5 MAR 2026

Day 64

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Albert Camus · The Myth of Sisyphus

A collection of silver coins, arm-rings, ingots and fragments, some whole and some chopped into pieces, displayed alongside a gilt silver cup with decorative bands.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Vale of York Hoard

Anglo-Scandinavian · 10th century · silver

Six hundred and seventeen silver coins and sixty-five other items, from Samarkand to Ireland, packed into a Frankish cup and buried near Harrogate. A single hole in the ground as a map of tenth-century trade.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Chain of Thought

Reasoning and architecture · 2022, Wei et al. and Kojima et al. · Prompting technique

Ask a model to solve a problem in one leap and it often fails. Ask it to show its working, and accuracy can double — though the steps may not be the actual computation.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

A towering pyramidal granite structure rising in thirteen diminishing tiers, crowned by a dome-shaped capstone, standing against a pale sky above a walled temple complex.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Brihadisvara Temple, Thanjavur

Chola emperor Rajaraja I · 1010 · Granite

Rajaraja I raised a temple tower taller than anything in South India before it, using stone quarried sixty kilometres away and hauled to a river delta that had none.

Enter lesson 7 MIN