Michael J Wise

Programmer/Computational biologist (microbes). Redgum Justice. GAICD. (he/him/his)
"... But if I'm only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?"
Loves K+A.

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

This is some seriously good thinking about an Australian approach to AI

[Kate Chaney @ChaneyforCurtin]

The govt’s approach to AI is passive and under-resourced. Today I’m releasing this AI Discussion Paper-18 policy priorities to set up the institutions, capitalise on opportunities, address the risks & share the benefits. This is urgent! #auspol https://t.co/9IZtKFoRzS

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

@ChaneyforCurtin These are excellent proposals. Apropos Policy 11 (Privacy), why don't we have a serious look at Europe's GDPR model. If Ireland, a Common Law country like us, can do it, perhaps we can too?

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

@JJKALE2 No. For all its genuine multicultural success, Australia has had an undercurrent of racism, not least against Blaks since invasion and Chinese since C19. There also has antisemitism since at least 1920s. Segal may not help, but it is the cancer of racism that is the problem.

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

@otokyo Thirst traps work. Nothing new there. These days I'd wonder if that person in the picture is real.

[Louis Gleeson @aigleeson]

A computer scientist won the Turing Award at 36 and then walked away from almost every other project for the next 50 years to write one book that he has still not finished at age 88, and it may be the most important book in his field.

His name is Donald Knuth. He won the Turing Award in 1974, which is the closest thing computer science has to a Nobel Prize.

He was 36 years old. He had already written volumes one, two, and three of a book series called The Art of Computer Programming. He was the youngest person ever to receive the award at that point in its history.

Almost anyone else would have ridden that moment for the rest of their career. Founded a company. Sat on boards. Gone on speaking tours. Knuth did the opposite. He went back to his desk and kept writing.

He started the book in 1962. He was 24 years old. His publisher had asked him to write a short paperback on compilers. He sat down to outline it and discovered that to explain compilers properly he would have to explain the deeper algorithms underneath them first.

The short paperback became a draft outline of 12 chapters. The 12 chapters became a planned 7-volume series. The 7-volume series became the project he is still working on 63 years later.

Volume 1 came out in 1968. Volume 2 in 1969. Volume 3 in 1973. He was producing books faster than most academics produce papers. Then everything stopped.

In 1977 he received the printed proofs of the second edition of Volume 2. He looked at the pages and was so disgusted by how the publisher had typeset his mathematical notation that he could not bring himself to release the book.

The equations looked ugly. The fonts looked wrong. The spacing was off. He decided he could not in good conscience publish another volume of TAOCP until the typesetting problem was solved.

So he paused the book.

He stopped writing TAOCP and spent the next 8 years inventing TeX from scratch.

TeX is the typesetting system that every academic paper, every math textbook, every physics journal on earth now uses. Every PhD thesis in the sciences is set in TeX. Every paper on arxiv. Every equation in every paper Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind have ever published. The system that the entire scientific publishing world runs on exists because one man refused to compromise on how the second edition of Volume 2 looked.

He gave the entire TeX system away for free. He never tried to commercialize it. He went back to writing TAOCP.

In 1992 he retired from Stanford at the age of 54. Most professors retire to slow down. Knuth retired to speed up. He explicitly said he was leaving teaching because he needed every remaining hour of his life to keep writing the book. He stopped using email on January 1, 1990.

He answers no calls. He takes paper mail only. He is on a personal mission to finish a multi-volume series that nobody is forcing him to write, on a deadline that only exists in his own head.

Volume 4A came out in 2011. Volume 4B in 2022. He is currently working on Volume 4C. Volumes 4D, 4E, 4F, 5, 6, and 7 are still ahead of him. He is 88 years old. He will almost certainly die before he finishes.

The thing that should haunt anyone reading this is the math of his choice.

Every modern incentive structure tells you to optimize for speed. Ship the imperfect version. Get it out the door. Iterate later. Move on to the next thing.

