The last four years feel like they took about eighteen months. A single summer at ten felt like a substantial portion of my life. I have heard the explanation that a year is a smaller fraction of your life as you get…
Drove across a good chunk of the United States last month and the thing I could not stop noticing was how much reading there is. Signs say things like NO TURN ON RED, or DO NOT PASS, or SPEED LIMIT, in words, where…
The image of a porcupine launching quills at an enemy is a cartoon invention; the quills detach on contact rather than being fired. That made me wonder whether the mechanism exists anywhere else. Not an animal that…
I have become fascinated by statements that would be clean theorems if not for a single stubborn exception. Not families of exceptions, not "except for small cases": exactly one counterexample, and then the pattern…
Here is the argument that is bothering me. Any file is a string of bits, so any file is a number. A lossless compressor maps each input to an output that is supposed to be shorter, and the decompressor maps it back, so…
I was playing with a molecular model kit and built a four membered carbon ring where every carbon was double bonded to the next one all the way around. It went together fine physically, which I took as some kind of…
I am an engineer and biology is my weak subject, so apologies if this is naive. The usual answer to why two eyes is depth perception. That explains why not one, but it does not explain why not four or six more…
Most results get celebrated. I am interested in the opposite: theorems whose truth or falsity was a letdown, where the mathematical community had been hoping for the other answer. I do not mean results that were merely…
Somebody sent me a flat metal card, roughly the size of a bank card, with a set of small shapes stamped into it that can be snapped out. Most look fishing related to me, there are things that could be hooks and…
My building has four lifts in one lobby. All four serve every residential floor, they are identical, and there is a single call panel between them. What happens in practice is that they bunch. Two or three of them end…
We started with sticks and stones and we now have atomic clocks and electron microscopes, many orders of magnitude more precise. What I cannot picture is the bootstrap. To make a precise thing you seem to need a precise…
A stellar mass black hole would tear anything apart well before it reached the horizon. I am curious about the opposite extreme. Suppose a black hole with the mass of an apple existed and sat on a table. Its…
Closing a single tab happens immediately and silently, even if there is a half written message in it. Closing a window with several tabs often produces a confirmation. Some browsers let you enable a warning for the…
Idle curiosity that turned into a search I could not resolve. Salt dissolves in water because water is polar and pulls the ions apart. A liquid metal is a completely different environment, a sea of loose electrons…
It runs but takes two full cycles to dry a normal load, and the repair quote is 180 for a heating element and thermostat. A plain replacement without any smart features is about 600 here. We do maybe five loads a week…
On dry cold mornings the glass is clear, but if it rained the day before I get a full fog on the inside that takes ten minutes of blowing to clear. Same car, same parking spot, same temperature roughly. I keep the…
With my eyes I can see craters and the darker patches clearly. My phone shows a featureless white disc every single time, even though the phone camera is genuinely good at everything else. Zooming in just makes a bigger…
Same brand of soap, same sponge, same technique I have used for years. In the new place every glass comes out of the rack with a cloudy film that wipes off with a finger but comes back next wash. Plates and cutlery seem…
It arrived rolled up in plastic and had a strong smell straight out of the box, a bit like a new car mixed with something sweeter. Three weeks later it is much fainter but I can still notice it when I get into bed at…