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The Daily Triptych042 / 365

11 FEB 2026

Day 42

Nothing can be created out of nothing.

Lucretius · On the Nature of Things
A wooden serpent covered in turquoise mosaic, curved into a shallow S-shape with a head at each end. The mouths gape, showing white shell teeth, and a single red forked tongue emerges from the centre.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Double-Headed Serpent

Mexica (Aztec) · Early Modern · Spanish cedar, turquoise, shell

Two heads meet at a single forked tongue, the whole surface covered in cut turquoise. It reached Europe within decades of contact, and no surviving text says what it was for.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Logits and the Softmax

Inference · Attention Is All You Need, 2017 · Vocabulary-sized vector of real numbers

The model produces a raw score for every entry in its vocabulary — fifty thousand numbers, many of them negative. Softmax converts that list into a probability distribution you can sample from.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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

A high, curving wall of grey granite blocks, laid in horizontal courses without mortar, with a decorative zigzag pattern near the top.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Great Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe

Shona ancestors, Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe · 13th–14th centuries · Dry-stone granite

The granite walls at Great Zimbabwe were laid without mortar, course by course, to a height of eleven metres. European investigators spent decades insisting Africans could not have done it.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

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