Thoughts From The Nerdherd

She/her 30yr old

[salmonella-destroyer-of-worlds]

Actual roman epitaph for a dog

[disgruntled-foreign-patriarch]

humans are the same

[mornington-the-crescent]

[bedlamsbard]

I’ve seen this one doing the rounds a few times (and it makes me cry every time I see it), but was curious about the original Latin text, so I did some digging: it’s a shortened version of CIL 10, 00659, a tombstone from Salernum (modern Salerno, Italy). (source; CIL is the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum).

Portaui lacrimis madidus te, nostra catella,

     Quod feci lustris laetior ante tribus.

Ergo mihi, Patrice, iam non dabis oscula mille

     Nec poteris collo grata cubare meo.

Tristis marmorea posui te sede merentem

     Et iunxi semper manib(us) ipse meis

Morib(us) argutis hominem simulare paratam,

     Perdidimus quales hei mihi delicias.

Tu, dulcis Patrice, nostras attingere mensas

    Consueras, gremio poscere blanda cibos,

Lambere tu calicem lingua rapiente solebas,

     Quem tibi saepe meae sustinuere manus,

Accipere et lassum cauda gaudente frequenter

And here’s my translation:

Wet with tears I have carried you, our little (female) dog, just as I did in happier times fifteen years earlier (lit. “three periods of five years).  For myself, Patrice, now you will not give me a thousand kisses nor will you be able to lie lovingly around/against my neck.  I have sorrowfully placed you, merit-worthy, in a marble tomb and I have joined you always to myself in death, as by your cleverness you matched a human.  Alas, we lost such pleasures for myself!  You, sweet Patrice, were accustomed to join us at our table, to beg charmingly for food (while sitting in our) laps.  You were in the habit of greedily licking our cups with your tongue, which my hands often held for you.  Frequently and joyfully (you) receive a weary one with your (wagging) tail...

tl;dr: this dog was named Patrice and was very, very loved.  (another translation with some glossing of the text.)

[red-faced-wolf-deactivated20251]

[ospreyonthemoon]

It's the fact she's joined to them in death, it's the fact that she sat in her owner's arms and ate their food. That he held the cups down for her to drink from....

Hundreds of years and we still know she was loved. We still know how she liked to sleep. All these years!! Loving dogs is the same!!!!

[thaylepo]

gonna point out too that 15 years is an INSANELY long lifespan for a dog in ancient Rome. This dog was both well loved and well cared for to have lived so long. Obvs there's going to be some statistical overlap with ancient dogs with loving epitaphs having longer lifespans, but in a world without modern vetrinary science or medicine, no canine vaccines, and no nutritionally formulated dog food, this Roman's beloved pooch exceeded even the average pet dog lifespan today.

[victusinveritas]

Meet Pando, not a forest but a single tree. Every trunk of the Quaking Aspen is genetically identical & connected by a single 80,000 year old root system, making it one of the largest and oldest living entities on Earth!

[foone]

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to walk through the body of a God?

[anarchistmemedistro]

tree farms < a forest of a single tree

[beardedmrbean]

[sunnyonline]

THREE CHEERS FOR BREAD WITH BUTTER ON IT!!! WOO!!!! YEAAHH!!!!

[highways-are-liminal-spaces]

Humpback whales singing off the leeward coast of O’ahu

(sound on 🔉)

[highways-are-liminal-spaces]

<— to answer these tags on main, since it’s a fun question, our guide lowered a hydrophone and so my phone is leaning on the railing right next to the hydrophone

[swonkohwenoeht]

@thesunlikehoney

[ibenology]

the average twitter vs tumblr community experience

[fourohfourlifenotfound]

[byjove]

I keep getting tourism ads revolving around the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and I think there is this thought that this will be like the bicentennial in 1976 and all these businesses will profit from patriotic merch sales and tourism to historical sites and it’s so out of touch it’s insane. Nobody is proud to be an American. I’ve never been patriotic but I’m not even in the mood to be like “FUCK King George! FUCK British colonial rule.” Just reading the Declaration of Independence hurts because that shit is so ironic.

[byjove]

reading the “…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” passage of the Declaration of Independence and putting my head in my hands

[likeafieldmouse-deactivated2015]

Luis Camnitzer - The Photograph (1981)

[gastronauticsyd]

The Screenshot (2014)

[fredersen]

The Reblog (2014)

[toratiger-deactivated20211204]

Bahahahaha love this

[processintegrated]

The Unnecessary Comment (2014)

[grumpygreenwitch]

The Revival (2026)

[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)

[cacophonila]

[runs hands down face]

Okay this is the problem with sharing pop science stuff online and content aggregation accounts

The study is real, it's very easy to find by searching up the author's name + study. Give it a read yourself. It's written in a pretty accessible way imo.

Note that it does not put forward any explanations for why this effect happens, only that it does. In the conclusion it posits many possible reasons for why, and that it's most likely nothing to do with the specific action of walking, merely any semi automatic repetitive activity. They also acknowledge the study did not account for the social company the walkers were in, which is a pretty massive factor imo. Considering the conclusion brings up MANY alternative explanations and future experiment possibilities, it's decidedly not "killed every alternative explanation" like the tweet says. The actual paper ends like most scientific papers, listing alternative possible explanations, these are preliminary results, more research is needed, wider demographics of people need to be included, etc.

