24 JAN 2026

Day 24

Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Confucius · The Analects

A bronze figure of a human acrobat in mid-somersault, body arched backward, arms extended forward, legs trailing behind, vaulting over a charging bull with lowered head and forward-pointing horns.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Minoan Bull-Leaper

Minoan · Middle Bronze Age · Bull-leaping

A bronze figure vaults over a charging bull, limbs stretched in a pose that may record an actual Minoan ritual — or an ideal the body could never achieve.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

One Word, Many Meanings

Language and tokens · Contextual embeddings (ELMo 2018, BERT 2018) · Static word vectors

The word 'bank' appears twice in a sentence, once about rivers and once about money. A static embedding gives both the same vector, which means the representation has already lost what the sentence was about.

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A tall, narrow granite shaft carved with a fanged face and clawed hands, standing upright in a dim stone chamber with low ceilings and close walls.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Lanzón of Chavín de Huántar

Chavín · c. 1200–500 BC · Carved granite

The Lanzón stands four metres tall in a cruciform gallery beneath Chavín de Huántar. You reach it through passages so narrow that only one person at a time can approach.

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