Knuth has spent 63 years doing the exact opposite. He pays a $2.56 reward in hexadecimal dollars to anyone who finds an error in his published books. Real checks, until check fraud made him switch to certificates of deposit. He treats every single error in every single volume as a personal failure. He revises. He rewrites. He goes back to fix issues that nobody else could have spotted.

He could have written 30 books in 63 years. He chose to write one.

The reason is the one almost nobody understands the first time they hear it. There is a category of work that loses all its value when it is done quickly.

A reference book that engineers will rely on for the next 200 years is not the same kind of object as a blog post that has to ship today. The slow project and the fast project look like the same activity from the outside. They are completely different games.

Bill Gates once said in an interview that if you can read the whole of TAOCP, you should send him your resume. He meant it. He was not joking. The man who founded Microsoft was telling the world that the rarest skill on earth is being able to finish a book that one man has spent his entire adult life writing for an audience that mostly does not have the patience to read it.

The book may never be finished.

The man writing it knows this and keeps writing anyway.

The work outlives the worker. That is the entire point.

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

@simongerman600 And the fact that compasses have pointed north, fixing it in our imaginations as the top. AFAIK, there is no north in space, is there?

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

Eucalyptus deglupta (Mindanao Gum). I gather there are (were?) some specimens in Kings Park and Araluen Gardens.

[Interesting things @awkwardgoogle]

The only Eucalyptus species naturally found in the Northern Hemisphere!

Eucalyptus deglupta (Rainbow Eucalyptus) is the one and only.

While nearly all 700+ eucalyptus species are native to Australia and the Southern Hemisphere, this stunning tree naturally grows in the Philippines, New Guinea, and parts of Indonesia, crossing the equator into the Northern Hemisphere.

