The useful question about any unusual shoe is what it was standing on. Almost every answer is a property of the ground rather than a preference of the wearer. Here…
Look at any vernacular building and the roof tells you the weather before anybody mentions it. Here are eleven of the things a roof is arguing with.
1. The Steep…
Sand seems like the least plausible thing to run short of. It is the archetype of abundance — the thing in the metaphor about counting grains, covering deserts and beaches…
The technical term for this is path dependence: an early decision constrains everything afterwards, not because it was right but because too much was built on top of it. Here…
Almost nothing in the animal world does what this does.
A great many animals signal. They warn, threaten, court and call, and the signal refers to the here and now…
Here is a question that has been asked for centuries and is still argued about on television panel shows: why does a mirror swap left and right but leave up…