references @tellmehowtodothis - Tumblr Blog

Drug arrives years after pandemic’s peak, but could still offer protection to vulnerable populations.

An antiviral pill has, for the first time, been shown to prevent COVID-19 in people exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at home, according to trial results published today in the New England Journal of Medicine1. The drug could be a lifeline for those who still face real danger from the virus, such as care-home residents or transplant recipients on immune-suppressing medication.

There are good things happening in the world.

#covid

rythms-of-synthax-deactivated20

Quote of the day

baffledtreesquid

I’m seeing a lot of people saying this post changed their brain chemistry, and as a neuroscientist I wanted to say yes!!! Yes it does!

Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.

If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.

Let your likes guide you.

(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)

Rewards are both ‘liked’ and ‘wanted’, and those two words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psych

magicratfingers

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)

#walking #science

novelistparty

it's called "labor share" and this is a post from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York talking about the latest data:

A look at the decline of the labor share of income that occurred post-COVID, comparing its dynamics to declines in earlier periods.

#read later #labor share

hope-for-the-planet

These pescatarian birds are directly exposed to PFAS contamination due to the island's position near the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

While continued vigilance a regulation is needed, this data indicates that regulations are working to reduce PFAS concentrations in marine ecosystems.

#good news #ornithology #birds #bird #PFAS

heyfruitcake

Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.

Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i

ignitelimelight

They dumped plastic skeletons in environmentally protected areas, against the literal contracts they had to sign to get the permits to film in environmentally protected areas. Like they not only did a bad ecological thing that freaked out some divers, they literally broke environmental protection laws and their contract with the Italian government

st-guliks-fnord

Concerns about prop disposal as filming on new Nolan film comes to a close | www.italianinsider.it

Found an article on this in English

Also a different, unrelated article about concerns & possible violation of international law in using another of the film’s locations

The decision to shoot in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, where the Indigenous people can’t tell their stories without fear of imprisonment

#odyssey #christopher nolan #nolan's the odyssey #nolan's odyssey

lukajagor

Why soils lose N, P, K and organic matter: monoculture, erosion, fertilizers, and climate stress—and how to rebuild fertility by 2030.

Healthy soil isn't just dirt—it's the foundation of our food system. 🌱 Every harvest removes nutrients, and when we don't replenish them sustainably, soils gradually lose fertility, biodiversity declines, and crops become more dependent on external inputs. Protecting soil means protecting food security, ecosystems, and future generations. This podcast explores why soil nutrient depletion matters and why healthier farming practices are essential for long-term resilience. It's well worth a listen. 🌍💚

#read later #soil ecology #sustainability

johannestevans

Watched a documentary about abuse and advice one guy said to give children was, "Tell them that if someone is hurting them, to tell someone - and don't just tell one person. Tell as many people as possible, and keep telling as many people as possible until the abuse stops." and i really liked that

Bc so many ppl focus on the idea of telling A Trusted Adult, but even a well-meaning individual can fuck up and let abuse fall through the cracks or not know what to do

Whereas if a child tells LOADS of adults AND other kids, there's far less opportunity for an abuser to do damage control

Consistently telling their story and spreading it around disempowers the abuser to control and coerce the flow of information, or to utilise gaps and weaknesses in systems of reporting or welfare to isolate the child

Just really good advice. Not suprised I don't hear it more often.

#child abuse #and honestly maybe even abuse in general?#abuse

nihilisticlinguistics

adulthood notes:

The Rodeo Rule: you only have to do it for the first time once.

The Rohan Rule: if you are at a social function full of new people and you want to be liked, find someone doing important work like setup or food prep and offer to help.

The Tutorial Mode Rule: to navigate an unfamiliar situation where you fear you will mess up an interaction, preface the interaction by mentioning that you've never done this before, and let them know if you have a specific concern or question.

The Rocket Science Rule: most new things you want to try seem very complicated but are simple when taken step by step.

The [X] Will Remember That Rule: if you need to make small talk with the same person on a regular basis, try to save one fact or current event in their life from a given conversation and bring it up next time you talk.

The Cool Binder Rule: by wearing clothes and accessories that are to your taste instead of trying to blend in, people will be more likely to compliment you and show interest in you as a person.

