Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about the tension between IKEA's sustainability branding and the fact that their stuff doesn't stay compatible across generations. The KALLAX shelf changes dimensions, BILLY bookcases get new hole spacing, and suddenly your old inserts don't fit. He's wondering: if standardization in industrial storage — Euroboxes, pallets, shipping containers — is both an efficiency win and an environmental win, then the lack of it in consumer goods has to be a corresponding environmental loss. Has anyone in the regulatory world actually connected those dots? And has IKEA addressed this directly?
This is the kind of question where the more you dig, the weirder it gets. IKEA does talk about sustainability constantly. They have an entire strategy called "People and Planet Positive." They've pledged to be circular and climate positive. But the compatibility problem sits in this strange blind spot.
The sustainability report as a genre is basically the corporate equivalent of a juice cleanse. You feel virtuous, nothing really changes, and the toxins are still there.
Yet, I want to be fair — IKEA does do things that are genuinely unusual for a furniture giant. They own more wind turbines than any other furniture company. They've invested about four billion euros in renewable energy. Their forestry practices are third-party certified through the Forest Stewardship Council. By twenty twenty-five they were sourcing nearly all their wood from FSC-certified or recycled sources. So when they claim to be a sustainability leader, it's not entirely hot air. But the compatibility question — the planned discontinuity of their product lines — that's a completely different axis. And it's one their entire reporting framework seems designed to not see.
Which is itself a design choice. What you measure is what you manage, and what you don't measure is what you're hoping nobody asks about.
IKEA's sustainability metrics track carbon footprint, renewable energy share, recycled material content, water use. None of their key performance indicators measure product longevity across generations. None of them track whether a shelf from twenty twenty fits the brackets they're selling today. None of them account for the plastic bins that become landfill because the new model is eleven inches deep instead of ten and a half.
The question is whether this omission is an oversight or a feature. And I think you can make a case either way.
Let's start with what actually happens when IKEA changes a product. The KALLAX is the poster child. When they replaced the EXPEDIT, they reduced the outer dimensions by about one centimeter on each side. The internal cubby dimensions shrank. Inserts that fit EXPEDIT didn't fit KALLAX. And IKEA's position was essentially, we made it better — lighter, using less material, more efficient to ship.
Which is a genuine sustainability argument. Less material per unit, more units per shipping container, lower transport emissions.
And that's the trap. Because any individual redesign can be justified on its own terms. The new version uses fifteen percent less particleboard. It stacks more efficiently on a pallet. The carbon footprint per shelf is lower. All of that is true. And all of it ignores the externalized cost — the existing inserts that now need to be replaced, the perfectly functional bins that no longer fit, the plastic that was manufactured to dimensions that no longer exist in IKEA's catalog.
It's like they're optimizing a single variable in a system where all the variables are connected. You reduce material per unit, you increase units thrown away. Net effect on material throughput is...
Nobody knows, because nobody's measuring it. IKEA doesn't track what happens to the aftermarket when they change a product line. They don't have a metric for "induced waste from incompatibility." It's a negative externality that falls entirely on the consumer and the municipal waste system.
This isn't a small company. IKEA sells something like forty billion euros of product a year. Even a small percentage of incompatibility-induced churn translates into enormous material flows.
Let me give you a concrete example. The SAMLA storage box line — those transparent plastic bins with lids. IKEA has changed the lid design at least three times that I can track. Same name, same basic concept, but the lids from twenty eighteen don't necessarily fit the twenty twenty-four boxes. The boxes themselves are polypropylene, which is technically recyclable, but municipal recycling systems are terrible at handling large rigid plastics. So most end up in landfill or incineration. And the reason they end up there is literally a few millimeters of dimensional change.
The SAMLA box is the plastic equivalent of a printer cartridge. The form factor is the business model.
A Swedish consumer program documented something like two hundred product changes over a five-year period that broke backward compatibility — and in most cases, the changes were invisible to a consumer browsing the showroom. The product looked identical. Same name, same color, same basic shape. But the new lid didn't fit the old box.
Two hundred changes over five years. That's basically one every nine days. At that pace, it's not an occasional engineering necessity — it's how the system is designed to operate.
Here's where it gets really interesting from a regulatory perspective. The European Union has been building out a framework that's increasingly hostile to planned obsolescence. The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation — ESPR — entered into force in mid twenty twenty-four. It expands the earlier Ecodesign Directive to cover almost all physical products sold in the EU, including furniture.
The EU is now regulating furniture for sustainability. What does that actually require?
