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[Kiko Pangilinan @kikopangilinan]

JOINT STATEMENT ON THE SENATE MINORITY WALKOUT

We strongly condemn what appears to be an attempt to rush a major change in the Senate Rules, especially when several members of the minority still wanted to speak and raise serious questions on the floor.

Bakit kailangang madaliin? Bakit kailangang pigilan ang mga gustong magsalita? Bakit kailangang i-divide ang house kung marami pang senador ang nagtatanong tungkol sa proseso?

Minamadali ba ang rule change na ito dahil gusto nilang maka boto si Senator Bato? At ngayong may mga ulat na may mga majority senators na maaaring arestuhin?

We walked out because what happened on the floor looked less like orderly deliberation. The proposed rule change affects how senators may attend sessions, participate in proceedings and exercise their mandate through remote means, and such a measure should be opened to healthy public debate instead of being rushed by the tyranny of the majority.

We have always welcomed healthy discussions on the floor, but this should mean allowing all members to be heard, not forcing the chamber to move at the speed preferred by the majority.

At the time the motion was taken up, there was no duly constituted Committee on Rules and there was not even an elected Majority Leader who could properly guide a rules amendment through the regular process.

How could there have been any action or discussion before the Committee on Rules when no Committee on Rules has been organized to date?

With due respect, the answer that no Senate rule had been violated does not settle the matter, because the rules cannot be treated as a matter of convenience when the very process for amending them is under serious question.

The timing raises a question that the public deserves to hear debated openly. Kaya pinili naming tumayo at iwan ang majority sa plenary. Kaya kami nagdesisyon to question the quorum and call for adjournment.

If the proposal is truly defensible, then let it pass through the proper route.

We owe it to the people who voted for us to do our mandate. This is why we want more time to discuss this further.

[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.

[Rolling Stone @RollingStone]

BINI made history on Friday as the first Filipino group to perform at Coachella. More:
https://t.co/cRoNUJv7dk
https://t.co/cRoNUJv7dk

[Kiko Pangilinan @kikopangilinan]

NAGKATAON LANG BA? 🚩

Sa ating imbestigasyon, napansin nating magkakahawig ang pangalan at address ng mga top importers ng bigas, na nagpapahiwatig na iisa lang ang nagmamanipula ng importasyon sa bansa.

Patuloy ang ating pagsisiyasat para may managot at matigil na ang pagsasamantala sa ating mga mamimili. Ang nararapat na kumita ay ang ating mga magsasaka ng palay, na sa ngayon ang pinakalugi sa nangyayaring ito.

[Cup of Joe @cupofjoemusic]

✨ STARDUST DAY 1: A NIGHT TO REMEMBER.
Cup of Joe opened the gates to an out-of-this-world experience.

One down, two more nights to make history. #COJStardustTheConcert

[Edwin Lacierda @dawende]

I first posted this in May 2022.

I thought of sharing it again now, in light of the ongoing controversies surrounding the national budget.

I remember how strict PNoy was when it came to government spending — he was careful with every peso, leaving no issue unchecked, because as public servants, we were entrusted to be faithful stewards of the people’s money.
———————-

SA ILALIM NI PNOY

Under PNoy, there were only two kinds of Cabinet meetings that would practically be held the whole day.

One was the fiscal budget meeting where PNoy would go thru the proposed budget for the next year w/ a calculator beside him & asked the logic of the expenditures. Ang taya na sasagot ay yung Dept Secretary at Budget Secretary (DBM). Kung hindi masagot ng Cabsec, si Budget Secretary ang sasagot. Kung hindi pa rin masagot, submit a written explanation. Walang item sa proposed budget ang papasa na hindi dumaan sa karayom ni PNoy. Ganyan sya kahigpit sa kaban ng bayan.

The second set of meetings is yung NEDA Board. Lahat ng govt projects over a certain amount kailangan dumaan sa NEDA Board. Si PNoy nasa tabi nya uli ang calculator.

Bago umakyat sa NEDA Board, na repaso na ng NEDA yung mga projects & tabled for NEDA Board approval.