#socialize

toasthaste

we can't actually hear most of the details in birdsong.... what sounds like the same song repeated to human ears/brains can actually contain extremely fast variations within it that are used for communication.... we can't hear fast enough to get it all! yo.....

toasthaste

oh! it's actually more complex than that. so for complicated reasons, being able to hear fast trades off directly with being able to hear precisely (like perfect pitch). temporal resolution vs pitch sensitivity. bird hearing optimizes for one or the other differently at different times of year!

the example given is the carolina chickadee. in the fall they form big flocks and need to be able to communicate efficiently with all those other birds, so their hearing is very fast. in the spring, the flock breaks up as individuals pair off to mate-- and the breeding season song is much simpler than the other year-round chickadee call! just four notes, and what makes it sexy to the girlies is how consistently the male can hit the exact perfect tone

but other birds have it inverted! the white-breasted nuthatch has a very fast courtship song with very fine structure, so their hearing becomes faster during the breeding season, and less sensitive to pitch

toasthaste

also-- sometimes it's different for males and females :0

in house sparrows, the females have seasonal hearing, but the males don't. so they hear the same in the fall, but in the spring the females get better at pitch and worse at speed. this is also interesting because speed of hearing improves your ability to locate an object in space based on sound, so when the hearing gets slower their ability to map sounds also gets blurrier.

and I wonder if this could have anything to do with rates of getting caught by predators in dull-colored females vs dull-colored males vs brightly-colored males, cause I remember those numbers being kinda counterintuitive

#read #an immense world #book #bird

segmentedleg

Remaining A Child. Shan Goshorn. 2017. X-rays, frosted vellum, artificial sinew.

"This single-weave basket is inspired by traditional Cherokee ones but rather than being woven with white oak splints, it is woven from splints created from X-rays and frosted vellum paper. Two LED lights are placed inside this piece: when the lights are off, the Cherokee basket pattern of “Mountains” is evident, linking these children with their homelands. But when the lights are on, the bone images are visible, referencing human remains. The names of the buried students in the [Carlisle Indian School] cemetery (including 13 "Unknown") are hand written on the vellum. The shape of the basket is also a familiar Cherokee one called a "coffin" shape." [x]

#art

depsidase

untitledgoosegay

Some narratives in international development hold that ending poverty and achieving good lives for all will require every country to reach t

#to read

headspace-hotel

while trying to decompress yesterday i ended up looking up a shit ton of stuff about book banning in the USA and wound up falling down this labyrinth of spreadsheets and aggregations that the people behind all this book banning stuff are using to find and challenge books

first of all theres ratedbooks.org which has a lot of different "ratings" of books but also advertises, for a fee of 100 dollars, a "Library transparency package" where you send in a spreadsheet of the inventory of a library and it is automatically cross-referenced against the site's list of no-no books.

There's also "national book rating index" which seems to be like...the same organization, sort of? Like a lot of the stuff on the site is the same.

on this page on "ratedbooks" there is a Google Docs template that i screenshotted

first page is a template for requesting that a parent be notified if a child checks out a book that is listed on the no-no list. From what it sounds like,books can be auto-flagged if they were banned in another school district.

the letter suggests that the parent will "review" the book by looking at its rating on the NRBI. Not by actually Reading The Fucking Book. Please note the additional boxes for "CRT" (Racially Divisive) and "LGBTQ"

The second page is (part of--the list continues) a list of books that the organization apparently recommends parents request that the library buy, which includes, among the stuff I haven't heard of, PragerU materials, "Irreversible Damage" by Abigail Shrier, something called "Transing Our Children," and the Tuttle Twins books.

very, very, very focused on recommending a few highly conservative publishers and specifically anti-trans stuff.

if you go to NRBI's "ratings" tab you find a link to the "standardization table" which explains that the ratings are compiled from multiple reviews from different sites.

Among these, "ratedbooks" is considered to be a source. So I'm confused about the relationship of these two sites.

So is. "Christian Parent Reviews." I looked at their "movie reviews" tab where they also recommend "Plugged In" and clarify that it is created by Focus On the Family. Their top recommended movie resource is something called "Christian Spotlight," which when I click on it actually leads to a site called "Christian Answers" which is. weird.

At this point I have detoured from the book banning quest and am searching in fascination at these people's approach to experiencing storytelling.

They have an "actors" tab where you can search actors and see whether they are Christian and what their "worldview" is. Every gay actor appears to have the worldview "Homosexualism."

I looked at Sebastian Stan for funsies.

Yeah. They have a list of all current and former partners and whether or not said actor reproduced. WHY

Looking at the actual movie ratings, I decided to search for Annihilation (2018). The "moral rating" given to Annihilation is "Extremely Offensive."

In spite of that the reviewer seems to think that the movie was actually very good, though violent. They fixate more than anything on the fact that the movie assumes evolution is real. It's just...strange.

Scrolling down the letter A I find The Avengers (2012). The website thinks this one is "better than average."

The morality rating is fully unrelated to how good the movie is. I have to think on that for a while.

Christian Parent Reviews doesn't really have a whole lot of books rated, though. I visited another website that was used to aggregate the NRBI ratings, "The Good and the Beautiful." Recommendations seem to be locked to members of the site, but I can at least access the site's FAQ where they state their ethos:

Okay this is the most sinister one yet.

ratedreads.com is not explicitly christian nor does it have a focus on "racially divisive" or "lgbtq" content. In fact, it seems excessively focused on swearing.

