[email protected]

Retired Academic and Law Lecturer, Honorary, Exec Committee Member NSW Women Lawyers. Living on Awabakal Land.

[[email protected] @CampbellSher]

Wear a mask. They did during the Spanish flu...even the cat. Respect others, especially the elderly and the immuno-compromised. It is a health decision and it is not political. #WearAMask #RespectWinter #COVID19

[[email protected] @CampbellSher]

Waiting for mini MAGA, Trump groupies @OneNationAus @PaulineHansonOz to front the @AustralianPressClub @Barnaby_Joyce unravelled because lies, blame and hate are their only currency. Surely Australia is better than this?

[Quentin Dempster @QuentinDempster]

Women and men of Australia: please do not vote for Pauline Hanson. She is a running dog of US NRA. If she gets anywhere near legislative levers our school children will be at great risk as she deregulates gun controls. This warning also applies to our Jewish and Muslim citizens.

[Michael Pascoe @MichaelPascoe01]

Hat tip AMP's @DianaMousina for that rare thing: keeping perspective. You'd think Australia was finished if you read the Murdoch rags when we're just about on top of the world. (I'd add one thing to her list: we pay less tax than most in the OECD)
https://t.co/AVzAPG4Jzu

[💧Mary Kostakidis @MaryKostakidis]

AFP urged to investigate IDF soldiers in Australia
Australia risks becoming "safe haven" for war criminals, human rights groups warn.
‘“There cannot be one standard for some conflicts and another for a genocide in Gaza.”’
https://t.co/d2fclaIrlU

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

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.

[Jenny Difficult-Frecklington-Jones 🇵🇸🍉🇮🇷 @JonesHowDareYou]

Wilcox. #auspol #UncommonCourtesy

[Quentin Dempster @QuentinDempster]

C’mon @AlboMP Attorney General @mrowland please urgently adopt Denmark’s new Copyright laws giving all citizens ownership of their biometric data (facial/voice/finger prints/morphology). Scammers, AI, Trump, global platforms cannot use your biometrics without permission. 👇👇

[Quentin Dempster @QuentinDempster]

Trump’s demand for Australians’ biometric (facial/voice/finger print/morphology) recognition data is currently being processed by our Commonwealth Government. This MUST NOT HAPPEN. Our Five Eyes security alliance already has a data base/risk assessment of any persons of interest.

[[email protected] @CampbellSher]

Gather around MAGA children.

[Peter Cronau @PeterCronau]

Surely this isn’t the country our sons and daughters fought & died for..

Aboriginal speaker jeered..
Accused war criminal cheered.. https://t.co/lcfmb4sWYA

[Jenny Difficult-Frecklington-Jones 🇵🇸🍉🇮🇷 @JonesHowDareYou]

Wilcox. #auspol #nswpol #protest

[Ben Pennings @BenPennings]

“Rinehart has found her direct line into the public narrative, having helped pull the Liberals into oblivion. Rinehart has always been about raw power, but this time she has managed to not only hijack the political situation by demonising renewables and the energy transition through political lackeys like Barnaby Joyce, Hanson and co, she is also, on the flip side, making bank.”

https://t.co/zzWfJOwPxU

[Antony Loewenstein @antloewenstein]

One Nation is Australia’s most prominent far-right political party, led for decades by leader Pauline Hanson. It’s akin to Reform UK and the Republicans under Trump. Think anti-multiculturalism, anti-Islam, pro-Israel and pro US wars, claiming to speak for the forgotten people while being funded by fossil fuel billionaires.
I’m excited to be launching a 3-part podcast series, starring tomorrow, 22 April, in conversation with the brilliant political journalist @AmyRemeikis.
Search for The Antony Loewenstein Podcast.
We go deep. Over 3 episodes. Looking back at One Nation’s beginnings in the late 1990s and the vital role played, then and now, by the mainstream media in boosting Hanson and her ideas.
It’ll be available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple.
This great trailer was made by @lemzakharia and Elizabeth. Series produced by Lena Helou + @lemzakharia.
This is independent journalism and needs your support: https://t.co/JpCylwILpi

[David Shoebridge @DavidShoebridge]

Palantir is embedding itself in other Australian institutions from Coles, to Rio Tinto. Westpac, our military cyber unit, the Australian Signals Directorate, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and AUSTRAC, which handles Aussies’ sensitive financial information.

[[email protected] @CampbellSher]

@KimDotcom Palantir @Coles Australia.

[Scott Marsh @Scottie_marsh]

So this just happened @strongheartsfarnseyflashmob 💪🍉🇵🇸🎷
400 Farnsy’s 💃🏻🕺🏼

#freespeech #queensland

[The Shift Journal @TheShiftJournal]

“A man who has read a thousand books is armed for life; a man who has read none is easy prey. The man who has read a thousand books has lived a thousand lives. He has seen cities he has never visited, spoken to men who died centuries ago, and walked in worlds that no longer exist. Reading does not merely inform him; it enlarges him. It stretches the boundaries of his own experience until he becomes something more than himself.”

-G. K. Chesterton

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

ZERO cases of cervical cancer diagnosed in women under age 25 in Australia 🇦🇺

None . Nada . Zip.

For the first time since records began!

How did this happen?

One word

VACCINES!!!!!

[John Urane @UraneJohn]

Marles is a rabid warmonger.
Marles is squandering a further $53 billion while humans sleep rough, sick persons die in ramped ambulances, & Aussies que for life-saving surgery.
The USA presents the greatest threat to our national security unless you're drinking the Kool-aid!