GregMo

Dad, PharmD, (Geek)²

[GregMo @GregMo]

#persistence #tabono

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

Do not install VLC.

Once you install it, you can never go back.

You will never pay 99 cents for a codec again.
You will never buy QuickTime Pro again.
You will never renew RealPlayer Plus again.
You will never pay for Blu-ray decoder software again.
You will never see the words "this file format is not supported" again.

You will become the family tech support person. Forever. Your dad will call you at 11 PM because he downloaded a .mkv from somewhere and Windows refuses to open it.

Your answer will always be the same. "Install VLC."

And then the orange traffic cone will eat his problem in 4 seconds and he will call you a genius.

You did not do that. A French student named Jean-Baptiste Kempf did, in 1996, as a school project at École Centrale Paris. His roommate brought a traffic cone home from the street that year. They made it the logo. 6 billion downloads later, the cone is still undefeated.

Repo: https://t.co/0Tlbn7KNan. 18,463 stars. GPL-2.0. Pushed today.

Here is the wildest part:

The warning is real. Just not for you.

Apple sold QuickTime Pro for $29.99. VLC killed it. Apple shut it down in 2016.
Microsoft sold Windows Media Center for $9.99. VLC killed it. Microsoft shut it down with Windows 10.
RealNetworks charged $39.99 a year for RealPlayer Plus. VLC killed it.
Sony built Blu-ray to need a $79.99 licensed decoder. VLC ships with libdvdcss and a French court ruling that protects it.

The codec mafia spent 30 years building a tollbooth on every video file on Earth.

A guy whose GitHub location is literally "Coneland" walked through every tollbooth with a cone on his head and never paid a cent.

He was offered millions of dollars to sell it. He said no.

So yes. Do not install VLC. The codec industry has not recovered from the last 6 billion people who did.

100% Opensource.
100% Free.
100% Yours.

The biggest media companies on Earth spent three decades trying to charge you to play your own files.

One French student and a cone he found on the street made all of it pointless.

[Erikaaa @ErikaC47]

So what you’re telling me is Thomas Massie has had alleged names of “high-profile pedophiles” that are still walking free for the last 8 months but might release them later.

Thomas Massie is protecting pedophiles. Or he’s lying. That’s the options.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford psychologist spent 4 years proving that the simple act of walking generates 60% more creative ideas than sitting, and the experiment she designed to kill every alternative explanation is one of the most decisive findings in modern psychology.

Her name is Marily Oppezzo.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

The result was almost too clean to publish.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves.

On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision.

She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

This is the part of the study that hit hardest when I read it the first time.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it.

Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes.

The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

The history of this is the part that should haunt anyone who still does meetings in chairs.

Charles Darwin built a gravel loop behind his house in Kent called the Sandwalk and walked it 3 times a day for the rest of his life. The theory of evolution was developed one lap at a time on that path.

Nietzsche walked up to 10 hours a day during the years he wrote his most important books and openly said the work was conceived on his feet.

Beethoven composed for the morning and walked for 5 hours every afternoon with a pencil in his pocket for when something landed.

Kahneman said the best thinking of his Nobel Prize-winning career happened on leisurely walks with Amos Tversky. Steve Jobs refused to take important conversations sitting down. He held them on foot.

Every one of them was using the system Oppezzo would not measure until 2014. They just did not know what to call it.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost nobody asks.

Every meeting you have ever attended sitting around a table was a meeting held at a fraction of the brain power that was actually available to the people in the room. Every brainstorm that got stuck inside a conference room. Every problem you tried to solve at a desk and gave up on. Every idea you could not quite get to.

The intervention is the easiest one in modern science. No supplement. No app. No subscription. No training program. Just a pair of legs and 15 minutes.

The Stanford lab proved it. The philosophers knew it. The neuroscience explains it.

And almost everyone reading this is still trying to think their way out of problems sitting completely still.

[The Angry Pharmacist @theangrypharm]

So i'll be the one who says it.

When is APhA (@pharmacists) going to directly address their sponsorship details/relationship with CVS Health and what 'favors' are being done for each other.

