25 JUN 2026

Day 176

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman · Cargo Cult Science

Pale marble sculptures and fragments from a larger group, with damaged or missing sections that reveal their separation from the original architectural setting.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Pediments of the Parthenon

British Museum · 440 BC · Marble

Two groups of marble figures once faced out from the Parthenon, presenting Athena’s birth and her contest with Poseidon in stone.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Neural Radiance Fields for 3D Reconstruction

multimodality · NeRF (arXiv 2003.08934) · Sparse RGB views with poses

A scene can be stored not as polygons or voxels but as a small neural network that answers one question: what colour and density sit at this point, seen from this angle.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

A marble Virgin seated with a standing child between her knees. She looks down and away; he faces forward, lightly held by her hand, as if about to step out from the folds of her heavy robe.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Madonna of Bruges

Michelangelo · c. 1501–1505 · Marble

Michelangelo’s marble Virgin does not smile down at her child. The boy stands almost free of her hand, ready to step away, while she looks past him into something unseen.

Enter lesson 6 MIN