’Most of us have experienced a vague sense of feeling “burned out” by work, but now there’s a specific definition for what that actually means. The World Health Organization recently updated their International Classification of Disease codes (ICD–11) to define burnout as a syndrome with three dimensions.

The new definition doesn’t mean that burnout (or, as they call it, “burn-out”) is a disease; it’s classified as a “factor influencing health status.” Here’s the new definition:

Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: 1) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; 2) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and 3) reduced professional efficacy. Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.

If you feel like you meet the criteria for burnout, you might want to mention it next time you’re seeking medical or mental health care. On its own, burnout isn’t considered a medical condition, but it represents added stress in your life that you may need to deal with…’

Via Lifehacker

Related: How America Created “Burnout”:

Steven Hopper notes that working overtime is the norm in America, that many cannot afford time off from work in the only advanced economy that does not mandate paid vacation leave for its workers. Even when paid time off is provided, many Americans do not use their available time off. 

‘American society has bred a culture of “work harder to get ahead”, so many Americans feel like taking vacation would mean sacrificing their future career success. It is precisely this culture of work more and vacation less that is leading to increased rates of burn-out among Americans…’

Via Medium

Adds Speed Trap Alerts in 40 Countries:

’Folks, I’ve got some great news if you’re a driver and some bad news if you’re a cop: Google has confirmed it’s rolling out the ability to see speed and mobile cameras, as well as speed limits, in more than 40 countries in Maps.

…They’re neat features, if the Google-owned navigation app Waze is any indication, the tech giant may see some pushback from law enforcement. Earlier this year, CBS New York obtained a cease and desist letter sent by the NYPD to Google over Waze alerts for DWI checkpoints. That letter, which can be read in full here, claimed that sharing information about the checkpoints with the app’s users “is irresponsible since it only serves to aid impaired and intoxicated drivers to evade checkpoints and encourage reckless driving.”…’

Via Gizmodo

’Over the course of two articles, one published in 2017 and the other just a few days ago, the NYT describes encounters between a carrier strike group centered around USS Nimitz in 2004 and aircrew from the USS Theodore Roosevelt in the 2014/2015 timeframe. The encounters with the utterly unidentified flying objects left highly trained and skilled sailors manning radars and flying some of the world’s most sophisticated fighter jets as at a loss as anyone else in describing what they had seen.…’

Via jalopnik.com

’This is thought to be the first photo of an all-albino panda. The beautiful animal was photographed by a trail camera at the Wolong National Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province, China. From The Guardian:

Local researchers said they believed the panda to be between one and two years old. The sex could not be determined from the photo, taken by an infrared camera installed in December last year to monitor wildlife in the area.

Spotting the albino panda is incredibly rare, given how infrequently albinism manifests. The giant panda, native to China, is the rarest member of the bear species, with fewer than 2,000 remaining in the wild……’

Via Boing Boing

What It’s Like to Have Multiple Personalities:

’Formerly called “multiple-personality disorder” and most often associated with murderous con artists on shows like Law & Order: SVU, dissociative-identity disorder (DID) is a widely misunderstood and controversial diagnosis. DID remains listed in the DSM–5, the most recent psychiatric diagnostic manual, where it is defined as “an identity disruption” involving two or more personality states, each of which may vary in behavior, memory, affect, and sensory-motor functioning, among other factors. Yet many professionals in the field have argued for its removal, even going so far as to call the diagnosis “bogus.”

Those who affirm DID’s legitimacy, like Bethany Brand, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Towson University, say that much of the controversy stems from the fact that most mental-health professionals have “shockingly little” training in trauma. DID, she says, is a trauma-based disorder, typically (though not always) formed by children in response to “very early, profound, chronic childhood abuse.”…’

Via The Cut

’Allergies driving you crazy? You may be a victim of “botanical sexism,” the exclusive planting of male trees, which plagues many cities.…’

Via Atlas Obscura

Here are some of the pearls:

• “The first thing they told us in culinary school when you’re learning food safety is: If you enter a seafood restaurant and smell fish, leave.”
• “Ask where your oysters come from. If they don’t know, you don’t want them. Same for most seafood.”
• “In culinary school, every single chef instructor says the same thing: If it’s misspelled on the menu, that’s on purpose. It’s so they don’t have to sell you the real thing. A prime example is ‘krab cakes.'”
• “When the menus are super dirty and never cleaned, that means everything is super dirty and never cleaned.”
• “Don’t order fish on Sundays. Most places get their fish deliveries on a Monday and on a Thursday. Fish goes off fairly quickly, and on a Sunday it’s really not great.”
• “If a pitcher of water touches your glass, it has also touched everyone else’s glass. Also, if you can’t see them pour your water, there’s something wrong.”
  

  Via BuzzFeed.

