Of all the things people argue about between Britain and the United States, this one has the clearest answer and the most confident wrong assumptions.
The accusation is familiar. Americans…
It is one of the small things that produces real confusion rather than amusement. A date written as a string of numbers with a slash between them is ambiguous in…
It Is One of the Only Parts of Your Insides You Can Actually See
Open your mouth in front of a mirror and there it is - a soft teardrop…
The shape of a letter is usually treated as a matter of convention, and to a large extent it is. But writing systems designed for a specific material carry that…
There is a question that sounds naive and turns out to open a real research problem: does everybody divide colours up the same way?
The physical answer is that the…
The number of signs a writing system requires is not a technical detail. It determines who can be literate.
A system with several thousand signs can be learned, and learning…