✺ ✧ ✦ july ✦ ✧ ✺ ❖
☀ 2025 ☀

• The Barnum effect.
• Stuart Kauffman’s Investigations, on autonomous agents. I wanted to get a different outlook on the idea of agents. I have to say, I wasn’t surprised by the book. I thought it was both too general and, simultaneously, excessively detailed on certain parts. It would be cool to know what Kauffman thinks of the current state of AI though.
• This essay by Ethan Smith on the need for prediction.
• Late to the party, but I finally read Anthropic’s multiagent research system blogpost.
• The Red Queen Hypothesis via Chaitin’s Metabiology.
• About the world’s largest hydropower facility, the Medog Hydropower Station, whose construction just started in July.
• Finally, via croissanthology, I read the entry on Cockaigne, the Goliardic utopia. My brother (who currently lives in Toulouse) brought to my attention that, actually, les boules de cocagne are the balls of crushed leaves of Isatis Tinctoria, the plant used to produce the traditional pastel blue in the Albi-Carcassonne-Toulouse region.

This is not mentioned in the English entry, but there’s arguably a very clear relation between the abundance brought to the region by the commerce of pastel and Cockaigne as a land-of-plenty.

Another curious thing I learnt is that one of the traditions related to Cockaigne is the greasy pole game (?), where participants try to climb a pole that has been previously greased-up. You can imagine how hard that is. Anyway, Francisco Goya, illustrated it beautifully in La cucaña:

When I saw the painting and read about the tradition I immediately recognized it as something I had seen before. Indeed, during ~2023 I lived in a neighborhood where people too climbed up greasy poles every once in a while! Apparently this is called the “palo ensebado”. Here’s a photo I took of the event back then:

Like Goya himself!

🍀