The distinction worth holding is between measuring and comparing. A ruler asserts a length and can be wrong about it. The instruments below compare one thing against another, or against…
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…
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…
Weaving was invented independently in every inhabited part of the world, which is a strong indication that the problem has a limited number of solutions. Here are eleven of the…
There is a security feature in almost everyone's pocket that has been doing its job for over three hundred years, and almost nobody knows what it is for.
Look at…