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The Daily Triptych180 / 365

29 JUN 2026

Day 180

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

John Culkin · A Schoolman's Guide to Marshall McLuhan
A religious icon described as showing the Virgin Hodegetria and the child Jesus, with eleven saints and martyrs associated with the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Icon of the Triumph of Orthodoxy

1375 · British Museum · Painting; icon

A small body of verified facts fixes this work in 1375 and in the British Museum; its maker, discovery and fuller history remain unrecorded here.

Enter lesson 4 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Mechanistic Interpretability of Grokking

interpretability · Power et al. 2022; Nanda et al. 2023 · modular addition

Networks trained on modular arithmetic can memorise every training pair, then—long after train loss has collapsed—suddenly generalise. Mechanistic work shows this is not magic but a shift between algorithms in weight space.

Enter lesson 7 MIN
A large circular marble relief of a bearded male face with hollow eyes, open nostrils and a wide open mouth, set against a wall.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Bocca della Verità

Marble · Santa Maria in Cosmedin · 1.75 m (5 ft 9 in)

A marble disc one and three-quarter metres across, carved as an open-mouthed face and set against a church wall in Rome, where visitors still put their hands in its mouth.

Enter lesson 6 MIN