15 JAN 2026

Day 15

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Friedrich Nietzsche · Notebooks

A terracotta relief of a nude winged female figure with bird talons, wearing a horned crown, holding rod and ring symbols, flanked by two owls and standing on two lions.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Queen of the Night Relief

Old Babylonian · 19th century BC · Terracotta

Naked, winged, taloned, flanked by owls and standing on lions — this fired-clay panel shows a goddess whose name we still argue over, because her attributes fit three candidates.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Why Hand-Built Knowledge Lost

Foundations · Richard Sutton, 2019 · Kaplan et al., 2020

Expert systems encoded decades of human expertise rule by rule. Then simple learning algorithms given enough compute and data outperformed them, and the pattern repeated across every domain.

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A tall fresco showing a barrel-vaulted chapel receding into the wall. God the Father stands behind the crucified Christ. The Virgin and Saint John flank them. Two kneeling donors are positioned outside columns at the front. Below, a skeleton lies in a painted tomb.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Masaccio's Holy Trinity

Masaccio · 1420 · Fresco

Masaccio built a fictive barrel vault that recedes into the plaster with mathematical exactness. The skeleton lying below it is there to tell you what all that geometry is for.

Enter lesson 6 MIN