9 AUG 2026

Day 221

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

Laozi · Tao Te Ching

Two tall dark stone obelisk shafts, both incomplete, standing on low plinths in a large light-filled museum courtyard with pale stone walls.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Obelisks of Nectanebo II

Ancient Egypt · 5th century BC · British Museum

Two broken obelisks, cut for a pharaoh, recorded in Cairo in 1737, seized from Napoleon's scholars, and now standing in a London courtyard hundreds of miles from the city that raised them.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis

Frankle and Carbin, arXiv 1803.03635 · pruning, sparsity, initialisation · MNIST and CIFAR10 feed-forward networks

Pruning strips over ninety per cent of a trained network's weights without hurting accuracy. Frankle and Carbin asked what those survivors do if you rewind them to their original random values.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

A crowded barn interior. Guests eat at a table running diagonally into shadow; two men carry a wide board of bowls forward. A young woman sits still against a dark hanging under a small paper crown, with stacked sheaves of grain behind.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Peasant Wedding

Pieter Bruegel the Elder · 1567 (some records give 1568) · Oil on oak panel

Two men carry a broad wooden board piled with bowls into a barn packed with grain. The bride sits still beneath a paper crown. Which guest is the groom is still argued.

Enter lesson 6 MIN