29 MAR 2026

Day 88

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

George Box · Robustness in the Strategy of Scientific Model Building

A marble statue of a nude male athlete, body twisted, right arm drawn back holding a discus, left arm extended forward, weight on the right leg, head turned back toward the discus hand.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Townley Discobolus

c. 450 BC, Greek bronze by Myron · Roman copy, marble · 156 cm (5 ft 1 in)

The original bronze is lost. Every copy we have is Roman marble. And for two centuries, the most famous version had its head turned backwards by a restorer who guessed wrong.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Systems and judgement · 2020, Lewis et al. · Question answering over private or recent documents

The idea is straightforward: fetch the relevant documents, put them in the prompt, and let the model answer from them. Almost every failure happens in the first step.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

A large central dome rises above a symmetrical stone mosque with four tall, slender minarets at the corners. The building sits on a hill, with smaller structures clustered around its base.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Sinan's Selimiye Mosque

Mimar Sinan · 1575 · Edirne, Turkey

Sinan spent fifty years building mosques for three sultans. At eighty, he designed one he called his masterwork: a dome that rests on eight supports so the space beneath reads as a single room.

Enter lesson 7 MIN