Teaching You A Little Bit About Everything

Divide the day

Nobody survives this for long; the rest of the day is spent pretending.

Roughly a third of your life, which is the deal everyone eventually accepts.

More than a third; the day is now mostly recovery from the day.

The standard shift, give or take the commute you did not count.

The job has become the day; the other slices are what is left over.

A couple of hours, mostly in pieces, mostly not remembered.

Six hours or more; this is now the biggest thing you did awake.

A day with no face in it; it happens, and it should not happen twice.

A couple of hours of actual company, which is what the day was for.

Impossible, unless the screens slice includes eating over the sink.

The maintenance the body charges for being carried around.

A long walk or a long bath; either is a good sign.

The can and the can opener

Astronomers confirm the sun is average and unbothered.

Local Star Found To Be Ordinary

Neurons, counted rather than guessed

What the forums say tonight

The Repair

Nobody understands the whole thing

Models practitioners reach for, with where they break.

Tools For Thinking About Anything

Il n'y a pas de quoi

Find the exclusion zone

One gate, two states, all of computing.

How A Transistor Decides

The whole Y2K bug in four lines

What a machine is next to

Your heart vs. a hummingbird's

Both sides at full strength, the reader scoring.

Should Humans Have Invented Farming

The shortest possible checkmate

Rank the killers

Things that broke in ways nobody planned for

Fifty years from spark to socket

Find the one part that failed and swap that.

Fix A Thing Before Replacing It

Worcestershire

Explain it to a bored twelve-year-old

Delaware rules, plain words, the concrete moves.

Can Your Landlord Enter Without Notice

Earthrise

The Daily Everything

Hairline cracks at the welds

Four movements, one cue each, three days a week.

Stairs At Eighty

The one letter behind sickle cell

Missed connection, dark matter

Why nothing is ever at rest

The interval the church banned

A town loses its one mechanic and has to learn.

The Last Person Who Knew

How old the light you see is

Edison's lamp patent

Ten questions across all of human knowledge, ramped.

Could You Pass Everything

The spoon and the tap

Walt, retired mechanic, returning your call

Andromeda, if you could see it

Fermi problems, scored, until guessing feels natural.

Estimate Anything In Your Head

Two balls, one fired sideways

Call the tower

Two Plumbers Explain the Universe

What memory is for

Infinite stars should make a bright sky, and do not.

Why The Night Is Dark

Everything, defined

What a virus is missing

A dialogue where the wrong idea goes first.

Talk Me Through Electricity

Words engineers hide behind

A Little Bit About Everything, Properly

A quarter turn, written down

A glossary of euphemisms for things that broke.

Words Engineers Use For Failure

Disease to the thing that was missing

Cheetah vs. pronghorn

The Hindenburg File

Where a litre of petrol goes

Flour, water, salt, and patience doing the kneading.

Bread With Nothing But Time

Argon

Tardigrade

The ones people type into a search box at night.

Questions Nobody Asks Out Loud

Degraded mode

The Ant Who Audited the Grasshopper

Divide the day

Split one day of your attention between the things that actually took it

Where this came from

Your turn