29 JAN 2026

Day 29

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 flat circular disc of pale green nephrite jade with a smooth, polished surface and a circular hole in the centre.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Chinese Jade Bi Disc

Neolithic to Han Chinese · c. 3400 BCE onwards · Nephrite jade

Nephrite harder than steel, shaped without metal tools by sand and patience. In early China this mattered more than gold, and the circular form with its empty centre carried meanings we can only partly reconstruct.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Multi-Head Attention

Transformers · 2017, Vaswani et al. · 8–16 heads per layer

The transformer does not compute attention once. It splits the representation into slices, runs separate attention operations over each, then concatenates the results — and most heads contribute far less than the rest.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

Three hunters and their dogs trudge down a snowy slope toward a valley where frozen ponds, bare trees, and distant jagged peaks recede under a pale greenish-white sky. Small figures skate and work across the ice below.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow

Pieter Bruegel the Elder · 1565 · Oil on oak panel

Bruegel painted exhausted men trudging home with almost nothing, then filled the valley behind them with dozens of small winter activities that do not notice their failure.

Enter lesson 6 MIN