I can’t believe how long it’s taken me to solve this Perplex City card. I’d sort of given up on it, but still had it around. Today, I picked it up while waiting for a package to build, and the answer just came to me. Duh.

Why can’t my Garmin GPS unit triangulate the position of a landmark for me? It’s got a built-in compass, and it’s got sight-markings on the casing for point-and-go navigation (you have to estimate the distance to the landmark). It would be great to be able to say ‘I can see it now if I look…

While looking up a word in the dictionary to improve my Scrabble score, I came across a word I hadn’t seen before: haecceity (hek’si:ɪtɪ). It’s the word to describe an object’s essence, or thisness, which makes it distinguishable from other similar objects. What a wonderful word! And I never would have found it if I’d…