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The Daily Triptych209 / 365

28 JUL 2026

Day 209

Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

Blaise Pascal · Pensées
No single fixed image is specified; the subject is the Gilgamesh flood myth, a deluge narrative within the Epic of Gilgamesh, held in the British Museum collection.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Gilgamesh flood myth

Deluge myth · British Museum · Mesopotamian

A flood story told within a longer epic, shared with older Mesopotamian traditions, and still read as one strand in a family of ancient deluge myths.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Graph Transformers with Structural Encodings

architectures · graph transformers · shortest-path encodings

Message-passing networks squeeze distant neighbourhoods through narrow bottlenecks. Structural encodings such as shortest-path distances let transformers attend across a molecule without that compression.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

Written before source checking was enforced · facts in this lesson are unverified

Tall oil painting of figures seated at a café table, drinks before them, in a narrow slice of interior space, held in the Musée d'Orsay.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

L'Absinthe

Edgar Degas · 1875–1876 · Oil on canvas

Painted in the mid-1870s as a scene in a French café, this canvas only acquired the name L'Absinthe in London in 1893, and the glass has dominated the reading ever since.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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