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The Daily Triptych130 / 365

10 MAY 2026

Day 130

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

Alan Turing · Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Pen and watercolour study of an animal head with tusks, the muzzle short and rounded, the forms somewhat dog-like, with a German inscription and a later monogram on the sheet.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Head of a Walrus

Albrecht Dürer · 1521 · British Museum

A pen and watercolour study of a walrus head, drawn in 1521 by Albrecht Dürer from a brief encounter with a dead specimen — and it looks almost nothing like the animal.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

BERT and the Masked Language Modeling Revolution

history · arXiv 1810.04805 · 2018

Before BERT, language models largely read in one direction. A cloze-style masking objective let them use left and right context at once, and pretraining for understanding changed course.

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A nude woman reclines on a bed in a palace interior, her body turned toward us and her eyes meeting the viewer. One hand rests between her thighs; behind her the room deepens into further chambers.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Venus of Urbino

Titian · 1538 · Oil on canvas

Titian’s reclining woman meets the viewer without apology. Sold in 1538, she has been read as goddess, courtesan and bridal image — and the disagreement has never quite settled.

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