Eight stations, every time.
Every explanation here walks the same eight steps. That constancy is the point: once you know the shape, you can enter a piece anywhere and know what you are looking at.
The walk
8 stations| Mark | Station | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| a | The question we started with | The question, restated so the familiar label stops doing the work. |
| b | Reasoning it through | The mechanism worked through, step by step. |
| c | The analogy | One analogy — and the honest place it stops holding. |
| d | Clarifying the model | The correction: what the analogy would leave you believing wrongly. |
| e | A picture of it | A drawn figure of the same reasoning. |
| f | What became clearer | What actually became clearer, stated plainly. |
| g | Where to go next | The next questions worth asking. |
| h | Key terms | The terms the piece relied on, defined. |
Shelfmarks
how to read oneEach explanation carries a shelfmark such as AST·07. The three letters are its broad
domain — AST for Astronomy & Space — and the number is its position within that
domain, alphabetically. Shelfmarks are this collection's own numbering; they cite nothing outside it.
Figures
drawn, not embeddedEvery figure is drawn as vector artwork in the site's own palette and switches with the theme. Click any figure to open it full-size, where you can zoom with the wheel or the +/− controls and drag to pan.
Reading it your way
what the page remembersThe theme you choose, the explanations you save, and the ones you have opened are kept in this browser and nowhere else. Nothing is sent anywhere. Press ? at any time for the keyboard shortcuts.