Ponderings
The Three Elements of the Good Life
To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with each other, being true is not a pledge to be a paragon of cohesion, predictable and perfectly self-consistent — the impossibility of that is the price of our complex consciousness — but a promise to own every part of yourself, even those that challenge your preferred self-image and falsify the story you tell yourself about who you are.
There is a peace that comes from this, solid as bedrock and soft as owl down, which renders life truer and therefore more alive. Such authenticity of aliveness, such fidelity to the tessellated wholeness of your personhood, may be the crux of what we call “the good life.”
By Maria Popova
The Marginalian, 05 October 2025
Cybernetics
Weiner, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
One of the cardinal notions of statistical mechanics, which also receives an application in the classical thermodynamics, is that of entropy. It is primarily a property of regions in phase space and expresses the logarithm of their probability measure. For example, let us consider the dynamics of n particles in a bottle, divided into two parts, A and B. If m particles are in A, and n - m in B, we have characterized a region in phase space, and it will have a certain probability measure. The logarithm is the entropy of the distribution: m particles in A, n - m in B. The system will spend most of its time in a state near that of greatest entropy, in the sense that for most of the time, nearly m1 particles will be in A, nearly n - m1 in B, where the probability of the combination m1 in A, n - m1 in B is a maximum. For systems with a large number of particles and states within the limits of practical discrimination, this means that if we take a state of other than maximum entropy and observe what happens to it, the entropy almost always increases.
read Chapter 2, pp. 65-84
Economist
Computer scientists are therefore looking for cleverer, less resource-intensive ways to train future AI models. The solution could lie with ditching the enormous bespoke computing clusters (and their associated upfront costs) altogether and, instead, distributing the task of training between many smaller data centres. This, say some experts, could be the first step towards an even more ambitious goal—training AI models without the need for any dedicated hardware at all.
Something else
Blue Rondo à la Turk
“Blue Rondo à la Turk” is the lead track on Time Out, the 1959 album which, thanks to “Take Five,” continues to be among the best selling jazz records of all time. Written by Brubeck, the song was inspired by music he heard on the street in Istanbul, played in a fascinating rhythm. In the 2009 Legacy Edition Reissue of Time Out, he explained:
There was a Turkish musician. I remember his name. His name was June Eighth - he was born on June Eighth, so that was his name. I asked June Eighth, “What was that rhythm: 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3.” June Eighth said, “That is like the blues to you. We all grew up improvising in that rhythm.” So I said, I'm going to use this rhythm in a tune, and I will call it “Blue Rondo à la Turk". Brubeck later regretted calling the song that. The name is a nerdy play on Mozart's Piano Sonata 11, 3rd Movement, a k a “Rondo alla Turca,” but Brubeck felt it only confused people. Crucially, it was also a bit too long to fit a jukebox title strip, but in 9/8 time, it wouldn't have inspired any dance steps that would fit on an Arthur Murray chart anyway.