https://markbartlett.org/papers/Papers by Mark Bartletten-usTue, 03 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://markbartlett.org/papers/the-100-day-foundation/https://markbartlett.org/papers/the-100-day-foundation/Tue, 03 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000T’ai Chi is built at home, not in class. Most students know this and still struggle to practice, because progress is invisible day to day. The old teachers had an answer: every session adds something, whether you can see it or not. This paper gathers that teaching from Laozi, Xunzi, Wang Zongyue and Ninomiya Sontoku, then turns it into a simple 100-day challenge: pick a minimum you can do on your worst day, do it every day, and drop a stone in a jar after each session.https://markbartlett.org/papers/openbox-llm/https://markbartlett.org/papers/openbox-llm/Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000We present a clean-room, reproducible implementation of native sparse attention (NSA) with custom Triton kernels, gated for correctness against a reference at every step and validated from Ampere (sm_86) to Hopper (sm_90). We report a +53% end-to-end training throughput optimization, a −45% model-VRAM reduction, and an honest performance analysis showing the selection branch dominates the training step — a finding independently corroborated by concurrent NSA-kernel work. The paper situates NSA as the first validated component of a broader program: decouple a model’s effective capability from what must reside in GPU VRAM.https://markbartlett.org/papers/the-tai-chi-body/https://markbartlett.org/papers/the-tai-chi-body/Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000The Tai Chi body is not a single feature but an integrated condition that arises slowly through patient practice. It is the body in which song, deep relaxation, has released enough holding for the connective tissue to organize as a coherent envelope: the trained body, or jin body. Once that shell is established, the inner body can move semi-independently of the outer shape. All of it is held together by zhong ding, central equilibrium. Awareness, yi and qi work as coordinated faculties within this organized body, and the whole practice is a relationship with gravity, met as partner rather than enemy.https://markbartlett.org/papers/i-ching-and-tai-chi/https://markbartlett.org/papers/i-ching-and-tai-chi/Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000The I Ching is not a fortune-telling book. Its oldest layer, the Zhouyi, was a Bronze Age decision-support system: a way to diagnose the current configuration of forces and how they tend to evolve. Because it describes how change behaves rather than any particular content, it maps naturally onto T’ai Chi Ch’uan. This handout separates the text’s three layers, then builds up from yin and yang as receiving and manifesting, through the eight trigrams as behavioral modes, to hexagrams as system states, and reads “stand like a great mountain, flow like a great river” as a precise instruction to run several modes at once.