Christopher E. Stith

Midwest born & raised, currently living in Texas. Internet industry.

@[email protected]
@cestith.bsky.social

[Christopher E. Stith @cestith]

In general I don't mind hearing about your politics or your religion to better understand your point of view. If the message isn't at least as powerful as Woody Guthrie's "Tom Joad Pt 2" you're probably not moving me at all.

[Christopher E. Stith @cestith]

The Cincinnati Reds are in last place in the NL Central, six games back. They stand at .517 winning.

The Seattle Mariners are first in the AL West. They also stand at .517 today.

This is the sort of thing they mean when they talk about the NL Central Bring highly competitive.

[Christopher E. Stith @cestith]

The judge ruled it can't be named for anyone else unless Congress approves it.
https://t.co/3MvPRyhXmP
via ABC News App

[Katie Coleman @kaydaustin]

Last year, I was offered a job even after disclosing a stage IV cancer diagnosis. Highlighting the very best of workplace acceptance and culture.

But today, my husband unexpectedly had a job offer rescinded after letting the company know he may need 2 days off, a month after starting to help me recover from a possible minor surgery.

We’re both software engineers and both companies are in the healthcare space. The response he received highlights the discrimination that not only many patients face but also their caregivers.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disheartened and frustrated by their response. When faced with the choice, be company A not company B.

We’ve faced bigger hurdles and come out on top, so on we go.

In other news, if anyone is looking to hire a talented software engineer w/experience in healthcare. I know a guy 😉

Here’s a photo of us on my birthday this year. We celebrated with a hackathon building tools/apps for cancer patients. Yes, that was my actual birthday request. Things get real nerdy around here.

[Sara Spector @Miriam2626]

Hey Ken Paxton :
I am an ex Waco child abuse prosecutor.
And while you are focused on bathroom stalls, I am focused on why you allowed Adam Hoffman sodomize a child and he is still a member in good standing of the Texas Bar.👇

[Christopher E. Stith @cestith]

https://t.co/Srh0LATTFD

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

Trump says he wants to 'take' Cuba because he objects to one family using the state as a vehicle for personal enrichment. Let's just leave it there, shall we.

[FactPost @factpostnews]

RFK Jr. has fired the chairs of the Preventive Service Task Force, which decides which preventive healthcare services insurers must cover.

This could threaten coverage for cancer, depression and osteoporosis screenings.

[ᗰᗩƳᖇᗩ @LePapillonBlu2]

I told you, he’s destroying it all!!

[AnthonyAndrews @anthon7yandrews]

Mar a Lago employees had pictures of stolen classified documents on their iCloud accounts. But the DOJ refuses to release Jack Smith’s Volume 2 in yet another attempt to hide Trump’s TREASON. 👇

[Jane of the North @JaneotN]

Oh look! A transgender immigrant serial pedophile drag queen!!

Just kidding. It's another white christian Republican, raping little boys.

[Stephanie Grisham @OMGrisham]

I resigned on Jan 6 & lost everything & live in fear. I watched these criminals get pardons, see new corruption from the WH every day, & now taxpayer $ set aside to reward them for their loyalty & maintain his own personal army. Where are you Congress? Cabinet? Anyone???

[Melat Kiros for Congress, CO-1 @MelatKirosCO]

He’s right bc we tax income, not wealth.

Bezos takes out a tiny salary, pays the income tax, and lives off loans borrowed against his stocks, basically tax free. They all do this and now 935 billionaires hold more wealth than 170 million Americans.

It’s time to tax wealth.

[Mueller, She Wrote @MuellerSheWrote]

NEW: I've filed a claim with Todd Blanche for compensation from the $1.776B slush fund for the unlawful investigation by the government into my podcast in August 2019. I'm seeking $8.647 million in compensation for weaponized lawfare - the equivalent of punitive damages, lost pay and retirement.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

People saying he won’t also need to explain how to stop it, because he won’t stop on his own. Simply hoping it’s not possible ignores what’s been happening in Congress and the Supreme Court for the last year. This year’s midterms must be an overwhelming repudiation.

[Jesus Freakin Congress @TheJFreakinC]

🚨A U.S. citizen, in Fort Myers, Florida, was just pumping gas when ICE agents walked up and illegally demanding ID… until they realized they were being filmed.

In the video, two agents were surrounding him, both asking if he had an ID…

He calmly said, “I do,” while recording the encounter.

Then, an ICE agent reached INTO his car and tried to grab his phone out of his hand.

You have a constitutional right to record law enforcement in public. You also can’t just reach into someone’s vehicle and try seizing their property because you don’t like being filmed.

The second he asserted his rights and said, “Don’t grab my camera,” the agent immediately backed off, said “alright, have a good day,” and walked away.

Because they knew.

They had no warrant, or probable cause, no crime was being committed… Just intimidation… until someone knows their rights.

And notice how fast the energy changed the moment they noticed he was filming.

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

Absolute disaster for the FBI. Senator Chris Van Hollen exposes how Kash Patel completely weaponized the agency by purging the exact counterespionage agents needed against Iran.

He confirms Patel maliciously fired agents who investigated Mar-a-Lago out of pure vengeance.

[FactPost @factpostnews]

The Trump administration has authorized the continued use of cancer-causing pesticide atrazine.

Atrazine is banned in more than 60 countries.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

JD Vance just accidentally told the Truth.

"If you want to rebuilt the American dream for the next generation, vote against the crazy leadership in Washington DC"

-President: Republican
-Senate: Republican
- House: Republican.

[Norm Eisen @NormEisen]

BREAKING: It's against the law for Trump to sue himself--& then settle for a huge sum

The court has the power to put a stop to these shenanigans & should do so

@mattplatkin & @DDAction_ are proud to rep over 90 members of Congress in filing a brief fighting back

[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.