Boniface Billy

Paducah, Kentucky pulled this off. Attracted artists with inexpensive downtown housing and studio spaces. Funded a bunch of public arts initiatives, including a quilting museum. Turned around decades of population loss, and now one of the most charming towns in the state.

One THOUSAND percent. Lawns were also a psyop so people wouldn't use their land to grow food.

this is an issue

RONE Megaptera New LP via Infine 📟 forcedexposure.com/Catalog/rone-m…

Anybody who wants advice starting an organic garden free or cheap please feel free to reach out with questions. Don’t feel embarrassed by lack of knowledge or experience. All are welcome at the Earth’s table.

@Lovandfear “shondo ki ma nondorani” youtu.be/6v_Qjx_Uv5A?si…

If you see this tweet please reply the last song you listened to. I’m making a playlist

Today, May 12, we celebrate the birthday of Maryam Mirzakhani (1977–2017) - the first woman and first Iranian to win the Fields Medal. Her groundbreaking work on Riemann surfaces and moduli spaces continues to inspire mathematicians worldwide. May 12 is now International Women in Mathematics Day.

Just published what I hope to be my best and most ambitious article yet: I investigate America’s epidemic of spending massive amounts of money outsourcing government functions to private contractors who provide worse services and constantly steal from us. publichappiness.substack.com/p/the-contract…

It is becoming harder & harder to report on Israel’s war on Lebanon when your timeline starts to feel less like news coverage & more like a daily obituary for your own people. Children. Women. Fathers. Entire families. Medics. Obliterated villages & towns. The killings are relentless. You finish writing about one Israeli strike, only for another name, another face, another small coffin to appear minutes later. At some point, the weight of constantly documenting this grief begins to bury parts of you with it. 🥀

youtu.be/0SmTd1QHJN4?si… Moses Forman made this; he asked me to read/perform the words, which were written by his father Mark.

Everyone’s stopped talking about it for some reason, but the defense of Minneapolis was the most seismic victory against Trumpism. That was supposed to be the blueprint for their autocracy and it was defeated and humiliated by astounding collective action from ordinary Americans.

Your brain physically rewrites itself every time you pick up a pen. Neuroscientists at Norwegian University scanned students' brains while they handwrote letters versus typing the same letters on a keyboard. The results shattered decades of assumptions about how we process information. Handwriting activated massive networks in the sensorimotor cortex, the visual processing centers, and the hippocampus simultaneously. Complex neural symphonies lit up across multiple brain regions, creating rich interconnected pathways between motor control, visual recognition, and memory formation. Typing the same letters? The brain activity looked like someone had dimmed the lights across entire cognitive districts. The neural networks that flourished during handwriting simply went dark. The difference? When you form letters by hand, your brain constructs elaborate spatial maps of each character. The motor cortex learns the precise pressure, angle, and trajectory needed to create an 'A' versus a 'B.' Your visual system tracks the ink flowing from pen to paper in real time. Your parietal lobe integrates hand position with eye movement. Your hippocampus encodes not just what you wrote, but how the writing felt, where you paused, which words required more pressure. Typing activates almost none of that circuitry. You press a key, a letter appears. The motor movement is binary. The visual feedback is uniform. The spatial relationship between thought and symbol gets mediated by a machine that standardizes every character into identical fonts and spacing. Your brain treats these as fundamentally different cognitive tasks. The evolutionary context makes this obvious once you see it. Human hands developed for manipulation, creation, and fine motor control over millions of years. We painted on cave walls, carved bone tools, and shaped clay vessels long before we invented written language. When writing emerged 5,000 years ago, it built on top of existing neural infrastructure that already connected hand movement with symbolic thinking. Keyboards appeared 150 years ago. Touchscreen typing maybe 20 years ago. From an evolutionary timeline perspective, we started using them approximately yesterday. Our brains are still running ancient software that expects physical engagement with symbols. That software produces dramatically different learning outcomes. Students who take handwritten notes consistently outperform students who type the same information on memory tests, comprehension assessments, and creative applications of the material. The difference persists even when researchers account for typing speed, note length, and time spent studying. The act of forming letters by hand forces deeper processing at the moment of information encounter. You cannot handwrite as fast as someone speaks, so your brain must actively filter, summarize, and prioritize information in real time. The motor effort required to form each word creates additional memory traces that typing does not generate. Children who learn to write letters by hand develop reading skills faster than children who learn letters primarily through typing or screen interaction. The sensorimotor experience of creating letterforms helps their brains recognize those same letterforms when they encounter them in text. Adults who handwrite shopping lists, daily schedules, or meeting notes remember the information better than adults who type identical lists into phones or computers. The spatial memory of where you wrote something on a page provides retrieval cues that digital text does not offer. These findings collide directly with how education and work environments have evolved over the past two decades. Schools replaced handwriting instruction with typing classes. Offices converted from paper systems to fully digital workflows. Students take notes on laptops. Professionals draft documents on screens. We optimized for speed and efficiency while accidentally severing the neural pathways that evolution spent millions of years developing. The implications reach beyond memory and learning into fundamental questions about human cognition. If the physical act of forming symbols changes how your brain processes ideas, what happens to thinking itself when you remove the physical component? Digital text is infinitely searchable, instantly editable, and perfectly shareable. But it may be creating brains that process information more superficially, store memories less durably, and connect ideas more weakly than brains that regularly engage in handwriting. The neuroscience suggests we traded cognitive depth for technological convenience without realizing what we were giving up. Some of the most innovative thinkers across history were obsessive handwriters. Darwin kept detailed handwritten journals. Einstein worked through complex theories in handwritten notebooks. Virginia Woolf wrote her novels by hand before transcribing them. Steve Jobs famously took handwritten notes during Apple meetings even as he was building the most advanced computers on Earth. Perhaps they intuited something about the relationship between hand, brain, and insight that we measured in brain scanners but somehow forgot in practice. Your pen is literally a cognitive enhancement device that activates neural networks digital keyboards cannot reach.

