so he isn’t bored. (In case you’re wondering, Joe is financially comfortable and that is not a factor in the retirement question.)
Is there a solution I’m not seeing? I feel awful about how this might have to end.
Why not have a very frank conversation with Joe about the situation? That’s the most respectful approach and gives him the most control of the situation, while still being firm about what you need.
You could sit down with him and say, “I have an enormous amount of respect for your work here historically, but as we’ve talked about several times lately, you haven’t been hitting the bar we need in your role. Because of the seriousness of the issues, we’re at the point where we’ll need to start a formal improvement plan, and if I don’t see XYZ from you in the next X weeks, I would need to let you go. However, since you had talked about retirement in the past, I wanted to touch base with you and see what makes sense to you. I would much rather see you leave on your own terms, but otherwise I’m at the point where I do need to begin the PIP process.”
That way, he knows where things stand and it’s up to him. If he seems unsure about how to proceed, you say, “I’m happy to give you a chance to pursue the PIP option if you want to — and if you choose that path, I’ll of course try my best to help you succeed — but I would hate for it to turn your experience here sour. I would much rather work together on a transition that meets your needs and ours.”
And then respect Joe’s choice, whatever it is. As part of that, I think you need to get away from the fear that putting him on a PIP will kill him. Joe’s a competent and financially comfortable adult who will have options and agency in this situation. It’s okay to be honest (be kind too, of course, but that’s not specific to his age). In fact, I’d argue that if you want to help him preserve his dignity, that necessarily includes not coddling him because of his age — and does require intervening at this point.
I’m actually a fan of this approach in lots of situations where you’re convinced that a PIP or other progressive discipline process won’t lead to the significant improvement that you need. Rather than dragging the person through a process that’s unlikely to end in success, having an honest conversation and giving them a voice in how to proceed can be a kinder (and more effective) approach. (To be clear, though, if the person picks the PIP route, you should be sincere in your willingness to give them a chance to show they can improve.)
In this third installment of the Denfield Hoard, I take a look at finds that I will call 'Multimedia'. But in this case it does not mean CD-ROM's and cheap plastic external speakers like it did in the 90's. This looks at software, magazines... but I get completely distracted by a separate cache of Mac stuff. In doing so, I get to delve deeper into a certain 90's Powerbook...
Previous 'Denfield Hoard' Installments: - Part 1: Kensington & Keyboards (Patreon exclusive!) - Part 2: The Powerbook 520
Sources- AppleDesign: The Work of the Industrial Design Group (1997) by Paul Kunkel MacWorld Magazine MacUser Magazine
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It's like when you go to France and find out everyone in France is really into baguettes, to the point where all conversation inevitably arrives at baguettes. It makes communication impossible, but it really makes you appreciate just how much French people love baguettes.
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## Music & Sound + Kevin MacLeod Track Name: Fig Leaf Times Two Kevin MacLeod on YouTube: youtu.be/UcOXTd9Ix7g Music from: incompetech.com
