Grell!! Grell!! Grell!!!
Stranger Things
TVSTRANGERTHINGS

if i look back, i am lost
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

Product Placement

Janaina Medeiros
Misplaced Lens Cap
cherry valley forever
styofa doing anything

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Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
hello vonnie
dirt enthusiast
h
NASA
trying on a metaphor
Jules of Nature

Kaledo Art
will byers stan first human second

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@volmorta
Grell!! Grell!! Grell!!!
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)
not gonna say it again!!!!
a BOG is a wetland that is acidic
a FEN is a wetland that is alkaline
FINALLY someone said it!!!!!!!
a SWAMP is a wetland whose vegetation consists of trees or other woody plants
a MARSH is a wetland with other forms of vegetation
#A LITTLE LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK
a MANGAL is a swamp whose soil concentrates high amounts of salt and very low amounts of oxygen, supporting little else than mangrove trees
a PEATLAND is a wetland whose soil concentrates decaying organic matter, becoming peat
Oh yeah baby, keep coming at me with watery environmental states
*puts my cigarettes out on you*
*wuickly smokes it all before you can reach me*
oh a wise guy huh? *rolls up my sleeves* why I oughta…
*wuickly rolls your sleeves back down before you can hit me*
loss is a gift, girl
one time I told my therapist "I tend to have issues with people who think of themselves as authority figures" and she burst out laughing and then said "I think we need to pause and reflect on how you phrased that"
I mean, what, was I supposed to refer to them as if they actually are authority figures? those don't exist
omfg
hold on i have to look something up
yeah he’s autistic
Legendary Holy Blade, by nolan192
The addition is ALSO really good
Late 90's/early 2000's Disney was really on a mission to make us all lesbians 😅
Edit: It has been brought to my attention that Road To El Dorado is DreamWorks, not Disney. My badzorz :p
Dwarf jewel nasturtium
My print shop: INPRNT
Other people have touched on this more eloquently, but I love that Ryland Grace is at his core a teacher. A middle school science teacher. Sure, his background as a former academic is also critical to the story, mostly because something about him needed to catch Stratt's eye and thus result in him getting dragged into the project, but more importantly than that, he hated being in academia. The book makes it fairly explicit that he wrote his controversial paper and insulted a leading scientist in his field because he was burnt out and hated the environment and got self-destructive as a result, which is a far less rosy view of academic science than I would have expected (and, frankly, completely believable).
And then he left and became a middle school science teacher. And that turned out to be his real calling. He was bright and creative and a little bit brilliant and a genuinely good scientist, and he gave that world up to teach kids and he loved it. Even after everything, after the Petrova Taskforce and Project Hail Mary and Tau Ceti and ultimately ending up on Erid, his calling is to teach kids.
As someone who has dipped in and out of the science communication/science education world myself, it's so important to me that Grace loves teaching, and especially that he loves teaching kids. People really devalue science communication work, and there's often this unspoken assumption that the people doing it just aren't "smart enough" to become real scientists, so they do scicomm instead. And everything about Grace flies in the face of that -- he's perfectly capable of doing the science, but it's not what he loves the most! What he loves and values and finds important is teaching, and I adore that. It's so refreshing to see, and such a genuine love letter to educators, and to everyone who chooses to prioritize communication and education regardless of how specialized they may or may not be in their field.
His happy ending is to be a teacher. And that's so important.
Jaskier
Watercolors on paper
Andy Wier going on an anti-woke podcast to promote his film (Project Hail Mary) and trash Star Trek (after his own ST project got rejected) just for Trekkies to terrorize him into an apology with a day… That’s one way to ruin your cutesy neo-liberal brand at breakneck speed
Genuinely such a dumb cunt thing to say while still trying to get Star Trek money:
“I dislike social commentary. Like… I really hate it. When I’m reading a book, I just want to be entertained, not preached at by the author. Plus, it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind. I no longer speculate about all possible outcomes of the story because I know for a fact that the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated. I hate that,” Weir said. “I put no politics or social commentary into my stories at all. Anyone who thinks they see something like that is reading it in on their own. I have no point to make, and I’m not trying to affect the reader’s opinion on anything. My sole job is to entertain, and I stick to that.”
Here is a list of all the politics and social commentary Andy Weir did in fact include in the Project Hail Mary book that I can recall at the top of my head:
When Grace is still incredibly amnesiac and manages to remember what his apartment looks like, he remarks the lack of feminine touches in the decoration and casually wonders if this means he is single or maybe gay.
