Quarelia

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A very large cream Moon rises just behind a low silhouette of navy rooftops, in a deep violet sky flecked with a few cream dots; a thin paper halo rings the Moon, which looks enormous against the small rooftops.

Why does the Moon look so big when it rises?

One question, in depth
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For example: Why are planets round? Why did the Vikings reach America nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus? Why do cats purr? Why do we clink glasses before drinking?

Watch35seconds

CosmiraWhy does the Moon look so big when it rises?0:35 · Quarelia

Locked by the same force that lifts our tides, the Moon turns once per orbit and keeps the same face forever toward Earth.

CosmiraSpace · Cosmos

Why does the Moon always show the same face?

An oval mirror with a golden frame on a cream table; inside, a large stylized eye with a navy outline and an amber iris looks straight ahead, perfectly still, while a pale, slightly offset double of the iris fades beside it, like an unseen movement.

EvelieWe'd never thought about it

Why do you never see your own eyes move in a mirror?

Fresh whys

Just arrived

An engineering decision made in 1873 on a long-dead mechanical machine. No one ever undid it, because millions of fingers had already learned it.

Insolite

Why isn't the keyboard in alphabetical order?

Because the QWERTY layout was frozen in 1873 on the first commercial mechanical typewriters, where some letters had to be kept apart so that the type bars wouldn't jam. The technical need vanished with the type-bar machines, but the muscle memory of millions of fingers didn't. Dvorak's 1936 layout, which roughly halves the distance the fingers travel, never broke through.

At random

Why do we remember nothing before the age of three?

Because at that age the hippocampus, the region that files memories away, makes so many new neurons that it struggles to fix them for good; and because the words to shelve them are still missing. The years themselves aren't lost: they are written elsewhere in the brain, in gestures and emotions rather than in stories.

The Map