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The Daily Triptych208 / 365

27 JUL 2026

Day 208

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.

Blaise Pascal · Pensées
A group of pale brown clay tablets and fragments densely impressed with cuneiform script, some corners broken, shown as study objects from an ancient Mesopotamian archive.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Library of Ashurbanipal

Assyrian (Nineveh) · 7th century BCE · Clay tablets

More than thirty thousand clay tablets and fragments from seventh-century Nineveh — the working library of an Assyrian king, dug from the ruins in the mid-nineteenth century.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

History: The 2012 AlexNet Revolution

history · ImageNet 2012 · 10.8 percentage points

In 2012 a deep convolutional network won ImageNet by 10.8 percentage points. The size of that margin, more than the win alone, forced the field to reconsider depth at scale.

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A wide horizontal panel: a winged angel at the left faces a woman seated at a lectern on the right, with garden ground, architecture and distant landscape between them.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Annunciation

Leonardo da Vinci · 1472 · Oil paint on panel

A panel more than twice as wide as it is high holds the Annunciation in oil: angel, virgin, and a stretch of ground that forces the eye to travel the full length.

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