cherry valley forever
todays bird
we're not kids anymore.
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Stranger Things
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shark vs the universe
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$LAYYYTER
styofa doing anything
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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@mnemonomancy
Do you ever think about how so much of the deadly anti-science rhetoric that fills America today and is killing countless vulnerable people can be directly traced back to one fucking guy who decided to just straight-up lie about vaccines causing autism because it would make him a profit? Do you ever think about that? Because I think about it a lot.
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i was like 'it's weird the way everyone is doing free pr for the catholic church rn just bc the pr for the new pope has already been that good' and someone was like 'wait? why don't you like the pope? did something happen?' i feel insane i'm not exaggerating i didn't even know what to say?? 'did something happen?' yes the last 2 thousand years of global history, and no, going back 2,000 years in catholic history is not dramatic because it's remained consistently that bad throughout and in fact i do think the church should answer for every single century of its sins while all of its assets are returned to the people from which they were stolen and its global power is dissolved.
“The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what one has lived through. Most people had not lived—nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died—through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.”
Another Country, by James Baldwin
When people talk about all art being political (hard agree) they always talk about the content, themes, etc present within the art itself. Which obviously I get and obviously is a huge part of it. Of course. But I’m personally always struck by the politics surrounding the more metatextual elements of the art; that is, stuff like access to the tools needed for the creation of the art. I mean the literal materials of which an artpiece is made. This is a low-hanging-fruit example but I’m reminded of that Disney adult who tried to claim art isn’t inherently political by being like “I just drew a stick figure on a napkin, is that political? 🤣🤣” & while I think there are multiple different angles from which one could criticize this blatantly pathetic argument, I remember being really struck by like… the flagrant “waste” of implicitly throwaway resources that many parts of the world just literally don’t have and/or that carry with them deeply fraught histories of capitalist labor exploitation and destruction of natural resources. Like. Napkins?? The apolitical canvas that is paper napkins?
I should be doing more to appreciate the lack of marvel movies in today's popular culture. I once yearned for marvel movies to have this level of irrelevance. They used to feel almost ozymandian, like an empire that had no beginning and no end. and now tony stark iron man is naught but two vast and trunkless legs of stone.
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I think that what affronts me so much about our present dystopia is how predictable it all was from social dynamics that had been at play throughout my whole life; and in fact it was so predictable that a lot of people did predict it! But it happened nonetheless!
Humans have agency! We can forecast likely futures and plan ahead for them! We can make moral decisions! But that capacity on a societal level seems to have been disabled.
Anyway, part of the reason I like the idea of a hivemind is because I want a collective that's actually capable of acting as a unit in the best interests of all.
I love spiders and u should too
spiders are like snakes, u are way more scared of them than u should be. only a tiny amount of them can hurt us and u can easily memorize the ones that live in ur area
person typing into google search bar: obfuscate meaning
google ai overview: Understood! From now on, all meaning will be hidden from you, and you'll be forced to wade through the dreary vastness. Whether it's things you've always held dear, or new ideas you've yet to discover, nothing will make sense or appear to have any real value. This could be the beginning of a fascinating journey!
my favorite block on the aids quilt
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.
Edited down a long tweet. (x)
Here's the link to the actual paper, in case someone wants to read the whole thing
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There's this really obscure forgotten DC hero named the Heckler, who's basically buggs bunny as a superhero, not having any powers or physically strong, but just really good at pissing people off until they accidentally deal with themselves.
Now they're interesting, but the REAL star of the show is one of his villains, John Doe the Generic Man, who's this guy in a stark white suit with flat pink unshaded, untextured skin with no features or anything who talks like chatGPT and has black text over his face that explains what he's feeling at the moment. That guy is fucking fascinating.
The AI encyclical doesn't yet have a Latin translation, because even though the Latin version is "official", it takes six to twelve months longer to prepare than all the others, an issue exacerbated by the use of terms that don't already have established neolatin translations. Since the timing is important and they don't want to rush the Latinists, they seem to have decided a few years back to move the Latin versions "off the critical path", even though this adds a layer of absurdity to the whole business. Since the encyclicals are still issued simultaneously in like ten other languages, this leaves it uncertain which version should be considered official -- it's likely that it was first written in Italian or perhaps English, then translated, but when the Latin version finally comes out like a year from now, it will retroactively be considered the official copy, and all the others will be considered vernacular translations of it. Which is already a funny story about where pragmatism meets tradition, but in reading about this I found some commentary from someone formerly of the Vatican's Latin office, who mentioned something even better: that one benefit of this process was that the Vatican got to see the public discourse about the document while translating it, which gave them a chance to tailor it to any controversies or confusion that might arise, so that, for instance, if there were competing readings of a passage based on subtle differences between translations, they could pick which one to favour after the fact. This means that this is sort of like Steam Early Access for papal encyclicals.
If elected, I will institute a tax on golf courses and lawn-watering that will be used to fund city parks. you don't need your own private grass patch. we have grass patch at home the park.
Friends, Seattleites, and Countrymen, is it fascism to tax people for growing invasive water-intensive grasses to impress their neighbors in order to fund public facilities that provide open grassy spaces for everyone to enjoy instead?
