18 JAN 2026

Day 18

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein · Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The dark brown, compressed remains of a human torso, head and limbs, preserved in peat with skin, hair and facial features still visible, displayed in a museum case.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Lindow Man

Iron Age Britain · c. 2 BC–119 AD · 1984, Lindow Moss, Cheshire

He was struck on the head, strangled with a cord, and his throat was cut — then placed face-down in a peat bog, where the chemistry preserved him for two thousand years.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Byte Pair Encoding

Language and tokens · Sennrich et al., 2016 · Iterative pair merging

Start with every byte as a separate token. Count pairs. Merge the most frequent. Repeat until you have a vocabulary of the size you chose. The algorithm is simpler than you expect.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

A tall silk landscape: a dark, towering cliff fills most of the height, with mist below it and a path among rocks and trees at the base, where a tiny mule train moves at the lower right.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Fan Kuan's Travelers Among Mountains and Streams

Fan Kuan · c. 1000 · Ink and light colour on silk

A cliff fills two thirds of the silk. At its base a mule train is so small it can vanish into the rocks — and that disproportion is the point of the painting.

Enter lesson 6 MIN