22 JAN 2026

Day 22

A journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one's feet.

Laozi · Tao Te Ching

A close view of a thin wooden writing tablet, its surface marked with faint lines of handwritten ink text.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Vindolanda Tablets

Romano-British · British Museum · Vindolanda

Manuscript tablets discovered at Vindolanda are associated with invitations, complaints and clothing notes: small records that bring a Roman frontier community unusually close.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Predicting the Next Token

Language and tokens · Predict the next token · Self-supervised learning from text

A model is never taught to answer questions, write essays or summarise documents. It learns one thing: given a sequence of tokens, guess which one comes next.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

An open manuscript page with text in Geʽez script and a painted arcade of columns and arches framing a grid of numbers and references.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Garima Gospels

Ethiopian Christian · c. 390–660 · Pigment on goatskin parchment

Western scholars long believed these Ethiopian gospels were medieval copies. Then radiocarbon analysis placed the oldest one centuries earlier — among the first illuminated Christian manuscripts anywhere.

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