The link to Compass Book Rating appears to be broken.

So I go back to Rated Books. The rating scale, which you can read here, goes from 0 "all ages" to 5 "deviant." I find "deviant" to be a troubling word to use here.

This is where we enter a confusing network of Google Sheets documents. The first one is the "master list" linked on this page. It contains a bajillion links to Google docs that painstakingly outline every instance of "offensive" content in the book. I found several Google Sheets documents like this somewhere in this maze of links and they don't all have the same content.

I decide to see what Rated Books thinks is "deviant" content. "Bride" by Ali Hazelwood is listed here. I click on the page and click the image slideshow. It contains. Get this. A screenshot of content warnings from the author's website, and then a bunch of fucking Google AI overviews about kinks the book has in it.

Anyways this didn't help me decompress and I don't know why i did this

jayalaw

Headspace, okay to recommend Authors Against Book Bans, an organization that is campaigning against this?

headspace-hotel

Sure thing

headspace-hotel

Oh my god. I can't believe I missed this. One of the lists used to create the NRBI's list is the Marshall Project's database of books banned in prisons, in other words an anti-censorship resource is being used as a tool to promote censorship

#censorship #sinister is absolutely the word

lichenaday

Do you have any resources about the history of bryology as a field?

Uh, no. Sorry. I don't really study bryology. Good luck in your endevours!

lichenaday

Wait nevermind. I spoke too soon:

Free download of Bryophyte Ecology by Janice M. Glime. It should have a chapter or 2 on the history.

#bryophytes #biology #moss #liverwort #plants #botany

fullcravings

No-Bake Cinnamon Cereal Bars (Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free)

#food #recipes #recipe

itwashotwestayedinthewater

i....found a rare shoegaze tape. legit. band does not exist online. tape is at least 20 years old. This is so Sam

itwashotwestayedinthewater

rare tape.

itwashotwestayedinthewater

ok ok....track for you from rare tape. ripped by me

Visit Original Link

itwashotwestayedinthewater

I HAVE SOURCED MORE INFO!!!! from my friend who works at an nz audio archive and they HAVE THE TAPE THERE? COVER:

itwashotwestayedinthewater

Final info ive put together after i have just looked over the insert notes (inside the other tape) sent to me by my friend:

This band had Steven Wells and Andrew Bain in it - they went on to be in a pretty popular NZ rock band called Fur Patrol from late 90s-2000s, so this is a precursor to that. in the notes they also thank Campbell Kneale, a prolific underground nz musician in bands like Birchville Cat Motel and Black Boned Angel. they also thank "Drinkwater".

itwashotwestayedinthewater

alright everyone. after 33k+ notes on an obscure 90s indie song from Aotearoa i gotta admit many want to hear the rest, & as i cant think of a better format to supply this, here's the rest of the tape in this post. please let it stay here where it needs to be, don't spread it like its yours. its not mine either! i now present to you: Clayflower - Still (1993, Aotearoa, Cassette, Shoegaze/Indie Rock)

Visit Original Link

Visit Original Link

Visit Original Link

Visit Original Link

Visit Original Link

beautiful and cool obscure music like this is everywhere if you just wanna look for it even for a few minutes. dont let yourself think someone has to come along and show it to you <3

#music

itwashotwestayedinthewater

i....found a rare shoegaze tape. legit. band does not exist online. tape is at least 20 years old. This is so Sam

itwashotwestayedinthewater

rare tape.

itwashotwestayedinthewater

ok ok....track for you from rare tape. ripped by me

Visit Original Link

itwashotwestayedinthewater

I HAVE SOURCED MORE INFO!!!! from my friend who works at an nz audio archive and they HAVE THE TAPE THERE? COVER:

itwashotwestayedinthewater

Final info ive put together after i have just looked over the insert notes (inside the other tape) sent to me by my friend:

This band had Steven Wells and Andrew Bain in it - they went on to be in a pretty popular NZ rock band called Fur Patrol from late 90s-2000s, so this is a precursor to that. in the notes they also thank Campbell Kneale, a prolific underground nz musician in bands like Birchville Cat Motel and Black Boned Angel. they also thank "Drinkwater".

itwashotwestayedinthewater

alright everyone. after 33k+ notes on an obscure 90s indie song from Aotearoa i gotta admit many want to hear the rest, & as i cant think of a better format to supply this, here's the rest of the tape in this post. please let it stay here where it needs to be, don't spread it like its yours. its not mine either! i now present to you: Clayflower - Still (1993, Aotearoa, Cassette, Shoegaze/Indie Rock)

Visit Original Link

beautiful and cool obscure music like this is everywhere if you just wanna look for it even for a few minutes. dont let yourself think someone has to come along and show it to you <3

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