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The Daily Triptych245 / 365

2 SEP 2026

Day 245

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Thucydides · History of the Peloponnesian War
A carved marble bust of a man shown bare-chested, without armour or drapery, the head and upper torso finished in the round and cut off below the chest.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Townley Hadrian

Roman · 3rd century · Greek marble

A marble bust of the emperor Hadrian, found in Rome and shown bare-chested rather than in armour, entered the British Museum with Charles Townley's collection in 1805.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The Rise of Self-Supervised Learning

history · Self-supervised pretext tasks · RotNet 2018; SimCLR 2020

Before large labelled sets were assumed, networks were trained to guess rotations and pull matched views together. Those odd chores quietly rebuilt unsupervised visual learning.

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A tall iron figure crowns a massive base on a wooded ridge, standing well above the surrounding forest canopy under an open sky.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Hermannsdenkmal

Ernst von Bandel · 1875 · Iron

An iron colossus completed in 1875 crowns a wooded hill in the Teutoburg Forest — raised to mark a victory whose true battlefield may lie far from the spot.

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