Ed @bitofpotential

I ❤️ this project from on @artizen→ artizen.fund/index/p/s33d?s…

Poland has found an unlikely celebrity in Edward Warchocki, a Chinese robot equipped with locally developed software that has debated politicians and chased wild boars off the streets of Warsaw. ft.trib.al/iIMGy1q

A Soviet psychologist walked into a café in 1927 and watched a waiter do something impossible. He remembered every open order at every table. Perfectly. Without notes. Without effort. Then a table paid their bill. She asked him to repeat the order. He couldn't remember a single item. She spent the next two years figuring out why. What she found is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your attention. Her name was Bluma Zeigarnik, and she was a graduate student at the time, sitting with her professor Kurt Lewin, watching the waiters work the room. What caught her attention was something so ordinary that it had been happening in restaurants for centuries without anyone asking why. The waiters could remember every open order with perfect accuracy. Table four wanted the schnitzel with no sauce. Table seven had changed their wine twice. Table twelve owed for three coffees and a dessert. Every detail, held without effort, without notes, without any visible system at all. But the moment a table paid their bill, the information vanished. Completely. Lewin tested it on the spot. He called a waiter back minutes after a table had settled up and asked him to recite the order. The waiter could not do it. Not partially. Not approximately. The information was simply gone. Zeigarnik went back to her lab and spent the next two years turning that observation into one of the most replicated findings in the history of psychology. Here is what she proved, and why it changes how you think about attention, memory, and almost every piece of media you have ever consumed. She gave participants a series of tasks. Some tasks they were allowed to finish. Others were interrupted before completion. Then she tested recall across both groups. The unfinished tasks were remembered at nearly twice the rate of the completed ones. Not slightly better. Nearly twice. The brain was holding the incomplete work in a state of active tension, returning to it, keeping it warm, refusing to file it away. The finished tasks were closed, archived, released. The unfinished ones were still running. She called it the resumption goal. When the brain commits to a task and cannot complete it, it opens a file that stays open until resolution arrives. That open file consumes a portion of your cognitive bandwidth whether you are thinking about it consciously or not. It surfaces in idle moments. It pulls at the edge of your attention during other work. It is the thing you find yourself thinking about in the shower when you were not trying to think about anything at all. This is not a flaw in human cognition. It is a feature. The brain evolved to finish things. An open loop is a signal that something important is unresolved. Keeping that signal active increases the probability that you will return to it and complete it. In an environment where most tasks had real survival stakes, this was an extraordinarily useful mechanism. In the modern world, it is the most exploited vulnerability in human attention. Netflix did not invent the cliffhanger. But it industrialized it in a way no medium before it ever had. When a show ends on an unresolved question, it does not just create curiosity. It opens a file in your brain that stays active until the next episode closes it. The autoplay countdown that begins at 15 seconds is not a convenience feature. It is a precise calculation about how long the average person can tolerate an open loop before the discomfort of not knowing overrides every other intention they had for the evening. One more episode is not a choice. It is your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do: return to what is unfinished. The writers who built Lost, Breaking Bad, and Succession understood this intuitively without ever reading a psychology paper. Every episode ended on an open question. Every season finale answered three things and opened five more. The entire architecture of prestige television is a Zeigarnik machine running at industrial scale. But television is not where this gets dangerous. Every notification on your phone is an open loop. Every unread email is an open loop. Every task you wrote on a list and have not yet crossed off is an open loop. Each one is consuming a small but real portion of your available attention, pulling fractionally at your focus, degrading your capacity to be fully present in whatever you are actually doing right now. TikTok's algorithm does not just serve you content you like. It serves you content that ends one loop and immediately opens another, keeping the resumption system permanently activated so the cost of stopping always feels higher than the cost of continuing. The research on this accumulation effect is striking. Psychologists studying cognitive load have found that unfinished tasks do not sit passively in memory. They actively interrupt. They surface at the wrong moments. They are the reason you are reading something and suddenly remember an email you forgot to send. The brain is not malfunctioning. It is running its resumption system exactly as designed. It is just running it across forty open loops simultaneously, in an environment that generates new ones faster than any human nervous system was built to process. The most important practical implication Zeigarnik's research produced is one that most people use backwards. David Allen built his entire Getting Things Done system on the insight that the only way to close a cognitive open loop is to either complete the task or make a trusted commitment to complete it later. Writing something down in a system you actually trust has the same effect on the brain as finishing it. The file closes. The bandwidth is released. This is why writing a task down feels like relief even before you have done anything about it. You have not solved the problem. You have simply told your brain that the loop is registered and will be returned to, which is enough for the resumption system to stand down. The inverse is equally true and far more destructive. Every task that lives only in your head, unwritten and unscheduled, is an open loop burning cognitive resources around the clock. The mental cost is not proportional to the size of the task. A tiny nagging obligation consumes the same active tension as a major project. Your brain does not discriminate by importance. It discriminates by completion. Zeigarnik published her findings in 1927. The paper sat in academic literature for decades before anyone outside psychology paid attention to it. Then television got good. Then the smartphone arrived. Then the entire attention economy was engineered, largely by people who understood intuitively what she had proven scientifically: an open loop is the most powerful hook available to anyone who wants to hold human attention. Netflix knew it. Instagram knew it. Every designer who ever made a notification badge red instead of grey knew it. The café in Vienna is long gone. The mechanism she discovered there is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your time. Every "to be continued." Every unread notification. Every thread that ends with "part 2 tomorrow." All of it is the same waiter, the same unpaid bill, the same brain refusing to let go of what it has not yet finished. Zeigarnik noticed it over coffee in 1927. A century later, it is the most valuable insight in the history of media. And nobody taught it to you in school.

