There is a question that sounds unanswerable and turns out to be a geometry problem.
How far away is a star? You cannot go there. You cannot bounce anything off…
There is a persistent belief that some people speak with an accent and others speak normally.
It is not true in any technical sense, and the belief itself is worth…
Source: Wikipedia
Medieval chronicles contain a great deal of material that is obviously not literal. Portents, marvels, signs and wonders appear regularly, and historians read them as they were meant —…
There is a specific social awkwardness that everybody has encountered from one side and nobody from both.
Visiting an unfamiliar house, you register its smell immediately — not unpleasant necessarily,…
The useful question about any symmetrical thing is not why somebody made it that way but what process would produce that arrangement without anybody deciding. Here are sixteen answers.
1.…
Source: Wikipedia
There is an assumption that pre-modern financial systems were crude, and it is worth testing against an example.
The English Exchequer — the department handling royal revenue — kept…