Code & Canvas

Artwork Copyright © Tyler Spangler

color theory (because how can you mix pale blue with red and make it make perfect sense AND look ethereal?)

perspective

An open-air museum this month! The oldest one in Germany, according to themselves, which I am not sure how reliable that claim is; I haven't fact-checked.

Three 17th century buildings, all taken from their original places and re-built in the Heinrich-Heine-Park in Rudolstadt, Thüringen. Obviously not enough for a real museum village, but a lovely little 3-sided farm complex with 2 houses and a barn.

All 3 beautiful timber frame houses

It's tiny, but I was very surprised by how well-curated the whole thing was. Often, with things like this, the buildings are overstuffed, there's just lots of vaguely historical-looking objects thrown in, yk? Here, the rooms really looked like someone might love there; not bare, but also not messy.

Time-wise, objects were kind of all over the place, but I feel that is authentic for this kind of historical farm.

Old farm furniture is often richly painted; you can find historical closets like this at antique shops sometimes, often they will have the names or initials of the owners, and the year they were made.

Closet bed!

The best tiled stove I have ever seen in my life, I want this in my house so had.

A wedding chest. The brides trousseau would be packed in here. Also often used to show off a family's wealth.

I just love how detailed everything was. Aesthetics are one of the fundamental things that make us human. Throughout history, it was never enough for things to be just functional, they must be beautiful as well.

The highlight of the whole thing was this recreation of an apothecary. I just love old shop furniture like this, the dozens of tiny drawers, all neatly labeled, the counter, the scales. I also learned something about traveling pharmacists! Which apparently were a thing that existed, and they were respected too, they had certificates and everything. Idk why I never considered that this was an occupation, but it makes sense. This area used to be very rural and isolated; of course there'd be all sorts of traveling craftsmen and merchants.

Of course there also was a spinning/weaving room, but unfortunately, I could only look in through the door. Would have loved a closer look at that loom.

Look at this yarn winder with a built-in measuring function! It's so clever, and I want something like this so bad.

Cake! It looked very nice, but unfortunately was mediocre at best.

Some more impressions:

So glad everyone's been loving the cephaloshrooms!

For something like computers, this looks like how pricey "gAmiNG" laptops look all fancy but fall apart in about the same timeframe as the lower end laptops for students. But if you've ever handled the sort of laptops for banks or businesses, you'd wonder why laptops can't all be like this. People swear by Lenovo Thinkpads for a reason. Dell's Latitude (general productivity) and Precision (has the power of a gaming laptop but far less bs) lines, HP's probooks, all feel really nice and last for-fucking-ever. But you can't buy them in a store even if you wanted one.

So the trick is to buy what big organizations are buying, but you likely gotta get 'em secondhand when the orgs are done with them. For basic clothes, mil surplus might be a good port of call, for technology see an e-waste recycler or sometimes government auction (you just gotta know what to ask for; ThinkPads, Dell Latitude/Precision, HP Probook/Zbook). Otherwise try to thrift old, pre-enshitification items. The blanket I had as a kid is still going strong and has lived to bury multiple sets of newer bedding (which have worn thin and torn). Kitchen items, see if you can shop at a restaurant supplier.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

What I thought was maybe nostalgia turns out to maybe be more than that: maybe, for the sake of simulation, we can build our own campuses by simply building our own curriculums, and switching between simulated classes by walking for a bit, instead of, you know, always sitting.

If our bodies really don’t give much of a crap about whether or not we are actually going somewhere when moving, why not play pretend for real?

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

I got to see this similar one of Thomas Beauchamp and Katherine Mortimer:

I'm also fond of this one, of a protestant and catholic couple who couldn't be buried in the same cemetary:

Images by Mike Searle via Wikimedia Commons (1), (2).

This person has some even better pictures and close-ups on their Flickr account.

Caroline Damer died in 1775 aged 57, and her husband, heartbroken, commissioned the Italian sculptor Agostino Carlini to create this marble tomb.

Joseph survived her by 23 years, but, from all I could find, never had a subsequent spouse or partners.