@cloud9dream - Tumblr Blog

fyi

this post has been up for five hours and has two notes. i think tumblr shitcanned it because it has pictures of women wearing bras on it. very cool. no censorship message, just vanishing it

boxingcleverrr

AHHHHHH someone put all the info from the now-extremely-hard-to-read, 10+ year old bra post into one nice infograph! THAT POST WAS MY BOOB BIBLE. Yay Boob New Testament!

naomiknight-17

@aspect-rei

twiststreet

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)

astrodidact

intheheartofman

wonderwanda

I reblogged this yesterday, but I want to reblog it again. Diabetic ketoacidosis turns your blood acidic and will essentially burn you from the inside out.

The stories you hear of people dying from rationing, this is what happens to their body.

Affordable insulin isn’t just a right, it’s a necessity.

No one should have to die like that when it’s preventable with access to proper medication.

teaboot

"Affordable" should be the lowest fucking bar. Pharmaceutical companies should be tripping over themselves to offer insulin at "affordable". That shit deserves to be fucking free

batmanisagatewaydrug

Wait, so you’re not supposed to leave tampons in too long because the tampons have toxins in them that it takes time to absorb, or because the blood it soaks up was supposed to be carrying toxins out of the body?

hi anon,

those are both incorrect understandings of toxic shock syndrome. toxic shock syndrome is caused by overgrowth of specific types of bacteria commonly found in and on the body, which will in turn release toxins. the version affiliated with tampons, which is probably what toxic shock syndrome is most well-known for, happens because tampons provide a great place for that bacteria to grow.

leaving tampons in longer increases the risk of bacteria growing and releasing toxins, which is why it's recommended to change them frequently. the same is true of anything placed in the vagina for extended periods (no pun intended) of time, including other menstrual collection items such a menstrual cups or disks or forms of birth control such as the sponge or diaphragm, both of which have become less popular with the availability of hormonal birth control.

it's important to stress that toxic shock syndrome stemming from tampons and other devices have decreased sharply in the last few decades, ever since the health risks became widely known in the 1980s, and the majority of toxic shock syndrome reported today is not affiliated with any menstrual complications.

batmanisagatewaydrug

okay this is going to sound nitpicky, but menstrual cups do not cause toxic shock syndrome. toxins released by excessive growth of Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes cause toxic shock syndrome. that can happen whether you use a menstrual cup or not, whether you menstruate or not, in a vagina or not. you are in fact more likely to develop toxic shock syndrome in an infected wound than from a menstrual device.

again, I know this sounds like quibbling, but saying that a menstrual cup or tampon "causes" toxic shock syndrome makes it sound like they're not perfectly safe menstrual collection tools, which they both are. they can very slightly increase the risk of toxic shock syndrome but they aren't the cause, in the same way that... I don't know, people going jogging outdoors isn't the cause of people being hit by cars. there's a difference! important difference!

batmanisagatewaydrug

hey, that's a really good practice! a lot of health and wellness grifters get by using terms that sound scary without being able to back them up at all (or even define them), and it's smart to look out for that.

I'm happy to report that the toxins affiliated with toxic shock syndrome are literally just called toxic shock syndrome toxin-1

darkersolstice

Oh! I know Streptococcus pyogenes! That's strep, like strep throat strep. Pyogenes literally means pus-making, and should not be confused for "pyrogenes", because bacteria that make fire would be EVEN WORSE.

liesandspookyfairytales

mabeltanaka

#same

WALL-E (2008)

lizclimo

skunkbear

This is one slice of an incredible high resolution, enhanced color image of Pluto, recently released by NASA. You can see the full, larger version here.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

emmaklee

pourquoiwhy

I learned a new concept

Graceful degradation is the ability of a computer, machine, electronic system or network to maintain limited functionality even when a large portion of it has been destroyed or rendered inoperative. The purpose of graceful degradation is to prevent catastrophic failure. (Tech Target, first result on the search engine)

biglawbear

Literal opposite of planned obsolescence. I love you graceful degradation.

gallusrostromegalus

Oh neat the first time I heard of the concept the guy described it to me as "catastrophic functionality".

