17 APR 2026

Day 107

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

Immanuel Kant · Idea for a Universal History

A large marble vase standing on three legs with a triangular base, featuring intricate reliefs around its sides depicting a scene of satyrs making wine. The upper part is inspired by the Borghese Vase, while the lower section is influenced by the Torlonia Vase.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Piranesi Vase

Giovanni Battista Piranesi · British Museum · London

This colossal vase is not what it seems — nor where it should be, or even who made it. It hides a mystery that challenges our understanding of its origins.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

BIG-bench Collaborative Benchmark

evaluation · emergent abilities and limits · BIG-bench and BIG-Bench Hard

Hundreds of contributed tasks, one shared scoreboard: BIG-bench was built to map model behaviour across domains where a single leaderboard would never be enough.

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Close view of a naked woman’s abdomen, genitals and open thighs on white bedding; the torso is cut off before the head, the legs before the knees.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

L'Origine du monde

Gustave Courbet · 1866 · Oil on canvas

Courbet’s 1866 oil shows only abdomen, thighs and genitals on a rumpled bed. No face, no setting, no narrative — just the body, cropped tight and named as origin.

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