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The Smell of Rain & Women's Salaries
Plus, you are what you eat, in case you forgot...
Adam Zulawski
July 24, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Our lovely misspelt logo by Dall-E
Hi,
Welcome to the Procrastilearning Newsletter, where your time is well spent even though you should probably be doing something else.
3 things worth procrastilearning over
via Leonardo.ai
1. The smell of rain is called “petrichor”
Ever noticed the smell when it rains after a dry spell? Of course you have. It's a common phenomenon, especially in summer. That smell is “petrichor” and it comes from the release of specific chemicals from soil bacteria, plants and the ozone all combined together. Our noses are very sensitive to the aroma as it lets us know there's drinkable water available after a drought.
I love it personally, and it turns out I'm not the only one. There is a book all about petrichor and even a perfume based on it.
2. AI recommends women ask for lower salaries
While Trump is signing executive orders to stop “woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models”, it turns out AI is actually pretty patriarchal anyway, so I’m not sure what he’s complaining about. Never mind the extreme outbursts of MechaHitler by Elon Musk's Grok model, just trying to get balanced job advice from ChatGPT is going to go better if you’re a man.
An investigation has shown that AI regularly gives men and women different advice about adequate pay for different jobs, recommending women ask for significantly lower sums. Women already get paid worse for the same work, so I guess AI is just assuming well this must be what society deems acceptable. If AI was truly woke, you'd think it'd be egging women on to ask for more.
Meanwhile a recent study has found that using AI regularly might mean you end up with worse recall and brain connectivity than people who write things themselves. Me brain okay though.
3. “You are what you eat” gets truer all the time
Not only will a lot of sugar make you fatter and hurt your cardiovascular system, but it will also make you less conscientious and open. It turns out what's happening with your gut affects what's happening with your brain. For example, having a mostly healthy mix of bacteria in your stomach is associated with lower anxiety and better emotional stability.
So the question all this raises is: if you're an emotional wreck at the moment, should you be checking what you're eating? The answer is: well yeah, you probably should.
2 quotes to keep in mind
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet, and another fig was a brilliant professor… I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.
1 simple tip to get some clarity
Take a few minutes to jot down onto paper everything on your mind.
When your mind feels cluttered with random thoughts, worries and things you need to do, take 5-10 minutes to write everything down, without judgment or organisation. Just get it all out of your head onto paper. You can sort it later. This simple method should rein in the mental overwhelm you might be feeling, especially if it’s making you procrastinate.
The idea has been popularised by lots of people, most notably David Allen of ‘Getting Things Done‘ fame. He calls it a ‘mind sweep‘. If you like, you can listen to him explaining how to do it here:
That's all for today. Many thanks for reading.
Adam
Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning on Beehiiv / More stuff
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