Fascism is when the government institutes taxes to fund public services.
on the note of lawns, is the ridiculous need for watering literally just down to the monoculture? because like, lawns here don't tend to need that much watering, and are typically mixed species since they're just patches of grass used as general purpose yard space more so than vanity features i can't imagine all of the US is such a desert either, and if it is desert why the fuck do you have a lawn
To the first part of your question: US lawns are not only monocultures, they are monocultures of non-native grasses. There's only a handful of species of grass used for lawns in the US, predominantly kentucky blue grass (native to europe, north africa, and west asia), fescue (native to europe), and bermuda grass (native to europe, africa, and oceania). none of these grasses typically grow as a monocrop in their native environs, they grow intermixed with other species of wild grasses, legumes, flowers, etc. North America has an abudant range of it's own native grasses, legumes, and flowers, but those aren't used for lawns. Legumes, like clover and peanuts, are nitrogen fixers, meaning they absorb nitrogen from the air and release it into the soil. grass needs nitrogen to survive, so growing any grass without legumes requires adding constant supplements of nitrogen fertilizer, and fertilizer usually has to be watered in. On top of that, because you don't have a functional ecosystem supplying nitrogen and consuming it in balance, and because you lack the necessary variety of plants for supporting other organisms, laws are essentially ecological dead zones where a sheet of grass is kept alive on constant life support. Active, healthy, richly biodiverse soil is great at holding onto water. The dead dirt under a monocrop is not. Because of this, you have to use way way way more water to keep your grass alive. Also, because none of these lawn grasses are native to the region they're being grown in, they are extremely vulnurable to inhospitable environmental conditions, with many of them being entirely unable to survive brief droughts. This means the only way to keep your *very expensive* lawn alive is to keep it watered in excess, constantly. Also, most lawns aren't even grown where they stand, they're bought from sod farms which deliver rolls of pre-grown grass in a soil matrix which you then roll out and water heavily and pray to god it takes root and also you should water it more to be safe and all the water is draining out between the sod and the soil oh shit you should really water it more, i think it needs more water.
To answer your second question: No, most of the US is not a desert, the deserts of the US are mostly limited to the west and southwest of the country. A quick glance over wikipedias list of the population of US cities indicates around 5-6 million people in total live in deserts in the US. That said, the definition of desert is variable, and you don't have to be in a desert to be in the red on your water budget. Los Angeles, the second largest city in the US with 3.9 million people, is not technically in a desert, but it doesn't have enough water for self-sufficiency. It can only exist because of an aqueduct that redirects a huge portion of a watershed from elsewhere in the state. Another river, the Colorado, doesn't even make it to the sea anymore because of how much of it is used. Even much more non-desert places can see issues with rainfall or snow pack that can lead to water shortages, and there are huge swaths of places in the US where groundwater is drawn up far faster than it can be naturally replaced (which is an exceedingly slow process) to the point that some parts of the US have been sinking to lower elevations due to the lack of water in their aquifers. And in ALL OF THESE PLACES, PEOPLE GROW FUCKING LAWNS. like. Lots of people do. Almost everyone in suburbia continues to grow and care for and overwater lawns. Even in deserts. Even in droughts. Even in places that see a handful of inches of rain per year. People keep growing lawns. It is the *default* that is expected of you.
If you want to know why it's the default, I'm not in a state to give that answer honestly, but look up HOA's, american suburbanization, white flight, levittowns, plantations, and french aristocracy. it's a long (and very racist) line.
US lawns are a fucking trash fire.
yeah to be fair the second part was more a rhetorical question, i mostly know the aggressively racist history that does explain the first part though; Finnish lawns which i'm used to usually are native grasses with a ton of other plants mixed in, and lawns exist as i mentioned mostly as utility spaces or to fill out excess space with something nicer than concrete or gravel; i didn't know they even artificially fertilise the lawns out in the US trash fire sounds like an understatement based on that tbh
Fair enough. And yeah, not only do we fertilize our lawns, we also use massive amounts of weed killer, moss killer, fungus killer, and insecticide on them, all of which are highly toxic, all of which that fails to absorb into or cling to the plants and the soil gets washed right out into the local watershed. We also typically use gas-powered yard tools. Many of us also water our laws with extremely ill-optimized sprinkler systems that leave large swaths of overspray that just goes right down the drain. To be clear: i mean "we" in the broadest possible sense.
It's always hard reading about the violence committed to steal America, but the buffalo is always like... That's some inhuman shit. Everyone is burning in hell for that one. Wdym there were thirty to sixty MILLION buffalo in 1800, and by 1900 there were only 300 left. THREE HUNDRED. Do you know, can you fathom the amount of purposeful cruelty required to kill NINETY NINE PERCENT of a population of an animal, just to spite and murder the living Native people who existed and thrived with them? All this, for White Power and Entitlement?? Sickening.
in 1800 there were Billions of passenger pigeons in the United States.
by 1901 the last wild one was killed, and by 1914 the last captive one died.
a bill was introduced in the 1870s to designate the passenger pigeon a protected species and congress decided “nah they don’t need protection, they’re so prolific!”
and so, between hunting and deforestation, european settlers obliterated a species that numbered at least TWO BILLION in just 100 years.
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Some spider attack animations~
