Natalie Feng
Eloquent Musings
Category: Uncategorized
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A black basalt stele, 2.25 meters tall and more than 3,700 years old, now stands in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Carved across its surface are thousands of lines of cuneiform script recording laws and regulations concerning social order. At the top of the stele are two carved figures. Based on where it was excavated—Mesopotamia…
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Once I did not know how much affectation is hidden within sincerity, how much baseness lies within nobility—or that even within evil one might still find virtue. Baseness and greatness, malice and kindness, hatred and love can coexist within the same heart without canceling each other out. Let us speak of Sisyphus. No one has…
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Clarice recounts her childhood trauma: after her father died, she was sent to live with relatives. One night, she heard the cries of lambs waiting to be slaughtered. Wanting to save those pitiful creatures, she picked up a little lamb and ran as hard as she could, trying to escape the farm. In the end,…
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Recently, in a certain book, I once again read that famous story: the Spartan army was long known for its iron will. On one occasion, a young soldier tried to secretly hide a fox in his arms while standing in formation; by the time he collapsed, his heart had already been torn out by the…
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Howard Gardner, in Frames of Mind, proposed several branches of human intelligence in his theory of multiple intelligences. One of these is intrapersonal intelligence. This form of intelligence enables a person to perceive the laws of the external world, to notice and reflect upon the phenomena of their own body and mind, and to analyze…
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For decades, businesses have relied on a simple assumption:If you want people to perform better, reward them. Bonuses, commissions, rankings, and performance-based pay are treated as common sense. The logic seems obvious—tie rewards to outcomes, and effort will increase. But behavioral science tells a very different story. When tasks require creativity, judgment, or problem-solving, incentives…
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At first glance, happiness appears to be a scientific problem—something psychology or neuroscience might eventually explain with enough data. Yet beneath the measurements and models lies a quieter question, one that philosophy has always asked: what kind of experience can last? It is not accidental that the world’s most enduring beverages—coffee, tea, and cocoa—are bitter.…
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Spirograph drawings may look beautifully unpredictable, but there’s a clear mathematical structure underneath every curve. Once you understand a few simple ideas—gear ratios, prime factors, and pen offsets—you can predict what your design will look like before you even start. This transforms Spirographing from a nostalgic activity into a precise and creative design process. 1.…
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Introduction The rise of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini has transformed the AI landscape. But behind these innovations lies a single fundamental breakthrough: Transformers. Originally introduced in the groundbreaking 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need, Transformers have since revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, and even computer vision. But…
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“Idealism,” in its original sense, should actually be understood as “formalism.” (Incidentally, the term materialism—which is often used as the opposite of idealism—should more accurately be translated as hylomorphism or material formalism). In ancient Greek philosophy, form (or idea) signified the true essence of a thing—something that exists eternally, without birth or decay. Greek philosophers…
Natalie Feng 