The regulation sets a framework. The specific requirements come through delegated acts for each product category. Furniture is in the pipeline — the European Commission has identified it as a priority, with a delegated act expected in twenty twenty-six or twenty twenty-seven. The key word is "reparability." ESPR includes requirements for spare parts availability, access to repair information, and design for disassembly.
Repairability is not the same thing as backward compatibility, though.
It's not. And this is the gap. The regulation is focused on whether you can fix a product when it breaks — can you get a replacement hinge, can you replace a damaged panel. It doesn't address whether the storage box you buy in twenty twenty-seven will accept the lid you bought in twenty twenty-five. It doesn't require dimensional stability across product generations.
The regulator has built a fence around the barn, but the horse is in a different field entirely.
There's a reason for this, and it's not just regulatory failure. Dimensional interoperability is hard to mandate. If you require that every new version be compatible with every previous version, you're essentially freezing the design. You can never change the material thickness. You can never improve the structural design. You lock in every dimension forever.
That's exactly what the Eurobox system does, and it works. The whole point of standardization is that you agree on the interface and you're free to innovate inside the box — literally. The external dimensions are fixed, the material, the construction method, the color, the weight — all of that can change.
The Eurobox system is a voluntary standard that emerged from industry coordination. The VDA in Germany developed it in the nineteen seventies because automotive supply chains were drowning in incompatible containers. Every supplier had their own bin size, nothing stacked, warehouses were chaos. So industry had a direct economic incentive to standardize. The cost of incompatibility was borne by the same companies that would benefit from standardization.
With consumer storage, the cost of incompatibility is borne by me, in my garage, staring at a shelf of bins that no longer have matching lids. IKEA doesn't feel that pain.
That's the externality problem in a nutshell. And it's not just IKEA. Go to any big-box store and try to find a bin from brand A that stacks securely on a bin from brand B. It's a compatibility desert. Every manufacturer designs their own ecosystem, and the ecosystems don't talk to each other. It's like every phone charger being proprietary, which by the way the EU did eventually regulate.
The USB-C mandate is a really interesting parallel. The EU said, we don't care how you design the phone, but the charging port has to be this standard. That's an interface regulation. And it worked — estimated to reduce electronic waste by something like eleven thousand tons per year.
USB-C is a single interface. A storage box has at least three — the footprint on a shelf, the stacking geometry on top, and the lid closure. And those interfaces interact with each other. Change the lid closure and you might need to change the rim geometry, which changes the footprint. It's a more complex standardization problem.
Not an impossible one. The Eurobox standard defines all of those interfaces. The question is whether anyone is willing to extend that logic from industrial to consumer goods.
There's a fascinating philosophical question here about what a consumer product is versus an industrial product. Euroboxes are boring. They're gray. They're optimized for function. Nobody buys a Eurobox because it sparks joy. But consumer storage is a fashion category now. The Container Store built an entire retail experience around the idea that bins are aspirational. IKEA's storage range changes colors seasonally. There are trends in home organization.
The Marie Kondo industrial complex. Your bins must spark joy, and joy has a six-month shelf life.
That's not entirely frivolous. People do care about how their homes look. A standardization mandate that said all storage bins must conform to Eurobox dimensions would mean the end of that aesthetic diversity. You'd get a world of gray rectangles.
I'm not sure that's true. The shipping container is standardized to an extreme degree — corner castings, twist-lock positions, external dimensions — and yet people have built houses out of them, swimming pools, art installations. Standardization of the interface doesn't dictate the experience. It just means things fit together.
That's a good point. And it points to what a smart regulation might actually look like. You don't mandate a single bin size. You mandate that manufacturers declare their interface dimensions, maintain them across product generations, or at minimum label compatibility clearly. Something like: this bin is part of the SAMLA twenty twenty-four interface family, compatible with lids and accessories from twenty twenty onward. If you change the interface, you change the family name.
That would at least make the incompatibility legible. Right now, the consumer has no way of knowing that the SAMLA box they're buying today won't fit the lids they bought three years ago. The name is the same, the appearance is the same, the failure only becomes visible at home when you try to close the lid and it doesn't snap.
IKEA has actually addressed this — sort of — in their sustainability communications. They talk about modularity, about products that can be disassembled and reassembled. They highlight that you can buy spare parts for many products. But when you dig into what "modularity" means in their framing, it's about being able to add components to a single product over its lifetime, not about compatibility across product generations.
It's modularity within a generation, not across generations. Your KALLAX is modular — you can add drawers, doors, inserts. But those modules only work with the KALLAX you bought in the same era. It's a walled garden of modularity.