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

Remarkable man

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

Berthold Beitz watched SS soldiers throw Jewish babies out of orphanage windows.
August 7, 1942. Boryslaw, Poland. The SS was clearing out the Jewish orphanage.
Beitz was 28 years old. A young German oil executive. He had been warned by the local police. He went to see what was happening.
The SS were dragging children out of beds. Throwing infants out of upstairs windows. Loading them into trucks for the death camps.
Beitz stood there and watched. He had a small daughter at home. About the same age.
He went home that night and told his wife. He said: we have to do something.
By the end of the war, Berthold and Else Beitz had saved 800 lives.
Here's how he got there.
Born September 26, 1913. Zemmin, Pomerania. A small German village. Son of a banker.
Bert grew up in a normal middle-class German family. Some of his relatives liked the Nazis. He joined the Hitler Youth as a boy. Most German boys did.
He trained as a banker. Then in 1939, at age 25, he joined Royal Dutch Shell. The big oil company. Worked in their Hamburg office.
When the war started, Bert was in a special category. Oil experts were essential. He didn't get sent to the front.
In 1941, the Germans needed someone to run the oil fields in occupied Poland. Boryslaw. A small town in eastern Galicia. Today it's in Ukraine.
The oil fields there were important. Hitler needed oil to fuel his tanks. The German army needed every drop.
Bert was sent to Boryslaw in April 1941. Made business manager of the Beskidian Oil Company. Later renamed Carpathian Oil.
He brought his wife Else. Their baby daughter. They moved into a nice house in town.
Then he saw what was happening to the Jews of Boryslaw.
Boryslaw had been home to thousands of Jews for centuries. Many of them worked in the oil industry. Engineers. Chemists. Lab assistants. Office workers.
When the Germans arrived, the killings started. SS units. Ukrainian collaborators. Death squads.
Jews were rounded up. Shot in mass graves outside town. Or sent to camps.
Belzec death camp was nearby. Auschwitz was a few hours away.
Bert watched it happen.
Years later he tried to explain why he did what he did. He said it wasn't politics. He said it wasn't anti-Fascism.
He said: "When you see a woman with her child in her arms being shot, and you yourself have a child, then your response is bound to be completely different."
He started small.
The Carpathian Oil Company employed Jewish workers. They wore badges with the letter "R" on them. Standing for Rüstungsarbeiter. Armaments worker. Essential to the war.
These workers were officially protected. The SS couldn't take them. They were too valuable.
Bert started expanding the definition.
A Jew came to him. Said his brother was being deported tomorrow. Said his brother was a tailor.
Bert wrote out a paper. Said the brother was a "petroleum technician." Essential to the oil fields. Couldn't be touched.
Then a hairdresser. A "petroleum technician."
Then a Talmudic scholar. A "petroleum technician."
Years later, Bert remembered it: "I chose tailors, hairdressers, and Talmudic scholars and gave them all cards as 'petroleum technicians.'"
He didn't know any of them. Didn't ask. Just signed.
Then he started doing something more dangerous.
When the SS organized deportations, trains would arrive at the Boryslaw station. Jews would be loaded into cattle cars. Sent east to the camps.
Bert started showing up at the trains.
He would push past the SS guards. Walk into the cars. Shout that this man, that woman, that child, was an essential worker for his oil fields.
He needed them back. The German war effort needed them back.
The SS didn't always argue. Bert was a German civilian executive. He had powerful friends in Berlin. The oil mattered.
He pulled people off the trains. Sometimes one at a time. Sometimes in groups.
In 1945 alone, he and his team pulled about 220 Jews off deportation trains.
Else was doing more.
His wife was 22 when they moved to Boryslaw. Pregnant with their second daughter.
She turned their family home into a hiding place. The cellar. The attic. The spare rooms.
When Jewish parents knew they were going to be killed, they brought their children to Else. She hid them. Fed them. Kept them quiet when the SS came to visit.
Sometimes there were dozens of children in the house. Jewish children. The Beitz daughters grew up playing with them.
The SS visited often. Bert and Else would entertain officers in the dining room while Jewish children sat silent in the cellar below.
If the SS had checked the cellar, the whole family would have been killed. The children. Bert. Else. Their daughters.
The penalty for hiding Jews in occupied Poland was death.
They did it anyway.
In early 1943, the Gestapo finally came for him.
Two Jewish girls had been caught on a train to Hungary. They had forged work permits. The forged permits had Bert's signature on them.
Bert was called in for questioning. Faced the Gestapo.
He didn't crack. He said the permits were forgeries. Said he had no idea who had signed his name.
He had a story prepared. He had powerful supporters. The oil company needed him.
The Gestapo let him go. They warned him to be more careful.
Word spread among the Jews of Boryslaw. They knew what had happened. They knew what was at stake.
In March 1944, the war turned worse for Germany. Bert's protected status ended. He was drafted into the army at age 30.
He fought on the Eastern Front for the last year of the war.
His protection of the Jews of Boryslaw ended.
Most of the Jews he hadn't been able to save were killed.
But the 800 he had saved were still alive.
When the war ended, the survivors found him.
Letters poured in from Israel. From America. From across Europe. Jews who had been pulled off the trains. Children who had hidden in his cellar. Workers whose forged papers had said "petroleum technician."
They came to thank him.
Many of them sent testimonies to Yad Vashem. Israel's Holocaust memorial. They wanted Bert and Else honored.
In 1973, Yad Vashem named them Righteous Among the Nations. Israel's highest honor for non-Jews who saved Jewish lives.
Bert was 60 years old. He had spent 30 years rebuilding his career. He hadn't talked about Boryslaw much. He didn't think it deserved special attention.
He went to Jerusalem to receive the medal. He cried during the ceremony.
Here's what makes his story remarkable.
Bert Beitz didn't stay a small oil executive.
After the war, he came home to Germany. Found work in insurance. Then ran an insurance company in Hamburg.
In 1953, he met Alfried Krupp. The head of the Krupp steel empire. The most famous family business in Germany. They had armed the Nazi war machine.
Krupp had just been released from prison. Convicted of war crimes. Of using slave labor.
Krupp needed someone clean to rebuild his company. Someone with no Nazi past. Someone respected.
He hired Bert Beitz.
Bert spent the next 60 years running Krupp. Turning it into one of Germany's biggest companies. Building Krupp Steel into ThyssenKrupp.
He became one of the most powerful businessmen in Germany. Met with chancellors. Met with presidents. Met with Soviet leaders during the Cold War.
He once spent 21 hours straight in a meeting with Khrushchev. The Soviet premier. Talking about trade between East and West.
He helped Germany rebuild itself after Hitler.
He helped end the Cold War quietly. Behind the scenes.
He was a member of the International Olympic Committee. Vice-President from 1984 to 1988.
He never bragged about saving 800 Jews.
His grandson said it once. "He never spoke about it. We had to read about it in the papers."
When asked, late in life, why he had done it, Bert always said the same thing. "It wasn't heroism. It wasn't resistance. I was just a human being who saw what was happening."
Else Beitz survived him by a year. Died in 2014, age 94.
Their three daughters grew up. Had children. Have grandchildren.
The descendants of the 800 they saved number in the thousands today. Spread across Israel. America. Europe.
Many of them light a candle for the Beitz family every year.
In Germany, Bert is remembered as the last great industrialist. The man who rebuilt Krupp. The Cold War diplomat. The Olympic leader.
The 800 Jews he saved are barely mentioned in his German biographies.
In Israel, he's remembered the other way. The German who saved 800 lives.
Both versions are him. Same man. Same story.
He died on July 30, 2013. Two months before his 100th birthday.
He had gone to work every day until the end.
Berthold Beitz. German industrialist. Hitler Youth boy. Royal Dutch Shell executive.
Saw SS soldiers throw babies out of windows. Decided to fight back.
Forged papers for tailors and rabbis. Hid children in his cellar. Pulled Jews off deportation trains.
Saved 800 lives.
His crime? Refusing to look away.
His legacy? 800 families that lived. A medal in Jerusalem. A German empire he rebuilt. A grandson who only learned what he had done by reading the newspaper.
Some heroes shout about what they did.
Some never stop talking about it.
Bert Beitz lived 71 years after the war and barely mentioned it.
He thought saving 800 lives was just being human.
That's all it was.
That's everything./

