31 JUL 2026

Day 212

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Søren Kierkegaard · Journals

A dark, worn rectangular stone slab whose surface shows broken hieroglyphic text interrupted by heavy abrasion and damaged areas from later reuse.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Shabaka Stone

Twenty-fifth Dynasty Egypt · British Museum · Stele; later millstone

A royal stele from Egypt's Twenty-fifth Dynasty, later ground down as a millstone. The hieroglyphs survive only in fragments, enough that the religious text did not vanish entirely.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Differentiable Architecture Search

architectures · Differentiable relaxation · DARTS (arXiv:1806.09055)

Searching neural architectures once meant sampling discrete candidates at great cost. A continuous relaxation turns that combinatorial problem into one gradient descent can solve.

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A wide, dim courtyard in oil. A man lies outstretched as another bends over him with a blade; onlookers cluster beside a metal dish while further figures watch from the gloom.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist

1608 · Oil on canvas · St. John's Co-Cathedral

A canvas more than five metres wide, painted in oil in 1608, shows the killing of John the Baptist under the hard light and deep shadow of Caravaggio's chiaroscuro.

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