10 MAR 2026

Day 69

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer.

Donald Knuth · A=B, Foreword

A crested helmet covered entirely in small red and yellow feathers, with a high arching crest and two crescent-shaped cutouts on the sides.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Hawaiian Feathered Helmet

Native Hawaiian · Early Modern · Featherwork

Each helmet required feathers from thousands of forest birds, most caught, plucked for a few tail plumes, and released. The labour cost of rank made visible.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Dense Versus Sparse Models

Reasoning and architecture · GPT-3 175B · Mixtral 8x7B, Switch-C 1.6T

A four-hundred-billion-parameter model that uses only thirteen billion at a time can run on hardware where the full dense version cannot, yet it still needs the memory to hold all four hundred billion.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

A small ivory figurine standing upright, with a lion's head and ears on a human-like body, arms at its sides, carved from a single piece of mammoth tusk.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel

Aurignacian · c. 38,000–35,000 BC · mammoth ivory

The oldest known sculpture of something that does not exist. Someone in the Ice Age spent weeks carving a being they had never seen, which means they could picture it first.

Enter lesson 6 MIN