’Around the world, amateur astronomers are monitoring a strange phenomenon on the verge of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (GRS). The giant storm appears to be unraveling. “I haven’t seen this before in my 17-or-so years of imaging Jupiter,” reports veteran observer Anthony Wesley of Australia, who photographed a streamer of gas detaching itself from the GRS on May 19th:

The plume of gas is enormous, stretching more than 10,000 km from the central storm to a nearby jet stream that appears to be carrying it away. Wesley says that such a streamer is peeling off every week or so.…’

Via Spaceweather.com

Did Everest ‘Traffic Jam’ Contribute to Climber’s Death?

’Earlier this week, American climber Don Cash died on Everest hours after he had reached the summit. As Alan Arnette reported for Outside, Cash was one of about 200 people who went to the top of the world that day, and he encountered a traffic jam on his way down. “When Cash and his Sherpa guides got to the Hillary Step they were forced to wait their turn for at least two hours,” wrote Arnette.…’

Via Outside Online

’In 1960, David Latimer put some compost, water, and plant seeds into a large glass jar and sealed it up. And it’s been growing like that ever since, save for when Latimer opened the bottle to water it in 1972.

It’s easy to take nature and evolution for granted but think about how marvelous this is. Over billions of years, an ecosystem evolved on Earth that can sustain itself basically forever using light from the Sun.…’

Via Kottke

’The effort could cause a massive partisan fight over Iran.…’

Via Vox

’Since January 1, the rash- and fever-causing virus has sickened 880 people across 24 states. That’s more than all the cases of the past three years combined. The epicenter for this year’s spike is two outbreaks in New York—in Brooklyn and Rockland County—that public health officials have been struggling to curb since last fall. And the longer the virus continues to circulate in these communities, and spread to new ones, the more likely it is the US will be plunged back into a time when measles hot spots persist as a constant daily presence.…’

Via WIRED

’With the seemingly endless growth of the Democratic primary field, social behaviorists are worried that we may suffer from choice overload.…’

Via Big Think

’Yemen leads the list of the most fragile nations, with the U.S. and U.K. among the “most worsened.”…’

Via Big Think

’Our greatest achievement as a species has been to break free from the sheer naked ferocity of evolution. It means we need GM food to avoid starvation. We need additives to ensure that the food we grow can be safely consumed before it spoils — an important consideration for an increasing population. And most importantly of all, we need vaccines to prevent disease. We must never again expose our children to the wholesome, fully organic, unblemished and obscene fury of Mother Nature unleashed. Love science, hate evolution. Coming to a car bumper sticker near you soon, I hope.…’

Via Big Think

’In 2008, a ceramic bottle packed with about fifty bent copper alloy pins, some rusty nails, and a bit of wood or bone was discovered during an archaeological investigation by the Museum of London Archaeology Service. Now known as the “Holywell witch-bottle,” the vessel, which dates between 1670 and 1710, is believed to be a form of ritual protection that was hidden beneath a house near Shoreditch High Street in London.

“The most common contents of a witch-bottle are bent pins and urine, although a range of other objects were also used,” writes archaeologist Eamonn P. Kelly in Archaeology Ireland. Sometimes the bottles were glass, but others were ceramic or had designs with human faces. A witch bottle might contain nail clippings, iron nails, hair, thorns, and other sharp materials, all selected to conjure a physical charm for protection. “It was thought that the bending of the pins ‘killed’ them in a ritual sense, which meant that they then existed in the ‘otherworld’ where the witch travelled. The urine attracted the witch into the bottle, where she became trapped on the sharp pins,” Kelly writes.

It’s probable many witch bottles were made as a remedy at a time when available medicine fell short.
Akin to witch marks, which were carved or burned onto windows, doors, fireplaces, and other entrances to homes in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, witch bottles were embedded in buildings across the British Isles and later the United States at these same entry points. “The victim would bury the bottle under or near the hearth of his house, and the heat of the hearth would animate the pins or iron nails and force the witch to break the link or suffer the consequences,” anthropologist Christopher C. Fennell explains in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology.…’

Via JSTOR Daily

’Marie Kondo has convinced us of the morality of purging. If we knew where our clothes ended up, though, we’d feel differently… The problem is that most of our donated clothing does not reach any sort of higher purpose; it just ends up as waste. Clothing is one of the fastest-growing categories in landfills in the U.S. Almost 24 billion pounds of clothes and shoes are thrown out each year, more than double what we tossed two decades ago. And there’s every reason to believe the show only added to the problem, Adele Meyer, executive director of the Association of Resale Professionals, confirmed to me.…’

Via Slate

’It’s been eight years since the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The resulting damage led to hydrogen explosions and a partial meltdown, releasing radiation into the surrounding area. After workers’ brave efforts stabilized the situation, they began to focus on long-term cleanup. The cleanup recently reached a major milestone when workers began removing nuclear fuel rods for disposal. But how do you really clean up a nuclear accident?…’

Via JSTOR Daily

’RECENTLY AT THE Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Brighton, New York, one of the world’s most powerful lasers blasted a droplet of water, creating a shock wave that raised the water’s pressure to millions of atmospheres and its temperature to thousands of degrees. X-rays that beamed through the droplet in the same fraction of a second offered humanity’s first glimpse of water under those extreme conditions.