There's a term for this in the sustainability literature: "relative decoupling" versus "absolute decoupling." Relative decoupling means you're getting more efficient per unit — less material per shelf, less carbon per kilometer of transport. Absolute decoupling means total material throughput is actually going down. IKEA is very good at relative decoupling and very quiet about absolute decoupling. Their reports will say "we reduced the carbon footprint of product X by twenty percent." They won't say "and we sold thirty percent more units, so total emissions went up.
The classic efficiency trap. More efficient cars, people drive more. More efficient shelves, people buy more shelves.
Incompatibility is a demand driver. It's not just that products wear out — particleboard furniture does have a limited lifespan, though IKEA's is better than most. It's that the ecosystem around the product becomes obsolete. Your storage system stops being expandable. You can't add a shelf to the unit you bought five years ago because the mounting hardware changed. So you replace the whole thing.
Has IKEA ever been directly confronted on this? In an investor call, a shareholder meeting, an interview?
I couldn't find a clear instance where an executive has been asked point-blank about dimensional compatibility as a sustainability issue. There's been plenty of criticism of IKEA's sustainability claims more broadly — an Earthsight report in twenty twenty-one alleging wood from illegally logged Russian protected forests, a Changing Markets Foundation report criticizing plastic packaging targets. But the specific compatibility question — the idea that changing product dimensions is a form of planned obsolescence with environmental consequences — that doesn't seem to have broken through into mainstream scrutiny.
Which is remarkable, given how many people have had the experience of discovering their old bins don't fit their new shelves. It's a universal consumer frustration, and yet it hasn't been framed as an environmental issue.
Part of the reason is that the environmental critique of IKEA has historically focused on two things: forestry practices and the sheer volume of stuff they sell. The forestry critique is about whether their wood sourcing is sustainable at their scale. The volume critique is about whether any company selling forty billion euros of furniture a year can be sustainable, period. The compatibility question falls between those two critiques. It's too granular for the big-picture critics and too systemic for the product reviewers.
It's the missing middle of environmental criticism. Not the forest, not the landfill, but the interface.
It connects to something bigger, which is that standardization is one of the most powerful environmental tools we almost never talk about. The shipping container reduced global transport energy intensity by something like ninety percent compared to break-bulk shipping. The Euro pallet — just agreeing on twelve hundred by eight hundred millimeters — eliminated enormous amounts of handling waste. These are unglamorous, invisible standards, and their environmental benefits are measured in millions of tons of avoided emissions.
Standardization is the infrastructure of efficiency. It's the boring thing that makes the interesting things possible.
The consumer storage industry has essentially rejected it. Not consciously, not as a strategy document that says "let's make incompatible bins to drive replacement sales." But the effect is the same. Every manufacturer designs in a vacuum, every product line evolves independently, and the result is a global inventory of plastic bins and shelving units that don't interoperate.
There's a market failure here, right? If consumers valued compatibility, manufacturers would compete on it. But compatibility is hard to evaluate at the point of sale. You don't know your bins won't stack until you get home. It's a credence attribute — like whether your coffee is fair trade. You can't verify it by looking at the product.
And credence attributes usually require either regulation or certification to function. Fair trade coffee works because there's a label. Organic works because there's a certification. There's no equivalent for storage compatibility. Nobody puts a "backward compatible" badge on a storage bin.
The "Works With Your Old Lids" certification. I'd buy that.
You joke, but a standard like that could actually emerge. There's a precedent in the software industry. When a new operating system comes out, there's an entire discourse about backward compatibility. Will your old apps work? Will your peripherals still connect? It's a purchasing factor. The consumer storage industry has just never developed that vocabulary.
Because nobody's forced them to. Software companies face backward compatibility pressure because switching costs are high and network effects are strong. If your apps don't work on the new OS, you might not upgrade. If your bins don't fit your new shelf, you just buy new bins. The switching cost is low — financially, anyway. Environmentally, it's enormous.
Let me try to quantify that. A typical plastic storage bin weighs about one to two kilograms. If IKEA sells — and I'm estimating — maybe a hundred million storage products a year, and even five percent of those are replacements for products that became incompatible rather than worn out, that's five million bins. At one and a half kilograms each, that's seven and a half million kilograms of plastic. From one retailer. And that's a conservative estimate.
Seven and a half million kilos of plastic that exists primarily because a dimension changed by a few millimeters. That's the environmental case in one number.
Plastic is just the most visible part. There's also the particleboard shelves that get replaced because the old inserts don't fit. The metal hardware. The transport emissions for all those replacement products. The whole cascade.