You know, the same CVS Health who owns:

CVS Pharmacy - Major complaints of working conditions, had 2 employees do bad things to themselves, etc.

Caremark - Under cost reimbursements, predatory claw-back audits, patient steering, etc.

You know, the same CVS Health that is single handedly destroying retail pharmacy and the sanity of their pharmacists.

Asking for a friend. The optics of this situationship is ironic at best. We are going to have the fox guard the henhouse next.

[GregMo @GregMo]

@GovTimWalz How can you be so dense? Giving alcohol to those that can't take care of themselves will make taking care of them harder. This will lead to good employees leaving and high turn over rates. But hey, they can get drunk and drown out the reality of how bad they're being treated.

[Nick Sortor @nicksortor]

🚨 BREAKING: More and more Republican Senators are coming out and PUBLICLY calling for the SAVE Act to be passed after polling revealed a whooping **83%** of Americans support Voter ID

Sen. @HawleyMO just signed on as a CO-SPONSOR

Even 76% of BLACKS support Voter ID, per CNN

PASS IT NOW!

[Nick Freitas @NickJFreitas]

@SenWarren So what you're saying is…if you and your ilk hadn't let in tens of millions of illegal immigrants, we wouldn’t have to spend so much to remove them.

Thanks for reminding me.

[Nick Freitas @NickJFreitas]

@SenWarren Yes we are…because you and your party let millions of people into the country illegally. YOU Senator.

[Ms. Jackson🇺🇸 @PaytonKJackson]

Grateful beyond words! 🙌🏽🇺🇸

Thank you, President Trump, for sharing my speech not once, but twice this year. Your support means the world and inspires me to keep fighting for our country and for the values we all hold dear.

#MAGA #AmericaFirst

[GregMo @GregMo]

@KevinKileyCA @RealDeanCain So, it was almost 40 years ago when I first noticed that California was a wack-ado state. When was it great?

[GregMo @GregMo]

I get a hotel 2-3 times a year. Usually it's a @HiltonHotels room. Never again!

[Eduardo Whitecastle @EduardoW62333]

@BillMelugin_ Just to let folks know the Hilton family of hotels…

[Nick shirley @nickshirleyy]

I ENDED TIM WALZ

[GregMo @GregMo]

@RealDeanCain just rewatched Burn Notice. Forgot you were in it. Have you just always been a great actor? Keep on, keeping on, Superman!

[GregMo @GregMo]

I know good people that are Indian so I hesitate to share this, but the fraud and abuse needs some serious attention.

[Cari Kelemen @KelemenCari]

My husband and I bought a small print shop in Texas in 2024. We did not qualify for a Small Business Loan to lease a new printer because we hadn't owned the business for two years. We are both US citizens.

[Nick Freitas @NickJFreitas]

By "make it easier to get into the childcare business" he meant defrauding taxpayers to buy votes from immigrants benefiting from the fraud.

[Nick Freitas @NickJFreitas]

As we realize the incredible magnitude of fraud going on in Minnesota and other places just remember that Democrats think the REAL problem is you don't pay enough in taxes.

[Nick Freitas @NickJFreitas]

Journalist @nickshirleyy didn't uncover what Minnesota politicians and media missed.

He uncovered what they orchestrated and covered up.

Protect @nickshirleyy at all costs.

[GregMo @GregMo]

We both could use wisdom, grace, and vision to follow His will. Also would ask that He would watch over those that we turn to for cousel, that the counsel we receive be in alignment with God's heart.

[GregMo @GregMo]

I want to thank everyone that has prayed for Rebeka and me. There's been progress in the situation and for that I praise God. We still have a long way to go tho so I'd ask you for continued prayers for us. If you'll just raise our names up to God, He knows the situation well.

[John Rich🇺🇸 @johnrich]

I WAS ROBBED! Someone stole my ATV...It's a Polaris Sportsmen 850. Pay close attention to the tires...Very unique. If you find this for sale anywhere online, take a screen shot and post it in the comments! If you help me find it, I'll send you and autographed guitar:) REPOST!