OuterCoast 🏝

An OuterCoast Vacation Rental

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

I am so blessed to have two beautiful daughters that I am so proud of. I was able to listen to this beautiful music their whole childhoods. This was taken when they were 12 and 8 years old. Both studied Suzuki violin since 5 and 3 years old. (Thank you Diana for your expertise in teaching Suzuki.) Both are successful computer engineers now.

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

@miabenetti @FlyTPA Phoebe addition?

[Ryan Hall, Y’all @ryanhallyall]

Here's an updated version with aurora viewlines. The color scheme needs work but I'll have these auto-generating every hour or so on the site soon.

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

@jwellz8 https://t.co/e8qcDZg8Fp

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

@xxxx_xtra @JustJennifer369 @RonDeSantis https://t.co/Wvy3JZ7geU

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

@FLStormChasers_ https://t.co/f4xK2UtOfD

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

@gsnyder @elonmusk @elonmusk might be a good educational project.

[Gordon F Snyder Jr @gsnyder]

Hampshire College closing. 600 acres of labs, dorms, & classrooms sitting empty in Amherst MA. Reopen as an engineering school that teaches problem-framing. https://t.co/HWh9aDRxaH
@elonmusk it's right there.
#Engineering #HigherEducation #STEM #AI #EngineeringEducation

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Your kid's piano teacher was reshaping their brain. A Harvard-led team tracked children from age 6 to 9 and found that kids who practiced an instrument at least 2.5 hours a week grew the corpus callosum (the cable connecting the left and right halves of the brain) by about 25% in the region that handles movement planning. Kids who practiced less or quit showed zero growth there.

USC ran a separate study starting in 2012 that followed children from low-income LA neighborhoods. One group learned violin through the LA Philharmonic's youth orchestra program. A second did soccer. A third had no structured after-school program. Two years in, only the music group showed brain changes: stronger white-matter connectivity, faster maturation of auditory processing, and greater activation in networks involved in decision-making and impulse control. The soccer and no-program groups looked the same on brain scans.

A randomized trial at the University of Toronto tested 144 six-year-olds assigned to keyboard lessons, voice lessons, drama, or nothing for a full school year. The music kids gained about 7 IQ points on average. Drama and no-lessons kids gained 4-5. That roughly 3-point gap showed up across every subtest, including reading and math.

Now the language side. Bilingual kids outperform monolingual kids on task-switching tests (jumping between different sets of rules quickly), and it holds regardless of which second language they speak. Brain scans of nearly 1,300 children and young adults from a 2021 Georgetown and University of Reading study showed that bilinguals kept more grey matter (the layer where the brain's processing cells live) as they grew up than kids who spoke one language.

The long game is where this gets serious. A 2025 Monash University study of 10,893 Australians over 70 found that people who regularly played an instrument had 35% lower odds of developing dementia. Bilingualism shows an even sharper effect. Studies across India, Canada, and the US consistently find that bilingual adults develop dementia symptoms 4 to 5 years later than monolingual adults. A 2024 door-to-door survey of 1,234 people over 60 in Bengaluru, India, found dementia in 4.9% of monolinguals and just 0.4% of bilinguals.

Both piano and a second language work through a similar mechanism. They force the brain to manage competing systems at once, left hand versus right hand, one language versus another. That constant switching strengthens the frontal regions responsible for planning, focus, and filtering distractions, building what neurologists call cognitive reserve: a buffer that lets the brain keep working even as age-related damage accumulates.

Those parents running their kids between piano on Tuesdays and Mandarin on Thursdays were basically running a two-front neuroplasticity program without knowing it.

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

@FlyTPA Love it!

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

@elonmusk Uploaded a pdf file to make it accessible. It produced text that I had to copy and paste into word with instructions to do heading adjustments as well, vs Claude that kept all my formatting, produced a word file and a pdf file that all I had to do was download it. :)

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

@FlyTPA Been waiting for this! Will both sides be open once again as well?

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

Clearwater Beach: wait for it….

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

@FlyTPA Let Phoebe know please.

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

Eagle sighting on Sand Key Beach - Clearwater Beach

[Chester Tam @islantstudio]

Good morning to everyone in Massachusetts who wanted the option to opt out of the energy “relief” plan Healey put forward that would have made us pay more later.

After strong public outcry, the state’s largest utilities backed off plans to charge customers interest on deferred winter gas and electric bills. The people pushed back and made it clear that this so-called “relief” was not a solution if it ended up costing us more money in the long run.

Shaving bills now and then quietly adding the cost back later with interest is not help. It’s just moving the burden around and hoping people won’t notice. Many customers even said they would rather opt out entirely than pay more down the road, but there was no option to do so.

This moment proves something important. We don’t get an opt-out because it’s offered to us. We get leverage when enough people speak up, contact regulators, and pressure the administration to do the right thing.

Temporary fixes and accounting tricks are not answers to Massachusetts’ energy crisis. Real solutions lower costs permanently, increase transparency, and stop passing bad policy decisions onto ratepayers.

If this was the governor’s relief plan, it’s reasonable to ask how charging interest wasn’t known to her from the start.

[Chester Tam @islantstudio]

Good morning to everyone in Massachusetts who knows that kicking the can down the road is not a solution to our energy bill crisis.

Governor Maura Healey is rolling out what her office is calling “winter savings,” a plan meant to reduce energy bills for February and March. On paper, it sounds promising. The administration says it would cut residential electricity bills by about 25 percent and natural gas bills by around 10 percent, backed by a $180 million state funded package. Winter is expensive and families are hurting, so of course people welcome any relief.

But the real question is whether this is actual relief or just the state moving money around and calling it a win.

Temporary credits do not fix the underlying problem. Ratepayers are still responsible for the long term costs, and these short term savings do nothing to explain why Massachusetts energy bills are among the highest in the country. Two months of relief does not help families who are struggling to afford their bills all year long.

The real solution starts with rolling back policy driven charges that are buried in our bills under things like public benefits and infrastructure add ons. It also means expanding energy supply and competition, including reliable natural gas capacity, instead of restricting it and driving prices higher. Any assistance should go directly to ratepayers in a transparent way, not through accounting tricks that show up later as higher costs.

Families do not need press releases. They need real reform, honesty, and leadership willing to fix the system instead of delaying the problem for another month or another year.

[Spill The Memes @SpillTheMemes]

😂

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

@elonmusk https://t.co/7H2izw1WWP

[OuterCoast 🏝 @Outercoast]

@Microinteracti1 It’s a great area!

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

🇺🇸 Footage from Clearwater Beach, Florida.

As the sun sets over the Gulf, people slowly make their way along the shoreline. Some walk barefoot in the sand. Others stop to watch the light change. A few talk quietly. A few say nothing at all.

It looks calm. Almost surprisingly so.

For many in Europe, the image of the United States is loud, tense, divided. And sometimes it is. But evenings like this exist too. Ordinary ones. Peaceful ones. Where nothing dramatic happens and no one is trying to prove anything.

There are families, couples, older friends walking side by side. No rush. No spectacle. Just people enjoying the simple fact that the day turned out fine.

It’s easy to forget that most Americans live their lives in moments like this. Between headlines. Between elections. Between the noise. They walk, they talk, they watch the sky change color, much like people do anywhere else.

“I think people expect us to be more intense,” says Laura, visiting from Minnesota. “But most of the time we’re just… living. Same as everyone.”

Europeans often imagine the U.S. as extreme. Americans often imagine Europe as calm. The truth, as usual, lives somewhere in between in places like this, at sunset, when nobody is performing for anyone.

No crisis.
No commentary.
Just people sharing a moment that doesn’t need explaining.