Jetcat

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.

Let's start with a bizarre, but true, case.

There was a guy who posted to Reddit that he'd had to have his foot amputated. The foot was returned to him, and he and a few of his friends decided to Do Science, because this was a rare incidence where they could actually eat human flesh without having to kill or maim someone, and they cooked up his foot a couple of different ways and ate it.

Now I think this is weird as fuck, and kind of disturbing, but nobody was unnecessarily harmed in the making of this experiment, and I can respect the spirit of inquiry. If we wanted some information on what eating human flesh is like, this is a pretty good way to get it. (And yes, he did document their findings. I don't remember details but I do remember they found it extremely underwhelming, and unlike the common comparison, nobody said it tasted like pork.)

So: is cannibalism bad if it's flesh that's been surgically and necessarily removed from a consenting person, for example amputations, gender-affirming surgery leftovers, benign tumors, etc.? It's just going in the incinerator otherwise. Note, the question here isn't "would you, personally, partake in human flesh under these circumstances." It's "would this be bad."

Okay. I'm going to come down on the side of "meat is meat" here, just for the sake of demonstration (my actual answer is "I have no idea how I feel about this concept"). Okay. If we can verify the meat came from a necessary surgery, and that it's safe for human consumption (I would strongly recommend not eating a gangrenous body part, for example), we're going to say it's okay.

Now add a step.

What if it came from an unnecessary surgery? Say, a tummy tuck? How do we feel about this?

I feel a little iffy. I'm fat, and I know much of what could be removed from me wouldn't be tasty (fat without meat is just grease), but I could see some unethical surgeons pushing patients toward options they don't necessarily need--say, "you'll [possibly] need knee surgery in a few years, so let's go ahead and just replace it now. What? Your joint? For human bone marrow soup? Don't be ridiculous. [of course that's what I want it for.]"

I don't quite have an answer for whether I'd be okay with people being served human flesh from procedures like this. Let's get onto firmer ground and take it a step further.

What if the meat comes from an actively coerced surgery, for example, some rich bastard is willing to pay you ten grand to lose a couple of fingers for the sake of a rare new culinary experience?

No. I am 100% not okay with that. That feels akin to black market organ harvesting. You know full well none of the Musk kids would ever end up with only eight digits.

Okay. Let's back up a step.

How about meat from a corpse that was killed for the purpose, in which the person actively consented to their own killing due to terminal illness?

That feels pretty damn iffy again. I can't help but think of the MAID program in Canada that basically ended up as "oh, you're disabled? We can help you die." I guess maybe if you had a shortlist of acceptable diseases, like "you must have stage four cancer or Huntington's disease to qualify," and once again we run into "would unethical doctors deliberately claim a case was worse than reality in order to attempt to sell the corpse?"

Okay. Let's take a step forward again.

How about someone who wants to be killed and eaten as part of a fetish?

And here I have to draw a hard line. No. Because this is a paraphilia. This person can safely fantasize about being eaten, but past a certain point in real life there is no way for them to say "I changed my mind." You can't withdraw consent if you're bleeding out.

So what's the throughline with all the cases where I said "no" or "I'm not sure about this"?

They all involve the possibility, perhaps even the probability, of a vulnerable person being irreversibly taken advantage of.

Which raises the question, in the one case where I said "sure. Why not. Meat is meat," of whether that could also be a problem with those necessary surgeries. What if the surgeon could have saved that foot...but decided not to try quite as hard? If you need your gallbladder removed...well, can you be sure you need it removed?

Therefore, cannibalism is bad because it's inherently unequal. There's always the possibility of exploitation, and once it's done, there's no reset button. We can certainly make an argument for edge cases like survival cannibalism and, you know, the guy who ate his own foot, but as soon as a second person enters the equation there's doubt.

And so:

Let's not do that.

Instead of inventing a jew to tokenize, they tried to fill that role themselves are we fucking joking

a dude with a literal Nazi tattoo is the front runner for Democratic Senator in Maine

a woman peddling LITERAL Nazi propaganda and parroting Protocols talking points is running for Congress in Texas

Democrats as a whole are getting VERY cozy with rape apologist and man who called Jewish men "inbred" and Hamas defender, Hasan Piker

Democrats are allying with Jewish Space Laser Lady, MTG

2) pack them both up in a container you can stand to lose and put an ingredients list on the lid

3) go to your local hospital's front desk

4) tell them you love baking but live alone and would like these cookies to go to the nurses on whichever ward most needs a pick-me-up today

5) you won't be there to see how happy the nurses will be, but I assure you they will be. If it's a particularly terrible day and you happened to provide a sweet comfort at exactly the right time, they might cry.

