5 SEP 2026

Day 248

To see a World in a Grain of Sand, and a Heaven in a Wild Flower.

William Blake · Auguries of Innocence

A low two-fold screen in an unvarnished cedar frame; two mostly white paper panels marked with sparse black ink lines and glittering mica flecks suggesting cracked ice receding into the distance.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Cracked Ice screen

Edo-period Japan · Maruyama Ōkyo · Furosaki byōbu

A low cedar screen of cracked ice, painted for the tea ceremony by Maruyama Ōkyo — mostly white paper, black ink, and mica — bought by the British Museum in 1982.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Model Merging via Weight Interpolation

training · weight averaging · 2203.05482

Several models, each fine-tuned from the same start, can be blended by averaging their weights. The result is often stronger than any single run, with no extra cost at inference.

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A curved copper screen perforated with rows of letters, set outdoors among dark stone, pale wood and water on a landscaped institutional site.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Kryptos

Jim Sanborn · 1990 · Copper, granite, petrified wood, quartz

Four passages of encrypted text stand on copper beside granite and petrified wood at the CIA. Three have been read. The fourth has not, and the artist will not simply hand it over.

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