The X-rays revealed that the water inside the shock wave didn’t become a superheated liquid or gas. Paradoxically—but just as physicists squinting at screens in an adjacent room had expected—the atoms froze solid, forming crystalline ice…

The findings, published this week in Nature, confirm the existence of “superionic ice,” a new phase of water with bizarre properties. Unlike the familiar ice found in your freezer or at the north pole, superionic ice is black and hot. A cube of it would weigh four times as much as a normal one. It was first theoretically predicted more than 30 years ago, and although it has never been seen until now, scientists think it might be among the most abundant forms of water in the universe.

Across the solar system, at least, more water probably exists as superionic ice—filling the interiors of Uranus and Neptune—than in any other phase, including the liquid form sloshing in oceans on Earth, Europa and Enceladus. The discovery of superionic ice potentially solves decades-old puzzles about the composition of these “ice giant” worlds.…’

Via WIRED

How to do nothing: resisting the attention economy:

’In 2015, Jenny Odell started an organization she called The Bureau of Suspended Objects. Odell was then an artist-in-residence at a waste operating station in San Francisco. As the sole employee of her bureau, she photographed things that had been thrown out and learned about their histories. (A bird-watcher, Odell is friendly with a pair of crows that sit outside her apartment window; given her talent for scavenging, you wonder whether they’ve shared tips.)

Odell’s first book, “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” echoes the approach she took with her bureau, creating a collage (or maybe it’s a compost heap) of ideas about detaching from life online, built out of scraps collected from artists, writers, critics and philosophers. In the book’s first chapter, she remarks that she finds things that already exist “infinitely more interesting than anything I could possibly make.” Then, summoning the ideas of others, she goes on to construct a complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto.…’

Via The New York Times

’“Prohibitionist strategy is unsustainable,” reads the policy plan…. The five-year policy plan calls for prescribing treatment programs instead of punishments to drug users. It’s unclear what effects the laws would have on Mexican cartels, which make the bulk of their money selling drugs in the U.S.…’

Via Big Think

People who live further west in a time zone experience fewer days with natural morning light. As a result, they depend upon electric light to get ready for work and other business of the day. Lighter colors mean more mornings per year in light.

’Writing in the Journal of Health Economics, authors Osea Giuntella of the University of Pittsburgh and Fabrizio Mazzonna of Università della Svizzera Italiana took an innovative slant on the effect of position in a time zone on health and economics. They were interested in something called “social jet lag.”

The idea is that given the constraints of modern life, most people are out of sync with their natural circadian rhythms, which should follow the sun. Instead, we use electric light to synchronize most of our societal activities regardless of where the sun is at in its course through the heavens.

The conflict is that the primordial cycle of light and dark from the sun is deeply embedded within our evolutionary past as coded in our DNA; we have a “built-in” biological time for body temperature, hormone levels, sleep, and much more, that cycles very close to 24 hours.

Modern society requires synchronization in such things as school start times, work times and television watching times. All of these can desynchronize our social activity from our biological time. There is mounting evidence that chronic circadian rhythm disruption leads to several serious diseases as well as depression and mood disorders. On a societal level, the economic impact may also be large.

Lefties of a boundary healthier than righties?

As a test of this idea, Giuntella and Mazzonna predicted that at the boundaries between time zones within the United States, people on the left side of the boundary would be healthier than people on the right side, and the economies stronger; the left side would be the eastern extreme of one time zone, and the right side would be the western extreme of the adjacent time zone. The sun sets about an hour later on the right side.

Their primary unit of analysis was the county. They used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from the U.S. Census, as well as information on sleep duration and quality from two national surveys. They did several different analyses, one of which was to group counties within 100 miles of the time zone boundary into two groups, one on the left side and one on the right side. They then compared the two groups for health outcomes.

As they predicted, there were discontinuities between counties on either side of time zone boundaries in sleep and in risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and breast cancer. In each case, counties on the right side of the boundary did worse: shorter sleep and higher risk of disease. They then calculated an overall composite health index using the diseases cited above, and it, too, was lower in the counties on the right side. They ascribe their findings to the later clock time of sunset on the right side of the boundary.…’

Via The Conversation

’While browsing the GOES Image Viewer a few months ago, I had an idea: with the data frequency that these new GOES satellites provide, I could build a Mac app that pulls the newest image every 20 minutes and sets it as your desktop background.

