Lizzy

Proud day eh @Mark_Butler_MP, @albomp? Could have taxed gas companies, decided instead to hit people with Down Syndrome. The perfect mix of gutless and cruel. theguardian.com/australia-news…

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

Can anyone explain to me why Israel and only Israel is able to order people from another country to evacuate their home? Anyone? Israel has issued an evacuation order for Tyre, Lebanon, displacing 200,000 more people. Tyre is an ancient Phoenician city with Roman ruins and a hippodrome.

@mrstomlinstan She was directly discriminated against on the basis of appearance. A lot of women are vulnerable to the same type of discrimination because of the way they look.

@LizzyZeel He's a man and was recognised as one.

Tickle's win is a win for ALL women. It highlights direct discrimination against women based on gender-related judgements about appearance.

@mrstomlinstan When you judge women based on appearance, as happened in this case, you risk misgendering a lot of women who don't fit feminine stereotypes. These include women of colour, women with PCOS, those who are androgynous looking... Gender policing affects more than just transwomen.

@LizzyZeel This is the worst take ever.

US mining company Alcoa’s strip-mining of Western Australia’s jarrah forest under further investigation after “deliberate repeat breach” of environmental laws that destroyed habitat for protected species – including black cockatoos, quokkas & numbats theguardian.com/australia-news…

HUGE NEWS! This morning, the owners of Newcastle Waters instructed management to immediately cease plans for the culling of 20,000 native corellas & galahs. When thousands of Australians speak up for our iconic nature, the world listens. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.

@SenatorCash @AngusTaylorMP 'This is not about targeting transgender Australians. Every protection they currently have remains. We are not removing a single protection from anyone' Angus Taylor's new policy position on the Sex Discrimination Act.

STATEMENT BY @AngusTaylorMP Yesterday the Full Federal Court confirmed that Australian law does not properly protect single sex spaces for women and girls. Most Australians would find that hard to believe. A coalition government I lead will fix this. We will amend the Sex Discrimination Act to ensure that women and girls (and men and boys) have protections based on biological sex. We will define biological sex in the Act. Male or female. The sex you are born. And we will protect single-sex spaces across Australian life. This is not radical. It is common sense. Let me be clear about what this is not. This is not about targeting transgender Australians. Every protection they currently have remains. We are not removing a single protection from anyone. But we are recognising something that should never have been in doubt: biological sex is real, it matters, and women and girls deserve spaces where it is respected. This will be a first-term priority. The Prime Minister now has a simple question to answer. Does he believe women and girls deserve protections based on biological sex?

#Birds What do you think about this? British-owned beef giant CPC has been granted a permit to poison and kill 20,000 native galahs and little corellas at one of their vast cattle stations in the NT, Australia. In its permit application, CPC admits its practices created the problem: “grain production, on-site storage, and cattle feeding have provided an artificial food source.” Ornithologist Dr Lilleyman was "shocked" to learn of the NT government's decision to grant the permit. She said that Birdlife Australia is concerned about the potential for secondary poisoning of non-target species occurring close to "an internationally significant wetland". CPC has ten cattle stations on about 9 million acres. They supply cattle and beef to Asian markets, domestic feedlots and processors, and export live cattle. The company is owned by Guy and Julia Hands through the Hands Family Office. They live in Guernsey after leaving England to avoid UK tax. CPC has also applied for massive water licenses for irrigation projects to grow grain sorghum and other crops which will inevitably attract even more birds. So what happens then? Even wider-scale poisoning of native wildlife?

@MGrahMcIntosh Australian women are not protected by laws which allow gender policing. Who wants their gender challenged because they don't dress and act like a Stepford wife?!

Following today's Federal Court ruling which is a blow to women’s rights, it is time for a review of the Sex Discrimination Act. Our laws need to work for Australian women, not against them.

TERFs have been bragging all up & down the feed the last week or so about how this case was gonna be a landmark decision in their right to discriminate against trans women, & LOL IT WAS

@EJjohnsontweets Sex Discrimination Act, Australian Human Rights Commission and the courts disagree with your take on this. Facts.

@LizzyZeel And that’s right. Language matters. Women are adult human females. The other lot are biological men. Facts.

Gender dysphoria usually emerges before a child is 7 years old. This ⬇️sort of language does terrible harm to young people struggling with dysphoria as they search for identity and belonging.

@EJjohnsontweets I'm focussing on the safety of gender diverse children - some of whom will have GD. There's nothing misogynistic in that. We won't agree, so try to have a good evening. TERFs must be 🔥🔥🔥 tonight.

@LizzyZeel Exactly right. There’s no such thing as trans children. That’s child abuse. Your focus on women and girls is misogynistic. We matter too. Why do you think women/girls don’t have a right to their own space? You practice coercive control. That violence.

@EJjohnsontweets Gender dysphoria is not an ideology thrust upon children. I guess children with GD are just collateral damage as TERFs direct their hate at transwomen 🤷‍♀️

Women/ girls are not collateral damage in someone else’s ideology. Telling women to ignore their rights, boundaries and concerns while demanding endless compliance is misogyny dressed up as virtue. Women matter. Girls matter. Our sex-based rights matter. Grow a brain @LizzyZeel

@EJjohnsontweets Your narrow focus on trans women has an impact on children with gender dysphoria. Their rights, safety, dignity and boundaries matter too. Language matters.

@LizzyZeel Oh ffs. Women/girls matter. Our rights, safety, dignity & boundaries matter. A society that expects women/girls to stay silent, surrender protections, or ignore legitimate concerns to validate others is sexist.Compassion shouldn’t come at the expense of women’s sex-based rights.

Just in! The Full Federal Court has dismissed Sal Grover’s appeal against findings she indirectly discriminated against transgender woman Roxy Tickle after banning her from her women-only app The Court also found that Ms Grover directly discriminated against her #TicklevGiggle

RT @ncominoau: BREAKING: Tickle V Giggle appeal is upheld - with Sall Grover now ordered to pay Roxanne Tickle $20,000 instead of the previ…

@MilkMoney49 @JoshWalkos @speeed369 Birth, accident, illness and disability affect everyone at some stage of their life. That's why most developed economies spread costs across the community through universal health care. No-one should face bankruptcy from accessing medical care.

@JoshWalkos @speeed369 Most hospitals are non-profit. Who should they bill for the machines, building, staff, medications, procedures, utilities, etc?

This guy is calling a hospital on behalf of a new mom who was charged $1,847,392 because her baby was premature and needed to stay alive long enough to come home. The itemized charges are dystopian. $37,464 for heel sticks on a premature infant, $58 every time a mother held her own baby skin-to-skin in the NICU, $312 for discharge teaching on how to sponge bathe a preemie and $27,590 for phototherapy lights. That’s before even getting into the NICU bed charges. Our medical system is one of the most corrupt, exploitative and evil rackets in the world.