Actually Random

How does 20 questions work? Twenty is not an arbitrary number?

Twenty questions. Yes or no answers only. Somebody thinks of a thing, and you have to find it. The number twenty looks like a folk choice, the sort of round figure a Victorian parlour settles on. It is not. Twenty is very close to exactly the right number, and you can derive it. Every question is worth one bit, at best A yes-or-no answer can carry at most one bit of information.

What do foxes eat? About fifteen rodents a day?

Search this and you get a list. Rodents, rabbits, birds, insects, earthworms, berries, carrion, and whatever fell out of your bin. Every source has the same list because the list is correct. It is also useless, in the way that a list of things a car can run into is useless if what you wanted to know was how fast it goes. I wanted the number.

What would aliens look like?

I asked whether intelligent life on another planet would follow anything like our evolutionary path, or whether humans are a one-off. Everybody who answers this question reaches for the same argument, and I reached for it too before I checked it. It is a good argument. It is also, in the specific form everyone uses, wrong. The argument everybody makes Evolution repeats itself.

Is the sun getting hotter?

I went into this expecting the Sun to have been more or less constant for the whole history of life, wobbling a bit with sunspot cycles. That is wrong, and it is wrong by a lot. It is also a question that answers itself slightly sideways. The Sun is getting brighter, dramatically so. It is barely getting hotter. Those are different things, and the gap between them is the interesting part.

How thick does a monitor stand need to be?

I wanted a monitor stand to lift a Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 off my desk. The monitor is 49 inches of curved glass and weighs about 14.5 kilograms with its stand attached. My stand would be 1000 mm wide, 380 mm deep, 170 mm tall, cut from a single pine panel.