17 AUG 2026

Day 229

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves.

Bertrand Russell · The Problems of Philosophy

A thick block of colourless, transparent quartz engraved with the Crucifixion, the figure of Christ on the cross cut inwards into the stone in fine sunken lines that catch the light against the clear body of the crystal.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Saint-Denis Crystal

Rock crystal · Carolingian (conventional) · British Museum

Cut into a block of clear quartz, a Crucifixion once kept in the treasury of a French abbey. The Revolution scattered that collection; this piece ended up in Bloomsbury.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Contrastive Learning Across Vision, Audio and Text

self-supervised multimodal learning · co-occurrence in time rather than human labels · arXiv 1912.06430; arXiv 2104.05704

Three separate encoders, one shared space. The supervision is not a human label but a pairing puzzle: which picture, which sound and which sentence came from the same moment.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

A rounded, dome-shaped stone standing on the ground, its worked surface covered in a dense raised pattern of interlacing bands, tapering slightly towards the top.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Omphalos

Sculpture, a religious stone artefact · Ancient Greek religion · Associated with Delphi

Two eagles, launched from opposite ends of the world, crossed above Delphi. The Greeks set a stone where their paths met and called it the navel of the earth.

Enter lesson 5 MIN