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

1. Redheads have higher pain thresholds

Don’t hit that ginger kid, you bully - he can take a punch better than you think. That being said, redheads are more sensitive to certain types of pain. They even need more anaesthesia than most during medical procedures. It's all to do with the MC1R gene, which controls how they deal with melanocortin and melanin, the stuff that affects your skin pigmentation.

Essentially, if you need to change a dodgy plug, get a redhead to do it as they don't feel electric shocks as much as regular people. But if you want to hang out with a friend in a sauna one afternoon, your redheaded friend is more likely to want to stop early.

2. Survey finds how workers are really reacting to AI

Stanford just surveyed 1,500 workers and AI experts about which jobs AI will actually replace and automate. You will probably be unsurprised to learn that a lot of AI products are helping people with tasks that they don't really want replaced. Workers mostly just want help with administrative stuff that takes them away from their core work, but AI isn't covering that stuff properly yet.

When asked what they actually want, 69.38% of workers said "Automate the task so I can focus on high-value work", 46.6% ticked "Handle the repetitive stuff", and 25.5% said "Reduce stress and mental drain". All pretty reasonable asks.

3. China regularly plants forests in the Gobi desert

In the 1970s, with the Gobi desert expanding at an accelerated rate, and Beijing often rocked by sand storms, it was predicted 30% of China would soon become desert. So the Three-North Shelter Forest Program, known colloquially as the Great Green Wall, came in to stop the country's decline into a barren wasteland. It seems to be working well, although only up to a point, as the over-farming practices that accelerated the problem in the first place have not been curbed much.

Some of you may recall another famous project known as the Great Green Wall across the Sahara in Africa. It turns out something similar is also happening in Australia and soon in Saudi Arabia. All these projects seem like good and worthwhile endeavours to me, even though they obviously come with faults and problems.

2 quotes to keep in mind

1 simple tip to figure out why you get spam emails

Add a + to your email address when you sign up to stuff.

It turns out you can add an identifier to your email address whenever you use it to sign up to a service or website. So, for example, let's say I want to sign up to the exciting mumsnet.com and rival netmums.com - instead of me signing up with my usual [email protected], I would use [email protected] and [email protected] respectively. That way, when I start getting spam about penis enlargement pills, I’ll know which group of online mothers is responsible for selling my data.

That's all for today. Many thanks for reading.

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning on Beehiiv / More stuff

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