Ouch

Things are worse now than they were 25 years ago.

I was sixteen years old, freshly out of the closet, walking around holding hands with my girlfriend proudly, happily, utterly in love and at no point did I ever feel scared.

This was twelve years or so before same sex marriage was legalised and an apology was given by the queen for the criminalisation, harm and stigma brought upon our community. Equal rights seemed unthinkable to me at sixteen years old, and yet I never once felt a need to hide who I was or who I loved.

Today, I do.

The Pride flag I hang every June has been stolen and found burned in a nearby field. My neighbours don’t put my bin out when they take out everyone else’s, a deliberate choice of exclusion. A woman braked to a stop outside my house and asked me what I was doing there (I was very obviously cleaning my windows), and she looked shocked when I said I was the person who lived there, glared at me and drove away without explanation. I am the only female-shaped person who visits my local barbers, and although the staff there are friendly and welcoming, I see the coldness in the eyes of some of the other customers in the mirror, and I feel the need to explain my hair fell out due to cancer rather than that I actually quite like having short, masculine hair. Because I don’t feel safe.

I don’t feel safe.

Everywhere I look, I see Pride posts flooded with hateful comments, and it’s more than the ignorant basement dwellers I’ve dealt with all my life, these are deranged, radicalised individuals who believe their hatred is allowed because it is being given a platform. They are organised. They are finding each other. They are so full of rage and desperate to point it somewhere. At someone.

And I hate that I’ve been pushed into a state of fear and shame that I’ve never, in my twenty five years of being openly me, experienced.

It is bad out there. And I’m afraid it’s going to get worse.

I know my page, my whole thing, is mama bear hopecore, but I’m genuinely all out of hope. It’s so fucking hard to be hopeful in this charged political climate. So if you’re out there, and a part of you is afraid, I’m telling you that you are 100% right to be, that in twenty five years the most dangerous it has ever been is right now, and just staying alive and being yourself is all you need to focus on right now.

There are two general types of ways you can screw with a door: either the door cannot lock, or the door cannot open.

Let’s talk about locks!!

If you use any sort of badge/keyfob/rfid nonsense to enter a building, the door is either locked by a powered lockset, an electric strike, or a maglock. Here’s how you tell.

This is a maglock! If there is a little rectangle in the door frame, this is what it is. This takes 12 or 24 volts of power, rather low amperage, and by fire code there must be a DIRECT INTERRUPT to force these locks to open on the inside of the door. It may look like this:

If this button were to be held down in some way, or if the (likely to be) green and white wires behind this thing were cut and twisted together, the door would remain open. There are also frequently little access doors on these locks where the power wires connect:

If there’s no door, look for access to the wire inside of a box near the door frame as they can just have a wire that comes off of them:

Unlike other locking devices, maglocks NEED CONSTANT POWER TO OPERATE, also known as being “fail safe” opposed to “fail secure”. Fail safe meaning that in the event of a failure, you would be able to egress. The other types of electronic locking systems are typically fail secure, meaning that the door remains secure from the outside.

I’ll add more to this post later but the important thing to remember is that fire code necessitates that any door with an exit sign above it must maintain “one touch opening”, meaning a crash bar to exit with like this:

When there’s a certain occupancy level.

Remember, if you want to keep your business secure, keep in mind that anyone who has access to the inside of your door has the ability to disable the door completely. For example, this crash bar could also be disabled if that little black thing (called a strike) on the left were to be removed via the two phillips 3 screws holding it in.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

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He has made so many amazing illustrations and character designs over the years, but one of my personal favorites is the darkly humorous "Pontifex Maximus":

Superhuman, the tech company behind the writing software Grammarly, is facing a class action lawsuit over an AI tool that presented editing suggestions as if they came from established authors and academics—none of whom consented to have their names appear within the product.

Imagine being so full of yourself that you think you can just use the literal most successful author alive's name without his consent.

The interviewer calls out Grammarly’s parent company’s ad copy for saying that “in the AI era, taste and judgment are more valuable than ever”, and then insists that the CEO defines what “valuable” means and who is actually receiving the value in the situation. CEO ends up trying to spin the thing into an offer to have the interviewer design an AI chatbot that will impersonate himself more accurately than the one they previously made without his permission, and the interviewer proceeds to point out that the CEO basically admitted that AI devalues creative work to the point that the only way creatives can still profit is by selling out to the companies that stole their work anyway.

linked tree (includes options to donate to Ghanaian projects)

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.