He was talking about it in the context of designing robots that would go in and stop nuclear reactor meltdowns, something that would 100% destroy the robot, but they would be designed to keep functioning and fighting the meltdown for as long as possible. He had some designs where over 80% of the robot has died and it was functionally dragging its corpse around by its one working arm because one more minute of functionality might save thousands.

I've been having a few bad years mental health wise, and thinking about those robots a lot .

maddie-2022

This is also why NASA missions usually keep going so long after schedule. They are *masters* of graceful degradation, able to keep machines limping along on minimal power and after sustaining heavy damage

unusual

Japanese is an incredibly fun and rewarding language (if you’ve ever wanted to learn it for ANY reason, most importantly including the “silly” reasons) but the fearmongering and capitalist intervention involved in the language learning process have given it a reputation as an “impossible task” for English speakers, leading to confusion and dkn learners and weird pessimist attitudes about the whole thing. In this thread I will explain how to effectively learn and retain Japanese. This is a tried, tested and true method; probably 99% of all people who try to learn Japanese give up, but everyone I’ve met who has tried and stuck with this has been at or above N3-N4 after 6 months or less including me

unusual

You can teach yourself Japanese for free if you have a little free time every day and a computer

1. Drill yourself on hiragana and katakana. These are the phonetic building blocks of Japanese, think of them as equivalent to english letters. This site is a good resource in general. Once you have a solid grasp on this, DO NOT LINGER HERE; move to step 2. You will master kana later.

2. Download Anki. This is a flashcard service. They have a paid app if you’re willing to invest for it, but if not, they have a mobile website (create an account and sync it with your computer).

This is the deck you’re going to download. Import it to Anki and do this every day. I have learned the hard way (twice) that skipping this is bad. If you become overwhelmed, you can change the number of new cards and reviews by clicking the cog next to the name of the deck!

3. Cure Dolly (Youtube, grammar) + transcript. She has kind of a posh accent, you might want to turn subtitles on. Watch a few videos when you feel like it but most importantly set up 4 and 5 as soon as possible

4. Yomitan (must have) is a browser extension that functions as a pop-up dictionary. you need to install dictionaries for it to work. here are some dictionaries you can use with yomitan and explanations of what they do

5. READ. DO NOT LET YOURSELF GET STUCK BEFORE THIS STEP. JUST READ!!!! Most people who fail to learn Japanese do so because they are afraid of not being ready to move on, which is counterproductive. Just read. When you were a child did you spend years on vocab and grammar before reading? No I bet you did not. Pick something to read and learn what you don’t already know by reading in Japanese.

Jiten.moe has a list of novels and visual novels that you can read on your computer sorted by difficulty. So does jpdb. There’s also this document. There’s also this document. Hey look this website is cool too

For visual novels: download LunaHook. It “hooks” to your VN and allows you to use Yomitan on words you don’t know. Turn off the translation feature, it does nothing to help you learn

For literary texts: ttsu e-reader supports epub and htmlz files.

You can also learn Japanese by watching anime, but it’s a little more convoluted and requires a lot more patience.

For manga, utilize Mangatan, but I don’t recommend this right out the gate because when you’re first learning sentence structure you’ll want something with complete sentences.

Set your computer up for mining vocab before you start reading. Once you finish your kaishi deck, you can drill your mining cards (I didn’t do mine until after finishing kaishi because it was too much).

Most importantly: reading is going to be hard at first. It is going to piss you off. You need to muscle through with this because this is where the bulk of your learning will happen. After a while you will just feel like reading because you love reading! Try not to pick something too hard for your first read, but if you’re interested in the story you might be able to muscle through something a little tougher.

Remember to consult yomitan and cure dolly where needed, that’s what it’s there for. As you can see I am quite normal about the Japanese language, so if you have any other questions or need help with anything else feel free to shoot me an ask and I will get back to you promptly. Japanese is not your enemy and it is not impossible. It is your friend

kouignaman

Wanted to add the Kanji Map for understanding Kanji.

Kanji have been really hard for me to learn cause I would just try to stupidly memorize each new one, which take forever and doesn't work.

But each kanji can be decompose in smaller kanji and that's what give them meaning. The Kanji map show the decomposition and it help make sense of the word, also sometime it's kinda funny.

For exemple: 兄 (big brother) is a mouth ( 口 ) with legs ( 儿 )