6) learn some recipes for nutritionally-dense cookies. Real-world lembas bread, if you will. Keep in mind that nurses do not get set breaks; if you sit down to eat and someone codes, you're going to answer that code. Something you can cram in your mouth in three bites flat and be satisfied for awhile is a godsend.

7) rinse and repeat.

goodrx is the most well known one, but if i'm trying to find the cheapest price for a patient i compare it to scriptcycle, and use whichever is offering the best price. you just type in the medication (PLEASE make sure you're getting the right drug, dosage, and quantity) and your zip code and they will spit out some offers for you

some pharmacies may have their own discount card to compare to as well!

if you are getting a name brand medication, you can also look at the manufacturer's website to see if they offer any evouchers for you to use too

… but… Bees consent. NO. I’M NOT KIDDING.

How? Bee hives aren’t kept on leashes. They’re outside, the bees can travel miles every day. They follow their queen. Who is also outside, not on a leash, and can travel miles every day. If she doesn’t like the hive for any reason - for example: it got too hot, too cold, too messy, too filled with sugary stuff and they need more space… then the queen leaves. And with her the hive.

The queen stays in the hive because the hive is the best place to live. Period. Done. End of. If the hive is staying with the beekeeper it’s because the keeper is doing their job correctly and keeping them happy because the bees can, and do, leave bad beekeepers.

Harvesting honey does not murder bees.

The device pictured above does not mash up bees or their hives.

There’s no ethical concern when it comes to eating honey, it’s totally ethical as food is concerned.

Bees manufacture honey using pollen. They store it in the cells of their hive, where it’s used as food for the colony, particularly the larvae growing into the next generation of bees.

When you harvest honey, you remove parts of the hive that are being used to store the honey, without taking any bees along for the ride. Those parts of the hive are then put into a device, like the centrifugal extractor shown above by gemstone-gynoid, where the parts are spun really fast to pull extract the honey. The honey gets collected on the walls of the extractor, drips down, and can then be filtered and bottled for human use.

So.

It turns out that bees love making honey and can make more of it than they’d ever need. It also turns out that beekeepers taking care of hives and harvesting their honey keeps bees healthy and thriving, more so than they’d normally accomplish on their own. And we really need bees healthy and thriving because they help us grow an astonishing amount of food by pollinating plants.

Amirali MirJafari

Was executed today. He was accused of "setting fire to a mosque" (give me a break) which the authorities described as anti-security activity.

This man was arrested and executed following the jan 8 & 9 protests. The authorites claim that he was a Mossad agent. (Because y'know anyone that doesn't like them is a Mossad agent. All of those MILLIONS of people who took to the street in Jan were called Mossad agents. Then they said hmmm the killer of the tens of thousands of people who died that day were actually Mossad agents too. Which mean there were a bunch of Mossad agents killing each other......in the streets of Iran.)

They attack and imprison people after slapping them with whatever bullshit made up accuasation they want, throw a sham trial in which the detained have no access to lawyers and their rights are absolutely ignored and just kill kill kill.

برید بمیرید دیگه. کی قدر شما کشته؟؟؟ چقدر کثافت و زنا زده این. چقد بیشرفین. از حیوون کمترین. (حیفِ حیوون.)

Still no word from the “no war” assholes or western feminists no campus protests or human chains…

Leftist and liberal hypocrites don’t give a shit about Iranian lives they just use our plight for their political gain

One day, something in space is going to look at humans the same way. You go to a new galaxy and there's freaking humans in there, like they just spontaneously manifest on random planets that have the ability to sustain them. All you need is an atmosphere with enough oxygen, some form of water, and that's pretty much all you need before they seem to just pop out of the ground and start terraforming it.

The mystery of the lake fish has been solved, by the way. It's waterfowl. Much like the birds that eat seeds and spread them around, waterfowl consume roe from the water, and while the number of fertilised fish eggs that pass through the digestive system of a duck or wild goose alive and unharmed may be small, it's not zero. A goose will shit in the lake water, and through comes the roe. It happens just often enough that lakes and ponds become - and remain - populated with fish.

Humans don't pop up on unknown planets and and unreachable galaxies on purpose. They couldn't get in there any more than they could get out of there, they have no choice but to claim the most viable-looking planet they can reach and start terraforming it. But how did they even get there?