puzzler

Earthling

[puzzler @doodleface]

heads
on
pikes

[puzzler @doodleface]

@wylfcen fatigue buys them to protect drugs n stolen goods or to fight, they get loose and sent to the pound

neander women claim them for their families with a hallmark redemption narrative

[puzzler @doodleface]

@BBGreatMoments was routine at the Polo Grounds, which is why Mays throw was better than his catch: Doby only advanced to 3rd

[Teddy - PolyBackTest.com @Bitcoin_Teddy]

Never forget when MythBusters covered a Ford Taurus in modelling clay and scooped out 1,082 dimples to see if the aerodynamics of golf ball dimples could scale to a car.

It worked: a dimpled Taurus was more fuel efficient than the standard one (to make sure the cars weighed the same, the team put the same amount of clay in the trunk of the car on the non-dimpled tests).

Across ~300 episodes, the Golf Dimple Car was one of their most surprising results.

Just an absolute got damn classic and probably the most visually absurd of their experiments.

[puzzler @doodleface]

@pepesgrandma pickin up bags

[puzzler @doodleface]

@FischerKing64 deep not Haig?

[Alvin @Alvin1492840]

5. Send-to-Kindle turn anything into a Kindle book.

You have a personal Kindle email address (find it under Manage Your Content and Devices).

Email any PDF, Word doc, or webpage to that address with the subject line "Convert."

Amazon reformats it into a clean Kindle ebook. Highlighting works. Bookmarks work. It syncs across devices.

Long PDFs. Research papers. Substack articles. Court documents. Your own writing.

All become Kindle books. Free.

[Álvaro J @jota_snchez]

2/ Desconfía de tu propia inteligencia.

Cuanto más listo eres, mejores excusas te montas: "esto es muy pequeño", "no merece la pena", "no va a cambiar nada".

Tu cabeza es una máquina de justificar el no hacer.

La inteligencia mal usada es el mejor freno que existe.

[puzzler @doodleface]

@shegone03 @MLB rbi opportunities are entirely team dependent

[puzzler @doodleface]

near east origin

https://t.co/KExRi1sk2X

[puzzler @doodleface]

@cmccosky can he hit above .200 ? cuz that'd be the missing piece

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Somewhere in southern Spain right now, a pig is quietly turning itself into something close to olive oil.

This is the black Iberian pig, the pata negra, named for its dark little hooves. For most of the year it lives an ordinary pig's life. Then, around October, the acorns begin to fall, and the whole arrangement turns faintly ridiculous.

The pigs are loosed into the dehesa, an ancient oak woodland sprawling across millions of hectares of Spain and Portugal, with a hectare or two of forest given over to each animal. There they spend the autumn and winter doing essentially nothing but roaming beneath the holm oaks and eating acorns. Up to ten kilos a day. They walk miles to find them, and pack on forty-odd kilos in a single season.

Here is the lovely part. The acorn is loaded with oleic acid, the very same fat that makes olive oil famous. So the pig converts the fruit of the oak straight into soft, golden, olive-grade fat, marbled all the way through itself. A four-legged olive press, fattening on a forest floor.

That fat becomes jamón ibérico de bellota, cured patiently for years and sold for a small fortune.

The most coveted ham on earth is, when you get down to it, just a pig allowed to be a pig, in a wood, eating what falls from the trees.

And the wood only survives because the pig makes it worth keeping.

[puzzler @doodleface]

@JocelynBenson enable fatigue greater scope of harm

[Steve Kramer @spremark]

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse [or generous gifts/money] from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.” - Alexander Fraser Tytler

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A century ago, one in every four big trees in the eastern forests of America was a chestnut, and every autumn the country under them ate for free.

The American chestnut was a giant, a hundred feet tall, and there were close to four billion of them from Maine to the Deep South. Each autumn they dropped a carpet of sweet nuts so thick you raked it up by the sackful. Families roasted them all winter. Hogs and cattle were turned loose in the woods to fatten on them for nothing. Turkey, deer and bear lived off the same mast. The timber, straight and rot-proof, built the barns, the fence posts and the furniture. One tree fed the people, fattened the livestock, carried the wildlife through winter, then built the house.

Then in 1904 a blight arrived on imported Asian chestnut stock, spotted first on the trees at the Bronx Zoo. It moved through the forest at fifty miles a year, and by the 1940s it had killed close to four billion trees, nearly every mature chestnut on the continent. One of the worst ecological catastrophes in the country's history.

Here is the part that should stop you. The tree is not quite dead. The old roots still send up shoots, year after year, that the blight cuts down before they grow tall enough to fruit. A century on, the stumps are still trying, and still failing.

A free harvest that fed a continent every autumn for thousands of years, gone in forty, and still reaching for a sky it will never reach again.

[puzzler @doodleface]

@RugerBncurtis unions

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

My 19-year-old niece pulled out a small plastic card and said "watch this."

She opened her phone.

Free audiobooks. Free ebooks on Kindle. 30,000 movies including Criterion classics. Free New York Times. Free LinkedIn Learning courses.

All $0 a month.

She said: "It's my library card. I haven't paid for a streaming service in 3 years."

I checked the math. She saves over $100 every month.

Here's everything she showed me 👇

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated.

His name is Qing Li.

He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea.

The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason.

Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005.

He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest.

Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty.

The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected.

The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly.

Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty.

Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month.

Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet.

The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation.

The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall.

When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab.

Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system.

This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress.

A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower.

The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down.

Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks.

They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone.

The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk.

After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature.

What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care.

But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free.

The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish.

Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens.

Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.

[puzzler @doodleface]

@Yooper_IA if you don't target positions, the Tigers will get three more second basemen with zero power

[Selene Mariposa @Selene_Mariposa]

@JPowel80308

HEB is not just a grocery store.

It is Texas in a building.

Fresh everything. Local everything. Prepared foods that embarrass most restaurants. A bakery. A pharmacy. A florist. A sushi counter. A full butcher. Wine. Spirits. Cooking classes. And a store brand that quietly beats the national brands on almost everything it touches.

All under one enormous roof.
In a building the size of a small airport.
With parking that actually works.

But here is what makes HEB different from every other grocery chain in America.

When disaster strikes Texas, HEB does not wait.

When hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast, HEB has mobile kitchens and supply trucks rolling before the storm clears.
When winter storms knocked out power across Texas, HEB was distributing supplies to communities that needed them.
When floods hit Houston, HEB showed up.

Every single time.
Before FEMA finds its clipboard.
Before the press conference is scheduled.
Before anyone else has figured out the logistics.

HEB has been serving Texas since 1905.
It is family owned.
It has never forgotten who its community is.

That is not a grocery store.
That is a Texas institution that happens to sell groceries.

And @elonmusk is right.
The vibe is unmatched.

The Europeans touring it like a museum are not wrong.
They have simply never experienced what a grocery store looks like when it actually loves the community it serves. 🦋

[puzzler @doodleface]

@BoomertarianN truth