What would a regulator actually do about this? Walk me through the options.
There are roughly three levels of intervention. Level one is transparency. Require manufacturers to label products with their interface generation — essentially, a compatibility version number. If you change the dimensions, you increment the version. Consumers can at least make informed choices.
SAMLA two point oh. It's absurd that this doesn't exist.
Level two is a durability or compatibility warranty. Require manufacturers to maintain backward compatibility for a defined period — say, five or seven years. If you change the product, you have to continue selling the old version's accessories for that window. This is similar to what the EU already requires for spare parts under ESPR. You don't freeze the design forever, but you support the installed base for a reasonable time.
That seems like the sweet spot. It doesn't prevent innovation, but it forces the manufacturer to internalize the cost of obsolescence. If you want to change the SAMLA lid design, fine — but you're on the hook for supplying the old lids for seven years.
Level three is full interface standardization. The EU could, in theory, mandate that all consumer storage products conform to a set of standard dimensions — essentially, a Eurobox for the home. This is the nuclear option. It would solve the compatibility problem completely, but it would also eliminate a lot of design flexibility. And the political feasibility is essentially zero in the near term. The furniture industry would fight it ferociously, and consumers aren't demanding it.
Consumers aren't demanding it because they don't know they should. The environmental movement has been focused on straws and shopping bags — visible, individual-scale changes — while the structural stuff, the standardization of industrial design, goes completely undiscussed.
There's a reason for that. Straws are easy to understand. Standardization policy is technical and boring. It doesn't make for good protest signs. "What do we want? When do we want it? Within a reasonable transition period!
The chant needs work, but the principle is sound.
I do think there's a path that doesn't require full regulatory mandates. The EU's ESPR framework, as it develops delegated acts for furniture, could include something like a "design for compatibility" requirement. Not a specific dimension, but a requirement that manufacturers document and disclose their interface specifications, and justify any changes that break backward compatibility. Essentially, make incompatibility a deliberate choice that requires explanation, rather than an unremarked side effect of routine redesign.
That shifts the burden of proof. Right now, the assumption is that changing dimensions is fine unless proven harmful. You'd flip that: changing dimensions requires justification. And "we wanted to use slightly less particleboard" might not cut it if the net material impact is negative.
There's an interesting precedent in the automotive industry. For decades, car manufacturers designed vehicles that were difficult to repair except by authorized dealers using proprietary parts. The EU's Motor Vehicle Block Exemption Regulation changed that, requiring manufacturers to make repair information and parts available to independent garages. It didn't standardize car design, but it made the aftermarket more competitive and extended vehicle lifespans. Something similar for furniture could work — require that accessories and replacement parts remain available for a defined period, and require that dimensional changes be disclosed.
IKEA's response to all of this? Have they said anything about compatibility in their public statements?
IKEA's sustainability communications are remarkably silent on this specific issue. Their "People and Planet Positive" strategy talks about circular design, about using renewable and recycled materials, about enabling customers to repair and reuse products. They have a buy-back program in some markets where you can return used IKEA furniture for store credit. They sell spare parts — hinges, screws, cam locks. But nowhere in their public documentation have I found a commitment to maintaining dimensional compatibility across product generations.
The buy-back program is an interesting tell. It's a way of taking responsibility for the product's end of life without addressing the reason it reached end of life prematurely. It's a downstream solution to an upstream problem.
Buy-back programs have a mixed track record. The volume of furniture actually returned is tiny relative to sales — typically less than one percent. Most consumers don't bother. It's easier to put it on the curb or take it to the tip. So the program generates positive PR without materially changing the waste stream.
It's the sustainability equivalent of a recycling bin in the office kitchen. It makes people feel better, but the actual diversion rate is single digits.
I want to be careful here, because I'm not saying IKEA is uniquely bad. The entire furniture industry operates this way. IKEA is just the most visible and the most explicitly sustainability-branded. If you look at any flat-pack furniture company, they all change designs without regard for backward compatibility. IKEA gets the scrutiny because they're the biggest and because they make the biggest claims.
The bigger the halo, the more noticeable the smudges.
IKEA's halo is enormous. They've invested heavily in being perceived as the responsible choice. Their sustainability report is a hundred-plus-page document with detailed metrics and third-party audits. They're a founding member of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's circular economy initiative. They do more than most companies. But the compatibility gap is real, and it's not in the report.
Which brings us back to the original question. Has any environmental regulator connected standardization to sustainability in consumer goods? And the answer seems to be: not yet, but the machinery is being built that could.
