“Living through the Trump II presidency is an exercise in repeated loss and extended mourning for what is gone — while being daily confronted with the farcical and the absurd.”
— The Mounting Toll and Absurdity of Trumpism
noise dept.

★
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@tinygreenlight
“Living through the Trump II presidency is an exercise in repeated loss and extended mourning for what is gone — while being daily confronted with the farcical and the absurd.”
— The Mounting Toll and Absurdity of Trumpism
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)
I knew it.
No I think it's really great when a friend group of approximately twenty seven individuals spread out in the sidewalk as they walk so nobody has to walk behind the group. There's nothing better than when I'm trying to get home and I see the tableau of Jesus at the Last Supper gliding towards me like Jamiroquai in the Virtual Insanity music video and I have to decide who has the narrowest frame that I can shoulder-check my way past
All over the world, wherever people are sleeping, small, jumbled worlds are flaring up in their heads, growing over reality like scar tissue.
— Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night: A Novel. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Translator). (Riverhead Books, December 2, 2025)
Chris Judge Art !
Frog's Duvet Day
indiarosecrawford
Sooo cozy!
Some of my favorite quotes from Artemis ii so far:
"Copy. Moon joy."
"I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working."
"Houston, if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary for tomorrow that will help out my vocabulary a little bit, that would be great. Thank you."
“If you’ve ever seen the top of the spotlight of the top of the Luxor at night in Vegas, this looks like what it wants to be when it grows up.”
"To all of you down there on Earth... we love you, from the moon."
"We just went sci fi."
"It is so great to see Earth again. To Asia, Africa, and Oceania: we are looking back at you. We hear you can look up and see the moon right now. We see you too."
"We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other."
“It’s a bright spot on the moon, and we would like to call it Carroll.”
every time I see some bigshot scientist revealed as a fraud my knee-jerk reaction is "hell yeah elisabeth bik got 'em good" AND IM RIGHT
PubPeer enables scientists to search for their publications or their peers publications and provide feedback and/or start a conversation ano
SHE NEVER QUITS!!!!
ICONIC!!!!
> Elisabeth Bik is on patreon <
She is not directly paid for her work to vet papers, she has been hit with legal action & death threats by scientists who hate that she's exposing them and their financial fraud, and she keeps at it every single day, combing through thousands of papers to make science more fair. Please consider supporting her!
actually beautiful
Elisabeth Bik is a renowned microbiologist and science integrity advocate known for detecting image duplication in scientific publications.
wow! A real-life world-famous detective!
Shelley
by Galway Kinnell
When I was twenty the one true free spirit I had heard of was Shelley, Shelley, who wrote tracts advocating atheism, free love, the emancipation of women, the abolition of wealth and class, and poems on the bliss of romantic love, Shelley, who, I learned later, perhaps almost too late, remarried Harriet, then pregnant with their second child, and a few months later ran off with Mary, already pregnant herself, bringing with them Mary’s stepsister Claire, who very likely also became his lover,
and in this malaise á trois, which Shelley had imagined would be “a paradise of exiles,” they lived, along with the spectre or Harriet, who drowned herself in the Serpentine, and of Mary’s half sister Fanny, who killed herself, maybe for unrequited love of Shelley, and with the spirits of adored but often neglected children conceived incidentally in the pursuit of Eros — Harriet’s Ianthe and Charles, denied to Shelley and consigned to foster parents; Mary’s Clara, dead at one; her Willmouse, Shelley’s favorite, dead at three; Elena, the baby in Naples, almost surely Shelley’s own, whom he “adopted” and then left behind, dead at one and a half; Allegra, Claire’s daughter by Byron, whom Byron sent off to the convent at Bagnacavallo at four, dead at five —
and in those days, before I knew any of this, I thought I followed Shelley, who thought he was following radiant desire.
Worm Moon by Mary Oliver
IT’S SNOWING AGAIN AND I WOULD LIKE TO FILE A COMPLAINT.
Without naming your job, tell me something you say over and over again at work.
"I can note your interest in that feature for future development."
“Sure, we can do that, but that’s not how people learn.”
How many of these have you read?
Failing and Flying
by Jack Gilbert
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It’s the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last. Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist. Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy. I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.