Skip to content
The Daily Triptych016 / 365

16 JAN 2026

Day 16

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Friedrich Nietzsche · Twilight of the Idols
A teardrop-shaped stone tool, grey-brown in colour, with a pointed end and a broader base, showing multiple overlapping flake scars across both faces.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Olduvai Handaxe

Early humans · Lower Palaeolithic · Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania

A stone worked symmetrically on both faces, held and struck by hands anatomically like yours, but separated from you by more than a million years of time.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Turning Text Into Numbers

Language and tokens · 16 of 100 · Mikolov et al., 2013

A neural network processes numbers, not letters. The first problem is therefore not understanding language but representing it in a form the network can accept at all.

Enter lesson 6 MIN
A large carved stone head, several metres tall, with broad facial features, a flat nose, full lips, and a close-fitting helmet-like headdress, set outdoors among trees.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Olmec Colossal Heads

Olmec · 900 BCE onwards · Basalt

The Olmec moved boulders weighing up to forty-five tonnes across a hundred kilometres of forest and swamp, then carved them into heads with individual faces. At least two were thrones first.

Enter lesson 7 MIN