3 MAY 2026

Day 123

He who by reviewing the old can gain knowledge of the new is fit to be a teacher.

Confucius · The Analects

A clear, life-sized human skull carved in translucent crystal, shown facing forward with hollow eye sockets, nasal opening, and a full row of teeth.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

crystal skull

British Museum · 1881 · Quartz; lead glass

A life-sized crystal skull entered the British Museum as a Mexican antiquity. Study later placed its making in the nineteenth century, almost certainly in Europe.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Audio-Visual Contrastive Learning

multimodality · Joint audio-visual representations · Self-supervised representation learning

Picture and soundtrack from the same video can be pulled together in a shared space, so sight and sound become comparable without labelled pairs.

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A wide landscape canvas, much broader than it is tall. A field of wheat fills the lower half; a sky occupies the upper. Dark birds are scattered across the scene in flight.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Wheatfield with Crows

Vincent van Gogh · July 1890 · Oil on canvas

This long July canvas of wheat and crows is widely remembered as Van Gogh's last work. The documentary record places it earlier, and asks for a different kind of attention.

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