I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM
Head of a Walrus
A pen and watercolour study of a walrus head, drawn in 1521 by Albrecht Dürer from a brief encounter with a dead specimen — and it looks almost nothing like the animal.
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10 MAY 2026
Day 130
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
BERT and the Masked Language Modeling Revolution
Before BERT, language models largely read in one direction. A cloze-style masking objective let them use left and right context at once, and pretraining for understanding changed course.
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Written before source checking was enforced · facts in this lesson are unverified
III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY
Venus of Urbino
Titian’s reclining woman meets the viewer without apology. Sold in 1538, she has been read as goddess, courtesan and bridal image — and the disagreement has never quite settled.
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