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The Daily Triptych161 / 365

10 JUN 2026

Day 161

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce · Ulysses
No image is supplied. The available record identifies an Italian engraving, classified as erotic art, in the British Museum collection.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

I Modi

British Museum · Italy · engraving

An Italian engraving in the British Museum collection carries a title surrounded by accounts of collaboration, loss, and replacement, yet the supplied record leaves much unresolved.

Enter lesson 4 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Self-Supervised Learning of Visual Features via Contrastive Loss

training · contrastive self-supervision · SimCLR / SimCLRv2

Two randomly altered views of one photograph are treated as a pair. A network learns to place them near each other in embedding space, and everything else farther away, without class labels.

Enter lesson 7 MIN
A young man turns from deep shadow toward the viewer, smiling faintly, his right index finger raised above his shoulder while a slender cross rests in his other arm.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Saint John the Baptist

Leonardo da Vinci · 1514 · Oil on panel

A half-length saint emerges from darkness, one finger raised past the frame. Oil on panel, sixty-nine by fifty-seven centimetres, dated to 1514 and kept at the Louvre.

Enter lesson 6 MIN