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

The year was 1957. Inside a modest Sony research laboratory in Tokyo, a 32-year-old physicist named Leo Esaki was doing something that looked almost embarrassingly simple. He was pressing a tiny sliver of germanium semiconductor between two electrodes and watching what happened. No massive particle accelerators. No sprawling university budgets. Just a quiet man, a small crystal, and an idea that the textbooks said shouldn't work.

What Esaki noticed was extraordinary. Electrons weren't behaving the way classical physics demanded. Instead of climbing over an energy barrier the way any sensible particle was supposed to, they were slipping straight through it. Vanishing on one side and reappearing on the other, as if the wall simply didn't exist. This was quantum tunneling, a phenomenon that had been theorized for decades but never cleanly demonstrated in a semiconductor until that moment.

The implications were staggering. Esaki hadn't just confirmed a ghostly quirk of quantum mechanics. He had shown that it could be harvested, controlled, and put to work. The device born from his discovery, the tunnel diode, could switch between states faster than any conventional transistor of its era. It was a signal that the future of electronics wouldn't just be about building smaller components, but about bending the rules of nature itself.

Physics laboratories across the world took notice almost immediately. The tunnel diode ignited a wave of research into quantum devices that rippled from Bell Labs in New Jersey to research centers in the Soviet Union. Scientists who had spent careers working within the comfortable boundaries of classical electronics suddenly found themselves peering into the strange, probabilistic world of quantum mechanics.

In 1973, the Nobel Committee in Stockholm made it official. Esaki was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics alongside Ivar Giaever, the two of them recognized for independently illuminating the tunneling phenomenon from different angles, Esaki in semiconductors and Giaever in superconductors. It was a recognition not just of two brilliant careers, but of an entire new chapter in the story of physics.