What resulted was a simple little menu bar app that gives you a near real-time view of Earth all day long. I’ve been using it for a few weeks as I’ve built it, and it is an absolute joy to have a window to Earth all day.…’

Via Main Engine Cut Off (thanks to Jason Snell)

’Just 100 companies produce 71 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. This map lists their names and locations, and their CEOs. The climate crisis may be too complex for these 100 people to solve, but naming and shaming them is a good start.…’

Via Big Think

On the risks of immersing oneself in a role:

’In 2008, actor Heath Ledger accidentally overdosed on sleeping pills and died, aged 28.
One myth that attached itself to Ledger’s death was that it was somehow a result of immersing himself in the character of the Joker.
New research suggest that fully immersed actors “forget themselves” in the sense that they actively ignore facts about who they are, temporarily subordinating their own thoughts and feelings to those of their character.…’

Via Big Think

And humans will suffer as a result:

• The United Nations reported that nature is declining at an unparalleled rate, and humans are the cause. [Washington Post / Darryl Fears](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-t/)
• The UN’s biodiversity report outlines a shocking reality: 1 million species are on the verge of extinction, which threatens human survival as well. [[National Geographic / Stephen Leahy](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-i/)
• Climate change is the driving force behind this decline. Overfishing, the use of fossil fuels, pollution, and neglect of the growth of invasive species have also been identified as the cause behind the dwindling biodiversity. [NYT / Brad Plumer](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-d/)
• While this isn’t the first report to predict Earth’s grim future, this report stands out because it details how humans drastically rely on the well-being of these specimens. The health of our ecosystem is directly tied to food security and access to clean water. [Smithsonian Magazine / Maddie Burakoff](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-h/)
• The situation has already gotten so bad that small efforts will not suffice, and governments will need to make transformative changes if they want to save the planet. Some of the solutions suggested by the authors include adopting techniques that grow more food on less land and cracking down on illegal logging and fishing. [AP / Seth Borenstein](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-k/)
• Nations have begun to recognize the threat of a failing ecosystem, and two high-level summits have already been scheduled for world leaders to discuss their conservation goals in 2020. [CNN / Isabelle Gerretsen](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-b/)
• The UN report sends a dire message to all nations that action needs to be made –– quickly. Changing lifestyles to prevent a climate catastrophe may seem arduous, but the cost of doing nothing will be much higher. [Guardian / Robert Watson](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-n/)

Study: People who swear are more honest:

’There are two conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between profanity and dishonesty. These two forms of norm-violating behavior share common causes, and are often considered to be positively related. On the other hand, however, profanity is often used to express one’s genuine feelings, and could therefore be negatively related to dishonesty. In three studies, we explored the relationship between profanity and honesty. … We found a consistent positive relationship between profanity and honesty; profanity was associated with less lying and deception at the individual level, and with higher integrity at the society level.…’

Via Stanford Graduate School of Business

Suzie Lopez:

’The Wake has been called “the most colossal leg pull in literature” and even Joyce’s patron fell out with him over it. But Wake scholarship is thriving more than ever. In the words of Joyce Scholar Sam Slote almost “any analysis will be incomplete.” After Ulysses, Joyce was interested in the subconscious interior monologue, our dreaming lives. He also wanted to shatter the conventions of language to form an almost eternal every-language. It sounds somewhat like the dial of a radio in Joyce’s time, static turning into myriad languages. Joyce intentionally made passages more obscure to evoke radio. PHD candidate Yuta Imazeki has calculated “numbers of portmanteaux and foreign words in the radio passage” that are higher in frequency than any others; intentionally obscure. So is it an indecipherable ruse or a harbinger of hypertext? Could it even be… therapeutic? As a self-taught enthusiast, how did I even get into this?…’

Via Literary Hub

’Jon Stewart was once asked to describe his importance as a political commentator on The Daily Show. He replied: “On a scale of zero to 10, I’d go with a zero, not very important.”

That was dead wrong, according to a new study that suggests Stewart’s 2015 departure from the left-leaning show caused not only a drop in ratings, but also a slight drop in voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election – enough to tip the scales in favor of President Donald Trump.…’

Via Big Think

’All life as we know it relies on carbon and water. But researchers speculate this doesn’t have to be the case..…’

Via Big Think

NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller explains how the universe itself has been a salve for her fears:

’The universe chooses people to be interested it, she says. What has the universe chosen you for?…’

Via Big Think

Dementia, disrespect, and loneliness – that is not your future, says aging expert Ashton Applewhite:

’The best anti-aging advice? Stop stereotyping old people! Cultural messaging about the pitfalls of old age causes undue stress that prematurely ages the brain and shortens life spans.
People who have a positive outlook on aging can live 7.5 years longer than those who buy into cultural stereotypes about getting old.…’

Via Big Think