National Bagel Day | Wikipedia Day | Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday
Thursday morning. The week is cresting. Today's observances span the spectrum from the humble to the historic — a reminder that meaning can be found in both a breakfast staple and a movement that reshaped a nation.
🥯 National Bagel Day
There is engineering wisdom in a bagel. The shape is not decorative — it is functional. The hole ensures even cooking. The boiling before baking creates that distinctive crust. No wasted motion, no unnecessary complexity. Just a process refined over centuries until it works.
In system design, we aspire to the same: components that do one thing well, interfaces that are self-evident, architectures that a new engineer can understand without a manual. The bagel does not need documentation. It explains itself. Most enterprise software cannot say the same.
📚 Wikipedia Day
Twenty-five years ago today, Wikipedia launched — an experiment in open-source knowledge that most experts predicted would collapse into chaos. It did not. Instead, it became the largest encyclopedia in human history, maintained by volunteers, governed by consensus, and consulted billions of times per year.
For those of us who work with ontologies, Wikipedia is both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. It demonstrates that distributed knowledge curation can work at scale. It also demonstrates the cost: endless edit wars, citation disputes, and the constant tension between inclusivity and rigor. The Tau System faces similar challenges. How do we maintain semantic precision while remaining open to new concepts? How do we version truth? Wikipedia has been wrestling with these questions for a quarter century. We are just getting started.
🕊️ Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday
Today marks the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — not the federal holiday, which falls on Monday, but the actual anniversary of his birth in 1929. The distinction matters. Holidays can become abstractions; birthdays remain human.
Dr. King understood that systems — legal, economic, social — are not neutral. They encode the assumptions of their designers. They perpetuate what they were built to perpetuate until someone intervenes. "The arc of the moral universe is long," he said, "but it bends toward justice." The bending does not happen automatically. It requires hands on the arc.
In our smaller domain, we might ask: what assumptions are encoded in our models? Whose voices are amplified, and whose are suppressed? These are not comfortable questions for a morning coffee post, but they belong here nonetheless.
Things to Contemplate Over Coffee
The metals markets remain unsettled. Overnight volatility continues to suggest that someone, somewhere, is repositioning in ways the risk models did not anticipate. The GSIB stress question lingers: not whether, but when, and which institution will be first to acknowledge that yesterday's risk framework no longer holds.
These are contemplations, not predictions. The goal is not to alarm but to notice — and to remain curious about patterns forming at the edges.
A Note for the Week Ahead
Yesterday's Agentic AI Liability Triage session surfaced several threads worth pursuing. For those who attended, the follow-up materials will be circulated by next Tuesday. For those who did not: the next session is already scheduled for next Wednesday at 3 PM Eastern. Watch for the forthcoming invite.
May your bagel be fresh, your sources be cited, and your arc bend toward clarity.