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The Daily Triptych094 / 365

4 APR 2026

Day 94

It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.

Henri Poincaré · Science and Method
A woodcut print of a rhinoceros shown in profile, its body covered in plates resembling armour with rivet-like marks along the seams, a small twisted horn on its back, scaly legs, and serrated rear quarters.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Dürer's Rhinoceros

Albrecht Dürer · 1515 · Laid paper

Dürer carved a rhinoceros from a letter and a sketch, added plates like armour and a second horn on its back, and Europe copied the error for three centuries.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Diffusion and Image Generation

Systems and judgement · Ho et al., 2020; Rombach et al., 2022 · Learned denoising

Language models predict the next token. Diffusion models do something entirely different: they learn to clean up a noisy image, then generate by reversing that process from pure static.

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

A steep timber bridge in rain, three figures crossing with umbrellas. Fine white lines run straight down the entire print. A grey river below, a flat band of dark shore beyond.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Hiroshige's Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge

Utagawa Hiroshige · 1856 · Woodblock print

Hiroshige cut rain as hundreds of straight lines across the whole block. Van Gogh copied the print in oil and found he could not reproduce them.

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