Sublime

high-entropy macrostates have more equivalent microstates,

improbability of the spontaneous biogenesis of RNA, and on its chemical fragility.

A metaphor is not merely a flawed and fuzzy model, nor is it a final answer. A useful metaphor is an invitation to hard work that can be indispensable to innovation.

Nassim Taleb in a book curiously titled Antifragile. Here is the core of the idea. We can think about three categories of objects: Ones that are harmed by volatility and unpredictability, ones that are neutral to volatility and unpredictability, and finally, ones that benefit from it.

The behavior of each bee in a colony is governed by a simple set of rules that, through interactions with the environment and the other bees, leads to an end that was no part of any individual bee’s intention, allowing the colony as a whole to thrive—as if by an invisible wing. Put another way, bees are relatively dumb. Beehives are remarkably

“Benford’s Law doesn’t just apply to galactic distances,” she says, turning left, and then right. “It applies to everything measurable, assuming there is variation. Let me frame this in twenty-first century numbers for you. You could take the population of towns and cities worldwide, remove everything but the first digit, and the curve would fit

Markets are driven by the actions of countless individuals, each reacting to his or her whims, the weather, and the news of the day. Remarkably, just as with army ants, out of all our individual actions emerges a higher order, a set of prices that allows us to buy and sell whatever we may desire.