Dude stop giving away secrets that people should have to work for

Math Files @Math_files

2 months ago

There is a shape in mathematics that can hold a finite amount of paint, yet would require an infinite amount of paint to coat its surface. It is called Gabriel’s Horn. Imagine rotating the curve y=1/x around the x-axis. The result is a long, tapering surface that stretches

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1/ Bisq has reached a major milestone: With the release of Bisq Connect v0.3.2, the Bisq Easy mobile initiative is now complete. bisq.network/blog/mobile-ap…

Something has been quietly growing for over 10 years 🌱

Trees release invisible chemicals into the air to protect themselves from bugs and disease. Turns out those same chemicals also switch on your body's cancer-fighting cells. They're called natural killer cells. They're a type of white blood cell that patrols your bloodstream looking for cancer cells and virus-infected cells. When they find one, they punch a hole through its outer wall and inject proteins that force the cell to self-destruct from the inside. You're born with them. Unlike most of your immune system, they don't need to be "trained" on a specific threat first. They just attack anything that looks wrong. The 50% number in this tweet comes from Dr. Qing Li at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, who has been studying the effects of forests on the human body since 2004. His original 2007 study took 12 men on a 3-day, 2-night forest trip, walking two hours a day. Blood tests showed 11 of 12 had roughly 50% more cancer-killing cell activity afterward. A follow-up with 13 female nurses found the same thing. But the part the tweet leaves out: the boost didn't vanish when they went home. It lasted over 7 days in both groups, and in men, it was still detectable in blood work 30 days later. Li's conclusion is that one forest trip per month could keep these cells running at a higher level year-round. The obvious next question is whether it's the forest itself or just the vacation. Li tested this directly. A separate group took a city tourist trip with the same amount of walking. No boost to killer cells. No stress hormone drop. Zero effect. Then he ran an even more controlled test: 12 men stayed in a regular Tokyo hotel room for three nights while a humidifier pumped tree oil (from Japanese cypress) into the air overnight. Their killer cells still went up. Their stress hormones still dropped. That isolates the cause to those tree chemicals, called phytoncides. Pine, cedar, and cypress trees release the most. These chemicals were found in forest air but were nearly absent in city air. A 2021 lab study showed that one of these tree chemicals directly switches on killer cells and slows colon tumor growth in mice. The bigger picture connects these cells directly to cancer risk. An 11-year study published in The Lancet (one of the world's top medical journals) tracked 3,625 Japanese people and found that those with weaker natural killer cells developed cancer at significantly higher rates. A separate study screening for bowel cancer found that people with low killer cell levels were 7 times more likely to be diagnosed. Li's own research across all 47 regions of Japan showed that areas with less forest had higher cancer death rates for lung, breast, uterine, prostate, kidney, and colon cancers, even after accounting for differences in smoking rates and wealth. The caveats: Li's original studies used small groups (12 and 13 people), and the regional data show a pattern but don't directly prove that forests prevent cancer. No large-scale clinical trial has confirmed that yet. But the chain is consistent: trees release chemicals, those chemicals wake up the cells in your blood that kill cancer, the effect lasts weeks, not hours, and people with more active killer cells get cancer less often. Japan now has 65 government-certified Forest Therapy sites across the country, each tested and approved based on the physical effects they have on visitors.

All day Astronomy @forallcurious

3 months ago

🚨: Research suggest that just 3 days of camping in the forest can increase the production of cells that kill cancer by more than 50%.

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@oliver_lienhard are you a director a vaultoro ?

Forensic team on the case and the lead witness Master Gandhi is being somewhat cooperative

The holding container contract was broken into in the early hours and a significant number of the assets were gobbled up. @AskBlockchain @WillyOgo any more of these available #sos ?

Security around these 2015 DevCon @blockchain M&M’s was compromised this morning.

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@brockpierce @crystalrose Ah I had a special moment here a few years ago, fancy a chat feel we have a something to share with each other.

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Just posted a photo instagram.com/p/CGdU4sThgNl/…

When the world is fuller than normal with corrupt, dishonest & incompetent politicians, a truth-teller rots in HMP Belmarsh awaiting transport to a US gulag. UK/US/Oz govts must end this madness. What are they hiding? #auspol #FreeAssange #amnestyinternational #Whistleblower

#JulianAssange's extradition is fundamentally about the freedom of the press and the freedom of a journalist to publish information in the public interest. #politas #auspol #NoUSExtradition

If you could teleport (outside time) to any tree in the world, with two beings from history. Where would you go, who would you take, and what would you share? (Tag answers #treeoutoftime ) #edibleeducation #s33dreams #s33dstory #s33dlife #s33d #your #Sovereignty

We updated S33D’s ‘yOur Golden Dream’ on Friday 7th Feb. If you would like to help support the monthly pruning, watering and planting of this living document, (we will also plant 3 trees 🌳 each month) please check… instagram.com/p/B8U-fRbglEm/…

Some seed art from when @bitofpotential was a little 👾 “Scientist: You said it has the ability to manipulate its own environment? - Michael: He's smart. He communicates through Elliott. - Scientist: Elliott thinks… instagram.com/p/B8U9tJFA22L/…

Great Afternoon learning at the @GardenMuseumLDN with the London Freedom Seed Bank and Incredible Edible Lambeth “You can spend your whole life traveling around the world searching for the Garden of Eden, or you can… instagram.com/p/B8U8ySFA1ii/…

Mums Sweet Peas that invade Dads vegetable patch each year in a frenzy of colour 💐 “Sweet peas were the kind of flowers fairies slept in.” Allison Pearson instagram.com/p/B8U55FaACc_/…