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The Five-Kilometers Edition Sunday, July 24, 2016

Pokémon Go Is Secretly Teaching Americans The Metric System, by Michael Nunez, Gizmodo

The eggs have left a lot of American players wondering, “How many miles are in 5 kilometers?”

App Of The Day: Facetune, by Jamey Tucker, WPSD

Once the selfie is taken, you have options to smooth out wrinkles and blemishes, whiten teeth, get rid of dark circles around the eyes, even re­shape your face.

Hooray For Globalisation

Apple Weathers anti-U.S. Demo In China, Where Patriotic Protests Snowball, by Sharon Shi and Lindsy Long, Reuters

"Boycotting Apple would only make Chinese people lose their jobs - many work for Apple."

A U.S. Consumer Panned A Chinese Product On Amazon. Then Things Got Crazy, by Yingzhi Yang, LA Times

The incident seems to highlight differing cultural norms between buyers and sellers. In China, it is not uncommon for online vendors to harass customers who leave negative feedback online.

Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, said 8% of complaints on its EBay-like Taobao platform involve customers being harassed by vendors, according to a report published last week by the Chinese news portal Sina.

Hooray For Modern Life

The Reasons Why Exhaustion And Burnout Are So Common, by David Robson, BBC

A few years ago, Anna Katharina Schaffner became the latest victim of the exhaustion ‘epidemic’. It began with a kind of mental and physical inertia – as she put it, a “sense of heaviness” in all that she did. Even the most mundane tasks would sap her of all her energy, and concentrating on her work became increasingly difficult.

Yet when she tried to relax, she would find herself obsessively checking her emails at all hours, as if relief for her ennui would suddenly ping into her inbox. Alongside the weariness came feelings of emotional despondency: “I was disenchanted, disillusioned and hopeless.”

These feelings will be familiar to countless others, from Pope Benedict XVI to Mariah Carey, who have been diagnosed with exhaustion. If the media are to be believed, it is a purely modern ailment; almost every time Schaffner turned on the TV, she would see a debate on the trials we face in our 24/7 culture. “All the commentators represented our age as the most terrible one out there – that it’s the absolute apocalypse for our energy reserves,” she says.

Bottom of the Page

All the words I've 'typed' into my computer and phone today are either typed with my right hand only, or dictated via Siri. My left hand is totally non-functional.

(Yes, I've learnt to change to using my non-donminant hand for many other tasks too. It's not easy to teach an old dog new tricks, even if it's just a switch of hands.)

~

Thanks for reading.