Today, Leo Esaki turns 101 years old. Born in Osaka on March 12, 1925, he has lived long enough to watch the quantum principles he uncovered in that Tokyo lab become foundational to the technology billions of people carry in their pockets every single day. The man who once watched electrons walk through walls is still here. And the world he helped build is still catching up to him.

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

"Just as I know that there are two Hagens, Walter and Copen,
I know that marriage is a legal and religious alliance entered
into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut and a
woman who can't sleep with the window open."
Ogden Nash, from his poem "I Do, I Will, I Have"

[Le Contemplateur @LeContempIateur]

Les femmes ont davantage tendance à avoir froid que les hommes, non pas parce qu’elles seraient « trop sensibles », mais parce que la température ambiante de référence a été initialement définie en fonction du niveau de confort des hommes.

Pendant des décennies, les normes de confort thermique utilisées dans de nombreux bureaux ont été établies à partir d’un modèle standard représentant un homme d’environ 40 ans pesant 70 kg.

Le problème, c’est que les femmes ont en moyenne moins de masse musculaire, un métabolisme différent et une production de chaleur corporelle plus faible. Résultat : une température jugée parfaitement confortable par beaucoup d’hommes peut être perçue comme trop froide par de nombreuses femmes.

Certaines études suggèrent même que la température idéale pour les femmes pourrait être plusieurs degrés plus élevée que celle retenue dans de nombreux espaces de travail.

C’est un détail auquel la plupart des gens ne pensent jamais, mais il montre à quel point certains standards que nous considérons comme universels ont en réalité été conçus à partir d’un profil humain très spécifique.

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

She was rejected 15 times, dismissed as unruly, and largely written out of the conversation. Then the science proved she was right — and changed everything we thought we knew about life itself.

In 1966, a twenty-eight-year-old biologist named Lynn Margulis sat down and wrote a paper that contradicted one of the most fundamental assumptions in all of science.

She was not a tenured professor. She was not working at a prestigious research institution. She was a young mother of two, recently divorced, completing her PhD while raising her sons largely on her own. The scientific establishment had no particular category for her and no particular interest in what she was proposing.

She proposed it anyway.
Her idea was this: that the story of evolution told through competition and conquest was incomplete. That somewhere in the deep history of life on Earth — billions of years ago, long before anything with a spine had appeared — something had happened that was not a battle but a merger. Two separate organisms, each unable to survive alone, had come together and become something neither could have been independently.

The mitochondria in every one of your cells — the structures that convert food into energy, the engine that powers every thought you are having right now — were once free-living bacteria. They did not evolve gradually inside cells. They moved in. They formed a partnership so deep and so permanent that over billions of years they became indistinguishable from the cell itself.

She called the theory endosymbiosis. She called the process symbiogenesis. What she was really saying was that cooperation, not just competition, was one of the engines of evolution — that life's greatest leaps forward had sometimes come not from one organism defeating another, but from two organisms becoming one.

Fifteen scientific journals rejected the paper before it was published in 1967.
Fifteen.

To understand what she was working against, you need to understand the scientific culture of the 1960s. Neo-Darwinism — the synthesis of Darwin's evolution with Mendelian genetics — was the reigning framework, and it was defended with the particular intensity of a field that had recently achieved hard-won consensus. The idea that a bacterium had simply moved inside another cell and stayed there, permanently, was considered not just wrong but somewhat absurd. Evolution happened through random mutation and natural selection, slowly, over generations. Not through dramatic mergers. Not through cooperation.

The reviewers who rejected her paper used words like speculative and insufficiently rigorous. One described the idea as the sort of thing that was interesting to think about but impossible to prove.

She was also described, more than once, as unruly.
It was the specific word that followed women who challenged scientific consensus — not wrong, not misguided, but unruly, as though the problem were her manner rather than her method.

