To live curiously, document richly, create consciously, and co-design my own continuous evolution. Have recently started a daily writing practice - powerful!
Not so long ago: “Shall we eat sitting around the fire?”
Today: “Shall we eat in front of the tellie?”
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AI Genie: the best conversationalist shall unlock all of my secrets.
Launching our new paper on arXiv: we trained the largest multilingual food model ever built.
4.1M recipes. 7 languages. 1,790 ingredients. 300 dimensions.
All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes.
Amazing raw honesty 🙏
"This cup of plutonium has a deleterious effect and that is not being able to show up or turn off at home."
― @garrytan on the 🔥 and challenge of balancing mission-driven work and family presence.
Beautiful conversation with @RickRubin
https://t.co/x4pZzW8zV0
this has been a fun one. every piece of data you save to readwise/reader (highlights, full articles, PDFs, tweets, etc) is now embedded and indexed for full-text + vector hybrid search.. instantly ready
probably the easiest way to start saving external context for any AI
A psychologist at the University of North Carolina spent 20 years proving that a single 20-second hug rewires the human cardiovascular system, and the experiment she ran is so simple you can replicate it tonight at home.
Her name is Karen Grewen.
She works inside the UNC School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry. The paper that made her famous was published in 2003, and almost nobody outside her field has read it.
Here is what she actually did.
She recruited 183 healthy adults living with a long-term partner. She split them into two groups. The warm contact group sat together for 10 minutes holding hands while watching a romantic video. Then they stood up and hugged each other for exactly 20 seconds.
The control group sat alone in a separate room for the same amount of time doing nothing.
Then she made every single one of them give a public speech in front of a panel.
Public speaking is one of the cleanest stressors in psychology. Heart rate spikes. Blood pressure climbs. Cortisol floods the system within minutes. It is the laboratory version of every stressful moment you have ever had at work.
The people who had been hugged for 20 seconds before walking into that room had measurably lower blood pressure responses to the stress. Lower systolic. Lower diastolic. Lower heart rate increases. Everything was the same.. the speech, the panel, and fear. But this time completely different physiological response.
The hug had not made the stress disappear. It had changed how the body was allowed to respond to it.
Two years later Grewen ran the follow-up study that explained why. She drew blood from 38 couples before and after the same warm contact protocol and measured what was actually changing inside them. The answer was a hormone called oxytocin.
Oxytocin is the chemical your body releases during childbirth, breastfeeding, and orgasm. It is the same molecule that makes a mother feel calm holding her newborn.
Grewen's data showed that 20 seconds of physical contact with a trusted partner triggered a measurable spike in plasma oxytocin in both men and women, and the size of that spike directly predicted how much their blood pressure dropped.
The mechanism turned out to be older than recorded history. Oxytocin binds to receptors in your heart, your blood vessels, and the part of your brainstem that controls how aggressively your nervous system reacts to threat.
When the hormone shows up, the entire fight-or-flight machine downshifts. Your blood vessels widen. Your heart slows. Your cortisol production gets suppressed.
This is not a feeling. This is a chemical instruction your body sends to itself that you can measure with a blood pressure cuff.
The detail Grewen kept emphasizing in her interviews was the duration. Three seconds is the average length of a hug between two humans. It is too short.
The hormonal cascade does not have time to start. 20 seconds is the threshold where the oxytocin actually crosses into the bloodstream in a quantity large enough to do something measurable.
A follow-up study tracked 59 premenopausal women over time and found that the ones who hugged their partners most frequently had lower resting blood pressure and higher baseline oxytocin levels than the ones who did not. The effect compounded. Daily hugs produced a permanent shift in the cardiovascular baseline.
A separate review of long-term partner contact research found that married adults with frequent affectionate touch had significantly lower rates of heart disease and all-cause mortality than equally healthy adults without it.
The American Heart Association now cites this body of research when explaining why social isolation is treated as a cardiovascular risk factor on the same level as smoking.
The most haunting line in Grewen's research is one she said in an interview after publishing the second paper. She pointed out that the average American touches another human being less than they did 50 years ago. Phones replaced eye contact. Texts replaced visits. Hugs at the door got shorter.
The thing that used to regulate our cardiovascular system multiple times a day quietly disappeared from most adult lives.
Your body still expects it. The hormone receptors are still there waiting. The system was designed to be reset by physical contact with people who feel safe, and the reset takes 20 seconds.
You can run the experiment yourself tonight. Hug someone you love for 20 full seconds. Count it out. The first 10 will feel awkward. Around 15 something shifts. By 20 the shoulders drop, the breathing slows, the chest opens.
That is not in your head. That is your bloodstream changing.
Two layers of printed lines. One on the page, one on a clear film. Slide the film. That's it. That's the whole technology. The moiré effect has been known since the 19th century. Kurashima bound it between two covers. https://t.co/2zELa6h1WB
Can you spot the people like yourself, wandering streets and isles, talking to their @openclaw agents,
the way u’d spot other fiends hunting @Pokemon when @PokemonGoApp first came out?
I seee u 🦞
@awxjack Commenting, liking, sharing this because I love this idea. Local Australian-built startup becoming successful and wanting to share the love and drive innovation and creativity.
@garrytan This is exactly right.
Every time I read or listen to something using @readwise or @snipd_app I now tag my OpenClaw agent (Clyde 🎸) To help me connect those ideas with all of my other relevant ideas, particularly the more esoteric ones.
@chalaska Got a super well-refined OpenClaw multi-agent system operating now. Retrieving and collating and connecting. So many of my years of archived notes and ideas have blown my mind.
@chalaska Love a thread connecting more Aussies doing thinking and building.
Curiosity-led and building knowledge work systems, personal wikis, brand infrastructures, and so much more