Best of the Universe of Discourse

I try not to spend too much time navel-gazing, but this is the 20th anniversary of the blog, so I thought I'd observe it with a retrospective of my favorite articles of the past 20 years.

What they mostly have in common, I think, is that you would have been unlikely to read any of them on anyone else's blog.

Technical excellence

How Forbes made a list of the 20 most important tools and forgot to include the hammer

You can learn to read Middle English

Maintenance of utility poles

What's in those brown metal cabinets?

I struggle to understand Traversable

Obsessive geekery

The disembodied heads of Oz

The 23-part series on the Evpatoria Cosmic Call message

Nobody else would have written this

Ysolo has been cancelled

Louis XIV, disco king

Most quotable

If Hannibal Lecter claims to have eaten a baby, your first thought is not to check if it is April 1.

Graphic excellence

Incenters of chocolate-iced cakes

Technical jargon failure modes

Pedagogy

How to explain infinity to kids

Solving problems that make other people ask "what does that even mean?"

Recognizing when two arithmetic expressions are essentially the same

I found the best anagram in English

Similarity analysis of quilt blocks

Dishonorable mentions

Jools Holland and An Austrian coincidence.

Norton Juster award for Lower Mathematics at Work

60-degree angles on a lattice

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