She had been exceptional from the beginning in ways that made people uncomfortable. Born Lynn Petra Alexander in Chicago on March 5, 1938, she entered the University of Chicago at sixteen — intellectually restless, reading at a level that outpaced her coursework, drawn to the questions at the edges of what science had settled. At nineteen she married a young astronomer named Carl Sagan, who would go on to become one of the most famous scientists of the twentieth century. She would later say, without particular bitterness, that during their marriage she was primarily considered someone's wife rather than someone in her own right.

They divorced in 1964. She raised their sons — including Dorion Sagan, who would become her longtime collaborator — while completing her doctorate in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. She did the work that would change biology while managing the entire domestic architecture of a life that offered her very little structural support.

When molecular biology caught up with her theory in the 1970s — when DNA sequencing technology became sophisticated enough to actually test what she had proposed — the results were unambiguous. Mitochondria contained their own DNA. That DNA was bacterial. The evidence was not suggestive. It was definitive.

The fifteen journals that had rejected her paper were now looking at proof.

The scientific establishment did what establishments eventually do when reality forces their hand — it incorporated her theory, celebrated it as a cornerstone of modern evolutionary biology, and credited her in terms that ranged from gracious to slightly grudging depending on who was doing the crediting. E.O. Wilson, the legendary sociobiologist, called her the most successful synthetic thinker in modern biology. Richard Dawkins — who disagreed with her on multiple other scientific questions — praised her sheer courage in holding to the endosymbiotic theory through years of institutional resistance until the evidence made denial impossible.

Science magazine, the most prestigious journal in American science, called her science's unruly earth mother.
They still couldn't let go of the word.

She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983. She received the National Medal of Science in 1999 from President Clinton — the highest scientific honor the United States government bestows. She collaborated with British scientist James Lovelock on the Gaia hypothesis — the provocative and still-debated theory that Earth itself, its atmosphere and oceans and living systems, functions as a single self-regulating organism maintaining the conditions necessary for life. It was another idea that the mainstream received with raised eyebrows, and another idea that has proven more durable than its critics expected.

She wrote books with her son Dorion that translated complex scientific concepts for general readers — believing that science belonged to everyone and that the story of life was too extraordinary to be locked inside academic journals. She co-founded a publishing imprint. She taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for decades and trained a generation of scientists who carried her framework into fields she never lived to see it reach.

She died on November 22, 2011, from a hemorrhagic stroke. She was seventy-three years old.

What she left behind was a redrawn map of life itself.
Every complex cell on Earth — every cell in your body, every cell in every plant, every cell in every animal that has ever lived — is a collaboration. It contains within it the descendants of bacteria that chose, billions of years ago, to stop competing and start cooperating. The boundary between self and other is not where we thought it was. It never was.

Lynn Margulis saw that when almost no one else did.
Fifteen journals said no.

The universe had been saying yes for two billion years.

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

@simongerman600 You can also look at this by looking at the current profiles of Australia and Japan, which has had very limited inward migration.

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

Hey @In_Otter_News2, one for you:
https://t.co/vJHMWAGuFk

[Mike Carlton @MikeCarlton01]

She just gets better

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

I think there is something rather old-school and wonderful about a national/international newspaper covering the outcome of a national spelling bee
https://t.co/RIEHMS2Qu9

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

A woman is killed by an intimate partner or former partner every 9 days (data from https://t.co/A4CoBEcj39). it is well past high time for a Royal Commision on Femicide
https://t.co/uPb9b56RUD

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

#Walking is better than sitting for idea generation. This post nicely describes some very interesting work, though does over-egg it a bit.

[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.

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

@mathemetica Alpha-males 😉

[Palestinian Girl @Palestinia12961]

I found this picture that my father took in better times, when he was allowed to work in Israel.
The message was valid then, and even more so today.
“Only peace defeats terror”

[Michael J Wise @some_wise]

@simonmaechling Water will not be destroyed (no matter can be), but it can be transformed, in this case potentially to non-potable water when it falls in the oceans. Using cleaned waste water would be a start.