Are there any girders in the picture then? Or none, or impossible to tell? I can’t see any, by that definition.

2 units (in this case houses) down and 2 across (a perhaps intentional misinterpretation of the original slightly ambiguous statement). Reasonable to assume down and across are perpendicular directions. Let’s pretend space-time is Euclidean. How far away is the listener from the sneeze? Pythagoras, our faithful companion, guides our understanding…√(2²+2²)=√8=2√2

I think when you read that article it’s important to think critically about how it’s composed. I am as anti-trump as the next European “centrist dad”, but nothing I read there made me think he went out of his way to tell that story unprompted. I imagine he was interviewed, said a bunch of stuff, and then someone cherry-picked the quotes they needed to support the narrative of the article… You can’t just take it at face value!?

It’s my favourite format. I think the original was ‘stop doing math’