23 JUN 2026

Day 174

Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.

Thomas Kuhn · The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

A tall rectangular sheet of paper bearing a dense black-chalk drawing of a mythological catastrophe, with figures and horses arranged in a vertical fall across the page.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Fall of Phaeton

Italian Renaissance · 1533 · Black chalk on paper

In 1533 Michelangelo set down the Fall of Phaeton in black chalk on paper. The sheet, now in the British Museum, is a little over thirty centimetres high.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Neural Tangent Kernel Theory for Wide Networks

theory · infinite width · gradient descent

In the infinite-width limit, a neural network trained by gradient descent behaves like a kernel method whose entire training trajectory can be written in closed form.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

A young woman in a heavy, pale dress floats on her back in a dark stream, hands open, surrounded by dense green banks and scattered flowers.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Ophelia

John Everett Millais · 1851 · Oil on canvas

A young woman floats in a stream, palms open, surrounded by flowers painted stem by stem. Millais turned a few lines of Hamlet into a dense record of water, cloth and vegetation.

Enter lesson 6 MIN