4 SEP 2026

Day 247

The eye altering alters all.

William Blake · The Mental Traveller

A white marble head of a youth with softly modelled features and an ivy wreath in the hair, set on a plain modern bust against a neutral ground.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Townley Antinous

Roman · c. 130 · Marble

Only the head is ancient. Found reused in a Roman wall and bought for a Grand Tour cabinet, it shows Antinous wreathed like a god — Hadrian’s companion fixed in marble.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

MoE Routing Strategies

architectures · sparse mixture-of-experts · Shazeer 2017; GShard 2020

A gating network learns which expert sub-networks should handle each input. Only a handful fire. The rest stay idle, letting parameter counts grow without a matching rise in compute.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

Two pale marble figures in a rising twist: a youth strides and reaches from behind as a young woman turns away, her fingers and hair opening into leaves while bark spreads across her body.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Apollo and Daphne

Gian Lorenzo Bernini · c. 1620–1622 · Carrara marble

Two figures in Carrara marble fix the instant when Apollo’s hand almost closes and Daphne’s skin is already turning to bark and laurel leaf.

Enter lesson 6 MIN