Upon learning of the astrophage problem, all the nations of the world get their shit together in record time and give Stratt basically unlimited power, authority and resources to do whatever is necessary to save Earth. This itself is a political choice. Pair it with the vastly different real world response world leaders have to climate change and it becomes a social commentary, sorry Andy but it really does.
The reason Grace decides to join the Hail Mary project is because of his students. He's in the middle of a class when he realizes the incredibly hard and bleak future that awaits his students due to the cooling Sun, and tells Stratt he wants to keep helping.
Shortly after figuring out how astrophage reproduce on his own, Grace is taken to the aircraft carrier, where he meets for the first time the other scientists involved in the project. After explaining his findings, a Chinese scientist announces their team has been able to reproduce Grace's findings, the implied reason being they had somehow spied on them.
During one of his first conversations with Rocky, Grace remarks on an unexpected hurdle of meeting aliens: pronouns. His conclusion is to just shrug and slap he/him pronouns on Rocky. There are no further conversations about this topic, not even when both of them are able to communicate fluently. Grace doesn't re-examinate his pronoun choice any further, nor, despite having a PhD in molecular biology and being curious about things like how Eridians eat, ask about Eridians' concepts of sex and gender.
Following that previous point, when Rocky mentions having a mate back home, Grace chooses for said mate the name Adrian. This is yet another reference to the Rocky movies, albeit a more obscure one, and a lot of the people that didn't realize this simply read both Rocky and Adrian as male and therefore gay.
One last bit re gender and sexuality is the fact that at no point during the book does Ryland Grace, a single man of unspecified sexuality, lament being single or express any sexual desires, which is why many people read him as being on the asexual spectrum.
The movie had to gloss over many things and completely skip over others, some of these later things were the incredible sacrifices and hardships Earth had to go through to survive until hopefully Project Hail Mary managed to find a solution to the astrophage problem. First off, in order to produce the astrophage fuel for the ship they paved a huge chunk of the Sahara desert, which had devastating ecological and climate consequences, altered or destroyed the homes and livelihoods of millions of people and created tons of refugees. Also, in order to win time and counter the effects of the cooling Sun, they start to nuke chunks of fucking Antarctica, because making climate change worse will make Earth hotter and therefore buy them time. The first time the scientist (a self-declared hippie ecologist) in charge of this orders the release of the bombs, he understandably breaks down and starts to cry. Needless to say, nuking the fucking Antarctica raises sea levels and also has horrendous ecological and climatic consequences and once again would in fact create millions of refugees. The fact that the book doesn't dwell on the consequences of any of these two actions doesn't change the fact that we as readers are supposed to extrapolate and put two plus two together whether Andy intended to or not. Expecting otherwise is frankly insulting.
At one point Stratt tells Grace what will happen to Earth while they await for the solution to the astrophage problem. She talks about the famines and how many people will die, but that's just the people that will starve to death. Millions more will die in the wars that will break out all over the planet because there is no way the richer and more powerful nations will be willing to share resources equally with the rest.
Grace gifts Rocky, a member of an alien species, a laptop that contains the sum of all human knowledge, history and media. He knows Rocky, but has never met other Eridians, and despite this he chooses to give it to them.
The fucking foundational plot of the book is interspecies collaboration, trust, and friendship. Choosing to meet and befriend an alien despite all the possible risks and dangers is just as political of a choice as choosing to kill an alien would be.
Andy Weir is very good at writing Cosmic Hope books about Space MacGyvers, but writing any kind of story is inherently full of a myriad of political and social commentary choices, whether you want to or not, and whether you realize it or not. Being unable to see or willing to admit this makes him a worse writer and frankly greatly mars part of his supposed genius.
favorite take that I've seen on this so far. Andy Weir is a great author who writes very humanist novels, he's just also a guy who doesn't understand what political means. PHM is his best work and it's not even close, and it's a story about connection in spite of everything that would get in the way of friendship and community. in this world? there's no way to read that as anything other than political.
art allows us to ask important questions, such as "what if an apple core was a small girl?"
i'll hopefully be printing a green apple version soon, because there are some styling & faceup choices i want to try with this sculpt. also i couldn't decide what to do with her mouth, so version 1.0 is mouthless, but i want to give the next one a cute grin.
I love the midwest so much