Gail Hendry @AbsoluteGinius

@richard_1874 What a lovely photo Richie ☺️

@JimSpenceDundee So sorry for your loss.

Loyalty is a virtue but misplaced loyalty -to an individual over principles and honesty - becomes a vice. SNP politicians have become enmeshed in a growing web of deceit. Cost of failure to extricate themselves will only mount as more emerges, as it certainly will.

I'm older than John Swinney and Nicola Sturgeon. I was an independence supporter when they were still at school. Between them they've totally destroyed the possibility of independence for a generation. Maybe even forever. They did that in 12 years. Liars, cheats, bullies. But

@JamTarts 🪄 🎩 ❤️

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@AustinRSheridan @KennyMacAskill You used to worship Alex Salmond Austin. You wouldn’t shut up about him. Are you a poor judge of character? I’m a good judge of character. I’ve always thought that you’re a plonker.

Murrell was central to the Alex Salmond conspiracy. He has not pled or been charged with any crime relating to that. But this affects his credibility and the others involved many of whom remain in senior positions in the SNP and SG now need held to account.

@m1lllavvies @Roeburnscar @AngusBMacNeil @AvalonBunny1 It was Swinney who appointed him.

Moonlight and Roses at Windermere #JeffSudders

'Evening Muses' by Natalia Drepina, contemporary photographer #WomensArt

@Fergie_CJ I follow a lot of art accounts and it really lifts my mood if I check in to Twitter.

Georgia O'Keeffe Lake George Reflection, 1921-22

There’s a generation a lot of people forget exists. We were born at the tail end of the Boomers, but we are not culturally the same as people born in the 40s and early 50s. We are Generation Jones. And honestly, it explains a lot. We grew up in a world that still felt fundamentally analog, but we were young enough to be dragged headfirst into the digital revolution. We are the bridge generation between rotary phones and smartphones, between slide rules and AI, between Walter Cronkite and algorithm driven media. We remember when there were only a few television channels and the entire country watched the same thing at the same time. We also adapted to the internet, email, forums, social media, streaming and now artificial intelligence. We lived before and after the technological singularity hit everyday life. That is not a small thing. People born in the 40s came of age in a post World War II America that was still industrial, deeply hierarchical and institutionally stable. Their formative years were shaped by the Cold War, Vietnam, the civil rights era and a society where information moved slowly. Generation Jones came later. We inherited the aftermath of all of that. We were the kids who watched Watergate destroy blind trust in government. We watched manufacturing begin to collapse. We saw divorce rates explode. We were the first truly latchkey generation in massive numbers. We learned independence early because many of us had to. We grew up with one foot in old America and one foot in whatever this new thing was becoming. We played outside until the streetlights came on but we also learned DOS commands. We learned cursive and keyboarding. We had card catalogs and Google searches. We went from vinyl records to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s to streaming in one lifetime. We remember maps. We remember memorizing phone numbers. We remember life before GPS and before every human interaction became filtered through a screen. And because of that, I think Generation Jones developed a very unique perspective. We are adaptable because we had no choice but to adapt. We learned technology as adults instead of being born into it. We remember a slower world but were forced to survive in a rapidly accelerating one. That creates a very different mindset than either older Boomers or younger Gen X and Millennials. A lot of us also reject the caricature people now associate with “Boomers.” We were not buying houses for the cost of a sandwich in 1965. The interest rate on my first house was over 14% and that was after buying down a point. Many of us got hit by recessions, outsourcing, pension collapses and economic instability just like younger generations did. We watched promises evaporate in real time. We understand older generations because we were raised by them. We understand younger generations because we had to evolve alongside them. That’s why the Jones generation often feels culturally homeless. We are rarely discussed, rarely defined and usually lumped into categories that don’t actually fit us. But we exist. We are the human transition point between the industrial age and the digital age. And frankly, there will probably never be another generation quite like us again.

Craig Gordon is remarkable. In Scotland squad at 43. As a goalkeeper he obviously enjoys longevity but still to be active, and heading to a World Cup a third of the way through his fifth decade, is impressive. Gordon made his Scotland debut aged 21 against Trinidad & Tobago in a team that included - *deep breath* *checks notes of outfield players* - Steven Pressley, who has now been in management for 15 years; Gary Caldwell now in management for 10 years; Richard Hughes who stopped playing 12 years ago and is now sporting director at Liverpool; Malky Mackay who retired as a player 18 years ago and is now sporting director at Hibs. Again, Gordon’s position affords longevity, but his hunger and professionalism are admirable. If he plays, Gordon will become the second oldest World Cup participant after Egyptian goalkeeper Essam El Hadary (45 years and 161 days at Russia 2018) whose gloves have been exhibited in the FIFA World Cup Museum.

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.

@thewinterhippo @Jam_Tarts Aye… let’s not bother 😁

@thewinterhippo @Jam_Tarts I was just thinking that. I’d have to leave my seat at 75 minutes, and take a step stool 🤣

Fantastic night at @scottishfwa awards. Was a real honour and privilege to be at the top table. Congratulations to the winners (especially Claudio Braga who spoke magnificently) all very well deserved in what was a thrilling season in Scottish Football. ⚽️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

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Barney Stewart has been named the DoubleTree by Hilton SFWA Young Player of the Year.

What's the worst kept secret @TheBSGE ASM26? 'Paracetamol is a joke' - a presentation by the Campaign Against Painful Hysteroscopy in the Open Mic session 13:30 today Friday 1st May. By next year we'll be expecting the offer of sedation for ALL hysteroscopy patients.