Amateur carpenters who have laid out the cuts in a stair stringer (the zig-zag structural support for the steps) know the queasy feeling that bubbles up at the prospect of this job. There’s the simple ...

To lay out a set of stair stringers from scratch requires a little math, but not much. Equally important is some quiet time to run the numbers and at the same time to think about the construction ...

OK, what is a calorie, anyway? It’s a unit of energy, defined as the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 liter of water by 1 degree Celsius. (This is your common “food calorie”: ...