Education6 min read
The Maya Long Count: How Mesoamerica Recorded Time
A five-position count of elapsed days, two interlocking cycles, and one unresolved correlation with our calendar. Here is how Maya dates are actually read.
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All articles, page 26
Articles 601–624 of 990, newest first. To read by subject instead, start from a category or a topic hub on the blog’s front page.
- Health5 min read
Planning One Week of Meals for Different Eaters in the Same House
One plan, several eaters. Build a week around a vegetarian, low-carb or allergy-aware household member without cooking two separate dinners.
- Education6 min read
The Meiji Restoration: Revolution From Above
Why 1868 is called a restoration and behaves like a revolution: the domains abolished, conscription, land tax reform and the samurai who dismantled themselves.
- Education5 min read
Mesoamerica Before the Aztecs: Olmec, Teotihuacan, Zapotec, Toltec and Maya
The Aztecs arrived late. Two and a half millennia of Mesoamerican states came first, and one of the biggest cities has builders we still cannot name.
- Education6 min read
Missing Number Problems: Undoing an Equation
Which inverse operation solves a missing number problem depends on where the blank sits. Worked examples, the two shapes that trip people up, and a check.
- Education6 min read
Mnemonic Systems Built for Digits
Phonetic, shape, rhyme and peg systems all convert digits into something easier to hold. What each one asks of you before it starts paying anything back.
- Action & Arcade6 min read
Momentum Steering: Why One-Finger Snake Controls Punish Straight Lines
In a momentum steering model you set a heading, not a position. Turning radius, interception geometry and the arcs that keep you alive in a snake-style arena.
- Education6 min read
How the Mongol Conquests Spread So Fast
Cavalry is the weakest explanation for Mongol speed. Logistics, relay communications, surrendered engineers and succession crises explain far more.
- Education6 min read
Multiplying by 5, 25 and 50 by Dividing Instead
Five is ten halved and twenty-five is a hundred quartered, so the multiplication becomes a shift and a division. Pick which number to divide first.
- Education6 min read
Multiplying by 9, 99 and 999 Without Doing the Multiplication
Nine is ten minus one, so multiply by the round number and take one lot away. The same move runs at 99, 999 and 9,999, with a digit-sum check built in.
- Education6 min read
What an N-Back Task Actually Asks You to Do
What an n-back task asks you to do, why dual n-back feels unlike other memory games, and what the training studies actually found about transfer.
- Education5 min read
The Neolithic Revolution: Farming's Many Independent Beginnings
Agriculture began separately on at least four continents. What the evidence shows about where, why people switched, and what it cost the first farmers.
- Education5 min read
Nonverbal Reasoning Tests: What Culture-Reduced Actually Claims
Nonverbal reasoning tests replace words with shapes. That removes a language barrier, but it does not make a test culture-free. Here is what the evidence shows.
- Education6 min read
Number Bonds and Making Tens
Complements to 10, 100 and 1000 are the layer every mental addition method assumes: what they are, the digit rule with one trap, and how adults install them.
- Education7 min read
Number Sequence Puzzles, Explained From the Rule Up
A catalogue of the rule types behind number sequence puzzles, a first-pass procedure that beats guessing, and the honest limit of every such puzzle.
- Education5 min read
Numerical Reasoning Tests Are Not Arithmetic Tests
Numerical reasoning tests assume you can already calculate. The difficulty is deciding what to compute from a table, and doing it inside a 40-second budget.
- Education6 min read
Odd One Out Across Words, Numbers and Shapes
An odd one out puzzle asks for a dimension on which one item differs. Why several answers are often defensible, and how a setter removes the ambiguity.
- Education4 min read
Offline Brain Training: What Keeps Working Without a Connection
What offline means for a practice app specifically: whether streaks, personal bests and adaptive difficulty survive without a connection, and what stops.
- Education6 min read
The Opium Wars and the Treaties That Followed Them
Britain fought two wars to keep an illegal drug trade open in China. The commercial mechanics, the Qing prohibition and the treaty terms, from the archives.
- Education8 min read
The Ottoman Empire From Frontier Principality to Republic
Six centuries from a small Anatolian principality to a state spanning three continents, and the wars, reforms and atrocities that ended it.
- Education6 min read
Paired-Associate Learning: Linking Two Unrelated Things
What paired-associate learning is, why arbitrary pairs resist repetition, and why judging a pair with both halves in front of you overstates what you know.
- Education6 min read
Partition, 1947: The Division of British India
What the Indian Independence Act actually set out, how fast the boundary was drawn, and why estimates of the deaths and displacement differ so widely.
- Education6 min read
Percentile, Standard Score and Raw Score: Three Numbers, Three Meanings
A percentage is how much you got right. A percentile is where you ranked. A standard score is how far from the mean you sat. Three numbers, routinely confused.
- Education6 min read
Periodisation: Who Decides Where One Age Ends and the Next Begins
Periods are arguments, not facts about the past. Who drew the lines between ancient, medieval and modern, what they were for, and what they hide.