Before printing, every copy of every text was made by hand and therefore differed from every other copy. Almost everything below follows from that changing. Here are sixteen.
1. Paper…
The test is simple: pigment colour looks the same from every angle, and structural colour changes as you move. Once you know that, a great deal of the natural world…
Ask most people whether counting is natural and they will say obviously yes. Every culture counts. Children learn numbers early. It feels less like a skill than a faculty.
The…
The question worth asking about any spoon dish is what would be lost with a fork, and the answer is almost always the same: the ratio between the liquid and…
Pitch depends on how fast something vibrates, and everything below is a different method of controlling that rate and then getting the vibration into the air loudly enough to hear.…
Picture a world map. North is at the top, south at the bottom, and it feels less like a convention than a fact — as settled as the ground being…