I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM
Nimrud lens
A small disc of rock crystal, dug from a palace at Nimrud in 1850, may have magnified, kindled fire, or simply decorated a surface. Nobody can yet say which.
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8 JUN 2026
Day 159
It is not what you look at that matters, it is what you see.
II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The Transformer Architecture Paper
In June 2017 a short paper argued that attention alone could replace the recurrent networks that had dominated sequence transduction. The claim was bold; the results on translation were hard to ignore.
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Written before source checking was enforced · facts in this lesson are unverified
III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
Oil, gold and silver fix one face inside a field of pattern so dense that dress and ground nearly exchange places, and ordinary portrait space begins to fail.
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