Sa meeting, the Cabsec proponent will defend the Project & almost always may tanong si PNoy. Kung hindi masagot ang logic ng laki ng proyekto or any questions he asked, submit a written explanation.

Why do i recall these two kinds of meetings? First, dahil ang humarap kay PNoy ay parang thesis defense at ang proponent ay dapat “Laging Handa”. If one came unprepared, gisang gisa ang Cabsec at ang staff niya & no matter how one prepared, you’d still get questions from left field.

2nd, nakaupo kami ng buong araw & hindi comportable ang silya. Masakit sa likod. Magandang tingnan ang Aguinaldo Room pero panahon pa yata ng Kano ang mga silya at imagine marami sa amin ay hindi na bata. Kaya maraming beses na patawang minumungkahi na baka pwedeng gumamit na lang ng ergonomic chairs.

But kidding aside, mahalaga ang papel ng NEDA Board at ng budget meetings. PNoy always took to heart that in meetings w/c involved spending people’s money, he came prepared, read all the proposals, went thru each item line by line & made notes to ask.

PNoy was exacting when required & demanded the same standard from his people. In the end, we came out w/ tired backs but nonetheless wiser. 💪

[Gretchen Ho @gretchenho]

One our family members traveling abroad got denied at the foreign exchange counter in Oslo, Norway.

Lady at the counter goes — “You came from the Philippines? We cannot exchange your dollars because of the corruption and money laundering in the Philippines.” This family member (along with a group of friends) told me they were asked to exchange their money elsewhere but not at the airport. Family member was just trying to exchange 300 USD.

Terrible. What are we going to do about this, Pilipinas?

[Lzl @Oitiw]

Bakit nga Sinderela ang title ng Cup of Joe song? Please enlighten me 🙏
#joewah here

[Karen Davila @iamkarendavila]

Mapapamura ka talaga sa galit. Huwag po nating kalimutan ito.

Ginawang GATASAN ang gobyerno. Kay Zaldy Co palang umano ito. Isipin niyo ang iba pang congressman na may insertions, cut ng DPWH at mga kontratista.

During the senate hearings, estimates are the national budget can do with P1 trillion less. Napupunta lang ito sa kickback, insertions, lagay sa substandard or ghost projects.

[Christian Esguerra @IanEsguerra]

NapaMURA din ba kayo?

Here's our #FactsFirst special on the Trillion Peso March: https://t.co/DuDNUI471k

[Kiko Pangilinan @kikopangilinan]

KAPAG DIREKTA SA MAGSASAKA AT MANGINGISDA BUMIBILI, SULIT! 🌾🐟

Kahit tinaasan na sa ₱25 mula ₱15 kada bata ang pondo para sa feeding program, bitin pa rin kung sa merkado bibili.

Pero kung direkta sa ating mga magsasaka at mangingisda: mas mura, mas sariwa, at mas malaki ang kita para sa kanila. Tulad ng halimbawa sa Muntinlupa sa ilalim ng ating Sagip Saka Act — ₱25 lang ang kilo ng kamatis mula sa magsasaka kumpara sa ₱100 sa palengke.

Busog ang bata. May merkado ang magsasaka. Nakakatipid ang gobyerno.

Kaya't isinusulong natin ang Libreng Almusal Program na susuporta hindi lang sa ating mga estudyante, kundi pati na rin sa ating food producers. 🇵🇭💪

[Lzl @Oitiw]

Wordle 1,372 6/6
What is the antonym for AMBOG?
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[Teta Limcangco @teta_limcangco]

#Thread.

From Dean Ralph Satmiento

[Karen Davila @iamkarendavila]

HUWAG KALIMUTAN.

[Lzl @Oitiw]

Wordle 1,353 4/6

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[Lzl @Oitiw]

Wordle 1,290 4/6

🟩🟩🟩⬛🟩
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[Lzl @Oitiw]

🥳
Wordle 788 2/6

🟨🟨⬛⬛⬛
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[Lzl @Oitiw]

Do you remember when you joined X? I do! #MyXAnniversary 🥳

[Lzl @Oitiw]

Wordle 1,076 3/6

⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
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