How to rewrite a sentence without changing what you claimed
Why synonym swapping is not paraphrasing, which hedges go missing in a rewrite, and where rewriting does not solve the problem at all.
Read moreWhy Celsius to Fahrenheit needs two operations instead of one
Every other conversion here is a single multiplication, but the two temperature scales disagree about where zero sits as well as how large a degree is. Why a 10°C rise converts to an 18°F rise rather than 50°F, and which specific pound and foot are actually being used.
Read moreDetaching keeps both halves — muting throws one away
One video becomes a silent video and an MP3, and from an MP4 the picture is copied without being re-encoded at all. Why the timing survives the split, what the quality setting does and does not affect, and when there is nothing to separate.
Read moreWhy four citation styles do not format an author list the same way
APA and Harvard reduce a name to initials and a comma; MLA and Chicago keep the first name and only flip the lead author. Why each style switches to 'et al.' at a different number of authors, and the one trick for entering an organisation as an author.
Read moreGetting a document out of Markdown when the reader does not use it
Markdown has no single specification, so know which subset you are writing to. What passes through as literal characters, writing to convert cleanly, and when to use something heavier.
Read moreBox shadows that look like light rather than paint
Why most shadows are too opaque and not blurred enough, how to build an elevation scale, why two stacked shadows beat one, and the animation technique that avoids a repaint.
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Why base64 output is always about a third larger than the input
Three bytes become four characters every time, a fixed cost of the format rather than something content-dependent. Why it offers no protection whatsoever despite looking unreadable, and why a token using dash and underscore needs converting before it will decode here.
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Why keyword density stopped mattering, and what to measure instead
A ranking factor that died twenty years ago, what the word count still usefully reveals about a draft, and the five signals worth watching in its place.
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Resizing: both numbers are used exactly as entered
There is no aspect lock, so mismatched dimensions distort without warning. The one line of arithmetic that prevents it, why enlarging cannot add detail, and the sizes destinations actually use.
Read moreWhat a good summary keeps, and what it is safe to drop
Extraction and abstraction fail in opposite directions. How sentence ranking works, which documents defeat it, and the check that catches a summary saying more than its source.
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