• The Infinite Coast

    According to the U.S. state department the coastlines of Washington, Oregon and California together measure 2,131 km. This would seem to settle things. But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (N.O.A.A.) says that number should be 3,288 km. Has at least one of these agencies measured ... poorly?

  • Public Domain 2020

    Gutsy piano students everywhere can now legally photocopy Chopin’s Préludes as they sweat over its tangled passages.

  • Drawing or Color, Part III: The Neoclassicists vs. The Romantics

    Ingres considered bright colors “anti-historic” and warned his students against them. “Better to fall into gray,” he said, “than into bright colors.” Color, as Delacroix saw it, was essential to painting. “Remember,” he urged in his journal, “the enemy of all painting is gray.”

  • QFT: The World is Stranger Than You Thought

    Beginning with studies of electromagnetism, scientists have come to understand reality in such a way that there really is no such thing as tiny bits of matter that exist independently and that cannot be divided. Atomism (in any traditional sense) is dead. Reality is not what we thought it was.