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In the 1930s a college physics teacher named O. L. Railsback built a chromatic stroboscope and pointed it at pianos that professional tuners had just finished. He expected equal temperament, the textbook system where every semitone is the same frequency ratio and every octave is exactly 2:1. That …
A dry stone wall has no mortar, no footing poured in concrete, no rebar, and in the uplands of Britain some of them have stood for two centuries while the farmhouses they belong to were rebuilt twice. Nobody who hasn’t tried it quite believes this. The usual guess is that the wall stays up because …
Suppose you have come back from Alsace with a kougelhopf mould. It is a ring of glazed earthenware with a chimney in the middle and swirled flutes down the sides, probably painted with a blue daisy or a red heart, and it was heavy enough that you questioned the purchase at the airport. You have …