we gotta regulate the shit out of this tech YESTERDAY

I long for the day nature gets to reclaim every fucking golf course

🇲🇽🌊 Mexico reverses Salinas-era water privatization — redistributes concessions to indigenous farmers. "Those who had hoarded all the water — today, we're taking it from them and we can redistribute it," Sheinbaum said. Under the new Water Law, unused concessions return to the state. Private water sales banned. Decades of hoarding by a few ended and redistribution to campesinos are underway.

It's downright poetic all the different words Reuters editors can find to avoid saying Israel *violated* a ceasefire.

The 26 teachers massacred in Minab school with a Tomahawk missile along with 184 children by the US & the israelis | via @NajiMalik695708

Today marks four years since my aunt, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed by an Israeli sniper in Jenin. An iconic journalist, and one of the most empathetic and sweetest people. This is who they killed. She loved life, but they stole hers from her.

LETS GOOOO !!!!!! My tribe did that!!!!!!! Let's go Lakota!!! FUCK MINING, FUCK FRACKING!!! GET YOUR HANDS OFF OUR HOME!!!

One of the most horrifying things happening in Gaza right now something the world barely knows about is that we are now trapped inside an area no larger than 133 square kilometers out of Gaza’s original 336 square kilometers. More than two million people are crowded into this tiny, suffocating space, creating one of the highest population densities in the world, literally. But the real catastrophe is not only the lack of space it is that this area itself is no longer fit for human life. Everything around us has become rubble, tents, and destroyed homes. There are no proper schools, no functioning hospitals, no infrastructure, no electricity, and no clean water. People are surviving among destruction, disease, epidemics, hunger, and constant fear. Every single day we wake up to news that more areas have been taken over, and the space we are confined to keeps shrinking further and further, until it feels like we are being slowly pushed toward complete suffocation. Our homes disappeared inside those areas, and until this moment we know nothing about them, as if our entire previous lives have simply been erased. The situation here is becoming more terrifying with every passing day. Children fall asleep to the sounds of bombardment and fear, while families live without any sense of safety or stability. No one knows how long this endless nightmare will continue. What is happening can no longer be endured, and there is an urgent and immediate need for intervention to save more than two million people trapped in conditions no human being should ever have to live through.