6 JUL 2026

Day 187

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

William Bruce Cameron · Informal Sociology

A copper-alloy Roman helmet casing with rounded cap, flaring neck guard and hinged cheek pieces, showing three hollow bosses on the exterior and a worn, mottled green-brown surface.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Witcham Gravel helmet

Roman Britain · First century AD · Copper alloy

Only the copper-alloy shell survives of a first-century cavalry helmet, tinned to look like silver, and decorated with bosses no other Roman helmet is known to share.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Weight Agnostic Neural Architecture Search

architectures · weight-agnostic search · arXiv 1906.04358

Searching for networks that perform a task with random shared weights shows how much of generalisation can sit in topology alone, before any parameter is tuned.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

A tall, slender pin-like shaft of pale steel rising above a wide city street, tapering to a fine point against the sky, with surrounding buildings much lower than its tip.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Spire of Dublin

2003 · Steel · 121.2 m (397 ft 8 in)

A tapering shaft of steel, 121.2 metres (397 ft 8 in) high, stands on Dublin's O'Connell Street where Nelson's Pillar and, before that, a statue of William Blakeney once stood.

Enter lesson 5 MIN