Do it right, with real numbers

A magnifying lens held over a dictionary page, enlarging the entries love, and low, — two words a single deleted letter apart.

Cybersecurity 7 min

How to Check Who Owns the Lookalikes of Your Domain

Five edit rules per character generate the confusable space around a domain name, and DNS says which of those names alre...

Cyber Team

A tiled roof and the length of guttering along its edge, seen from below against a clear sky.

Sustainability 7 min

Annual Rainfall Will Not Size Your Tank

Singapore and Manila are within five per cent of each other on annual rainfall, and their driest months are 112 mm and 8...

Electrician's tools laid out on a bench with a stripped three-core cable showing bare copper conductors.

Science 6 min

Why the Voltage-Drop Limit Is Really an Efficiency Limit

The voltage-drop limit in every wiring code reads as a performance rule. The current cancels, so the share of power burn...

Two cupped hands holding a clump of soil with a small newly sprouted seedling growing from it.

Sustainability 6 min

What Does "Plant a Tree to Offset It" Actually Buy?

Carbon calculators end by translating your emissions into trees, and the unit that translation produces is the tree-year...

Ink-wash drawing of a scholar's table: a corded stack of thread-bound volumes, one open beside them, with a brush resting on an inkstone.

Chinese Culture 6 min

What Links the 36 Stratagems to the Art of War's 13 Chapters

The two are separate books a thousand years apart, so a stratagem filed under a chapter is a reading aid, not a lineage....

Eva Chin

Gloved hands closing a vernier caliper around a length of timber, with its scale in view.

Science 9 min

Significant Figures: The Digits Your Calculator Invents

We audited our own science calculators against the precision their inputs actually justify. Across 768 multiplications a...

Two people at a glass table, one pointing at a specific line on a printed contract.

Business 8 min

Two Offers, the Same Salary, and Opposite Answers

Two Singapore offers at the same S$144,000 a year rank in opposite directions depending on what you count. One wins by S...

Eva Chin

A worn mid-century booklet of the Thirty-Six Stratagems, of the kind the collection first surfaced in.

Chinese Culture 6 min

How Well Attested Are the 36 Stratagems?

The Thirty-Six Stratagems are introduced as ancient military history. Reading all thirty-six origin texts end to end, tw...

Eva Chin

A tennis ball resting on the white boundary line of a clay court, half on each side of it.

Personality 6 min

Why Your Personality Result Changes When You Retake It

A four-part label is two numbers passed through a threshold. We walked all 1,089 possible score pairs on our own attachm...

Amelia Wong

An aerial view of a multi-level motorway interchange carrying light traffic, with trees between the ramps.

Sustainability 5 min

Flying Against Driving, and the Units Nobody Checks

Both confident answers to this question are built on comparing a per-passenger figure with a per-vehicle one. Divide the...