Hi,

Welcome to the Procrastilearning Newsletter, where you’re free to procrastinate with a meaningful break guilt-free before getting back to work.

• 💡 3 ideas worth procrastilearning over

• 🗣️ 2 quotes to help you refocus

• 🪄 1 tip to keep you on track

3 things worth procrastilearning over

1. Penises are getting smaller

And sperm counts are getting lower. It’s caused by so-called EDCs in plastics, chemicals and even our food. These compounds get interpreted as hormones by our bodies. Stupid body.

Over the generations, it’s not looking good, but there are things you can do (from 5:18 in) to cut down your exposure to EDCs to ensure your grandchildren exist.

2. AI’s writing will get worse because it will copy AI

As ChatGPT and its ilk become more popular, more text on the Internet, books and even scientific papers are being generated by them.

All this new stuff is being fed back into AI again as more example-food for it to copy. But this re-ingestion is likely to lead to much lower quality output and more need for humans to keep writing things themselves. There’s a great breakdown here about it:

Elsewhere, the AI-specialist Wharton professor Ethan Mollick has just released a new book called Co-Intelligence on all this AI stuff, which he says is designed to be read with AI as a companion:

3. The world’s most relaxing song according to science

No, it’s not Richard Clayderman tinkling on a piano. It’s by an ambient band from Manchester called Marconi Union. The piece is called Weightless and you can listen to it here.

The initial study found it relaxed patients just as much as a control group taking the sedative midazolam. Later on, other scientists tried to see how it did against Katie Melua and Moby, which seems like a predictable waste of time. Marconi Union made Weightless with sound therapists to help them, which is cheating a bit anyway. Katie Melua doesn’t have sound therapists in her backing band.

Although all this happened a few years back, I thought I’d bring it to your attention since a new 24/7 live stream just launched showcasing the song along with endless remixes of it.

Amusing final fact: the song was commissioned by Radox Spa, Unilever’s shower gel brand. 🤷‍♂️

2 quotes to keep in mind

1 tip to reinvigorate your body & mind

Take regular cold showers.

As the weather gets warmer, it’s time to try to create a habit that will sharpen both your mind and body. And probably really annoy you at first.

But if you want to improve your sleep, reduce inflammation and speed up your metabolism, then regular cold exposure can do you wonders. Start simple, with say 30 seconds right at the end of your regular shower. I wrote about how to get started a while back here, but if you want reasons to give it a go from a more authoritative source than me, why not try fancy-pants Vogue:

That's all for today. Many thanks for reading. Before you go back to work, here’s a picture of a narwhal.

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning on Beehiiv / More stuff
Currently reading: Teach Your Child How To Think by Edward de Bono

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