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The Daily Triptych088 / 365

29 MAR 2026

Day 88

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

George Box · Robustness in the Strategy of Scientific Model Building
A nude male figure in marble, twisting to throw a discus, weight on his right leg, left arm extended forward, right arm swung back holding the discus low, torso rotated, head turned to follow the line of the throw.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Townley Discobolus

Ancient Greece (original), Roman (copy) · c. 450 BC (original) · Marble (copy); bronze (original, lost)

The athlete twists to hurl the discus — except his head is looking the wrong direction, attached that way by an eighteenth-century restorer who guessed incorrectly.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Systems and judgement · 2020, Lewis et al. · Question answering over private or recent documents

The idea is straightforward: fetch the relevant documents, put them in the prompt, and let the model answer from them. Almost every failure happens in the first step.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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

A large domed mosque with four tall slender minarets, one at each corner of the courtyard, rising above a city of low buildings.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Sinan's Selimiye Mosque

Mimar Sinan · 1575 · Edirne, Turkey

Sinan spent fifty years as chief architect to three sultans, building hundreds of mosques. At eighty, he said this one in Edirne was the work that mattered.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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