Another thing is the phrasing of these tweets are like red flags flapping in the wind to me. Any short form social media content that's 1. Pop science 2. Conveys absolute certainty 3. Ends with self improvement biohacking adjacent advice, should set off alarm bells.

Look at the implications that if the tweets were true, it would mean wheelchair users and people with mobility issues would be inherently worse at creative tasks.

So who is this person that's tweeting this, rephrasing this paper in a "helpful" way that is sure to get shares from people who really value being creative and are looking for any way to become more creative in their -

OFC ITS AN AI BRO

You wanna see what his recent articles look like?

CAN WE STOP GETTING BAITED INTO PLATFORMING GRIFTERS

[keepingitreluctant]

Thank you! There were so many red flags in the first post's language. The original paper straight up says that the mechanisms weren't isolated! Also there is no single part of the brain responsible for creative idea generation, it involves communication between multiple brain networks.

[lastoneout]

Glad I wasn't the only person who looked at this and thought that it was weird to say this study is SO perfect when the way it's framed here directly implies that people who can't walk are inherently less capable of being creative than people who can.

[lastoneout]

I can't leave a reply but to the disabled people in the notes who now genuinely seem to believe their mobility issues have robbed them of their ability to be creative pls don't think that! That's not what this study said! You're dealing with ableist misinformation from an AI bro, the study did not make these claims. I encourage everyone who's shared the version without the corrections to take them down, this misinfo is hurting already clearly hurting disabled people and should not be spread.

[depsidase]

[depsidase]

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[effbombmom]

as well they should because its fucking illegal. im tired of this administration getting away with crimes

[heycallmered]

people will really come into kink spaces and say you can't forcefem women like there wasn't a feature length movie about an elderly gay man forcefemming a woman as part of scheme to thwart an elaborate assassination attempt before the killer even determined their target

[llama2237]

What... What movie is this.

[heycallmered]

[heycallmered]

ain't no way in hell this post even breaks 500

[marmoset-marmoset]

i was trying so hard to remember the nonexistent assassination subplot in My Fair Lady

[groovysarity]

I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue

[rederiswrites]

Been actively working to replace “Google it” with “websearch” because fuck ‘em, that’s why.

[ahedderick]

Y’know what, this is a good idea.

[vashti-lives]

Yes but if we use google it often enough to mean “do a web search” they loose the ability to own the term google.

[rederiswrites]

I mean, valid point and that is a really funny long game, but I’d rather undermine the idea of Google’s inescapable supremacy in people’s minds and encourage the idea of choice. I, for example, don’t actually google things. I usually use DuckDuckGo.

[rederiswrites]

My efforts to find this post were greatly complicated by the fact that I have since taken my own advice, and so “do a web search” wasn’t a great search term.

Anyway. Fuck Google. Stop saying Google it, and also stop googling it.

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Okay but imagine being the team of Eridian scientists tasked with keeping Erid's Only Human alive for as long as possible while the whole planet's environment is literally trying to kill him. And then Rocky shows up and is like:

“Grace says he would like half of dome to be water.”

“Oh, is necessary for humans to have large amounts of water question?”

Small Eridian equivalent of a sigh. “No. Not needed for life. In fact Grace will die if he falls in water and does not get out.”

“Tell him we give him water in containers that won't kill him. Lots lots lots of water on Erid for Grace to drink.”

“No. Grace say he want water on ground. Also want it with excess sodium chloride compound so it will be unhealthy for drink.”

“WHY QUESTION???”

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

To celebrate Erid getting their sun back on track, Grace asks for some alcohol. There's a small amount left from the Hail Mary and Rocky offers to take it to the science Eridians to see if they can synthesise more.

“Grace want this liquid for celebration.”

“Of course.” They scan it. “You have wrong liquid. This contain compounds which are poisonous for humans.”

“Yes yes yes. Grace say humans like feeling of being slightly poisoned.”

“WHY QUESTION?????”

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Grace is like one of those extremely finicky tropical fish who instantly die if not kept in extremely specific conditions.

Only here the fish can talk and keeps asking you to make it vodka.

[the-haiku-bot]

Only here the fish

can talk and keeps asking you

to make it vodka.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[ramshacklefey]

No IDs, but these tags got me in a huff:

So ok look. The point is not the flared leg by itself. These cannot be yoga pants. These are, and you have to understand this if you are too young to have worn them, BLUE JEANS. And this was the last years before all jeans were 70% spandex.

They were denim, and they weren't bell bottoms. They hung loose from the knee in a way that would make a wizard envious. We all walked around like we were wearing hakama. And they dragged on the ground. That was important. Ragged cuffs. If your jeans weren't so long that they had ratty cuffs, they were embarrassingly short.

And the thing about denim is that it's a twill weave and it's cotton. So not only does it hold a lot of water, it wicks. Walking around in these suckers on a wet day could get you wet to the knees even if you never stepped in a puddle.

Then you'd go inside and take off your shoes and try to avoid letting your freezing, wet, filthy pant legs touch your skin.

Yoga pants. Hmf.

[elodieunderglass]

people in cold climates would have a tide line of white marks around their knees (if they were normal height) in the winter.

From wicking up road salt.

[taibhsearachd]

The visceral memory of that time is something that never leaves you. Everyone's jeans were many inches higher in the back than the front because you kept stepping on the hem and ripping it off. Your lower legs were so very cold. Every new pair of jeans literally enveloped your entire foot, they were so so long re: leg-to-waist ratio. Walking on a rainy day was a legitimate workout. You have no idea.

[teathattast]