For most of the history of ocean navigation, a ship's crew could tell you how far north or south they were with reasonable confidence and had very little idea how…
The counterintuitive fact underlying all of this is that mixing two soft metals frequently produces something substantially harder than either, and the reason is geometric. Here are twelve.
1. Why…
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…
Every pass is a compromise between height and distance: the lowest crossing point is rarely the shortest route, and the route that everyone took is whichever combination was survivable. Here…
Source: Wikipedia
For families in 1979, television was the center of the living room and the heart of the evening's entertainment. With only a handful of channels and no way to…
The useful habit when standing in an unfamiliar square is to look at what faces onto it, because the buildings around the edge record who wanted the space and what…