3 JAN 2026

Day 3

Man is the measure of all things.

Protagoras · Plato, Theaetetus

A human skull covered in pale plaster, modelled to suggest facial features, with two cowrie shells set into the eye sockets. The lower jaw is absent.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Jericho Skull

Pre-Pottery Neolithic B · c. 7100 BC · Jericho, Levant

Someone removed the jaw, packed wet plaster over the bone, shaped features back onto the face, and pressed cowrie shells into the eye sockets. Then they kept it.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Features and Representations

Foundations · Hand-designed to learned features · Representation learning

For decades engineers wrote careful rules to extract edges, phonemes and word stems. Then a different approach let the model decide what mattered, and performance leapt forward.

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Emperor Justinian in purple robes and a gold halo stands at the centre of a row of twelve figures against a gold background, holding a shallow dish, flanked by clergy and soldiers, their feet resting on a flat green band.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Justinian Mosaic at San Vitale

Ravenna, Italy · 6th century · Glass and gold tesserae

Justinian stands in gold glass at Ravenna, holding a paten, surrounded by his court. The green band beneath them is not a floor. It is a line that has been deliberately refused.

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