The ESPR is the most relevant piece of regulation, and it's still early days for the furniture delegated act. The European Commission has signaled that furniture will be a priority, with durability and repairability as key criteria. Whether "compatibility across product generations" makes it into the final requirements depends on how the consultation process plays out. Industry will push back. Consumer groups and environmental NGOs will need to make the case. And the case is strong, but it hasn't been made loudly yet.
There's something almost poetic about this. The most powerful environmental intervention in consumer goods might not be a new material or a recycling technology. It might be a rule that says: if you change the dimensions, you have to tell people, and you have to support the old dimensions for seven years. That's it. No new science required. Just a requirement to be consistent.
It connects back to the Eurobox insight. The reason Euroboxes work isn't because the plastic is special or the design is brilliant. It's because someone wrote down the dimensions and everyone agreed to stick to them. The environmental benefit is an emergent property of the coordination. It's not designed in — it's a knock-on effect of standardization.
The coordination is the environmental intervention.
And coordination problems are notoriously hard to solve through markets alone. Every individual manufacturer benefits from being incompatible — it creates switching costs, it locks customers into their ecosystem. But collectively, the incompatibility is a disaster. It's a classic tragedy of the commons, played out in plastic bins and particleboard.
The commons being my garage.
The commons being the planet's material throughput, but yes, your garage is the front line.
If I'm a regulator looking at this, what's the actual mechanism? Do I set a standard, or do I require disclosure?
The most politically achievable path is probably disclosure first, compatibility requirements second. Start by requiring manufacturers to label products with an interface version and to publish compatibility information. Make the invisible visible. Once consumers can see the compatibility landscape, market pressure starts to build. Companies that maintain compatibility can advertise it. Companies that don't face scrutiny. Then, once the transparency infrastructure exists, you can layer on requirements: minimum support periods, justification for changes, eventually maybe standardized interface families.
The incremental approach. Don't ban incompatible bins — just make incompatibility embarrassing.
Embarrassment is underrated as a regulatory tool. The Toxics Release Inventory in the United States, which requires companies to report their toxic chemical releases, led to substantial emissions reductions without actually capping anything. Companies just didn't want to be on the list.
The "name and shame" school of environmental policy. Publish the data, let the press and the public do the work.
It works particularly well for consumer-facing companies. IKEA cares deeply about its brand. If there were a publicly available database showing that the SAMLA box has gone through six incompatible revisions in ten years while a competitor's equivalent has maintained compatibility, that's a story that gets written. That's a reputational cost that might actually change behavior.
The question is whether anyone's actually building that database. Is there a "Does It Fit" registry for consumer storage?
Not that I've found. There are enthusiast forums where people document compatibility — 3D printing communities, home organization blogs. But no systematic, public-facing database. It's a gap. And it's the kind of thing a motivated NGO or a particularly obsessive open-source developer could probably build. Scrape product dimensions, track changes over time, flag incompatibilities.
I think I know someone who fits that description.
I suspect we both do.
That's a side project, not policy. And the policy question remains: is anyone in Brussels or Washington actually working on this?
The closest thing I've found is the EU's ongoing work on a "digital product passport" under ESPR. The idea is that every product sold in the EU will eventually have a digital record containing information about its materials, repairability, and environmental footprint. In theory, a digital product passport could include compatibility information — what other products this item works with, what generation it belongs to, what's changed from the previous version. But that's not currently in the draft requirements. It would need to be added.
The infrastructure for solving this is being built, but the specific data point — does this bin fit the old lids — hasn't been prioritized.
It won't be unless someone makes the case. If you can quantify the material impact of incompatibility — the seven and a half million kilos of unnecessary plastic per year, the carbon footprint of replacement products, the landfill burden — you can make a regulatory argument that this data point matters. It's not just consumer convenience. It's an environmental metric.
The environmental case for standardization is hiding in plain sight. It's the shipping container argument, the Euro pallet argument, applied one level down. We've already accepted that standardization is an environmental good at the industrial scale. We just haven't extended the logic to the consumer scale.
The consumer scale matters. IKEA alone sells enough furniture to furnish something like one percent of the world's homes each year. The material flows are comparable to industrial supply chains. Treating home storage as a fashion category with seasonal redesign cycles is environmentally incoherent.
It's profitable.
It's profitable in the current accounting framework, which doesn't price externalities. If there were a carbon price that reflected the true cost of plastic production and disposal, or a landfill tax that made waste expensive, the economics of incompatibility would look very different. Suddenly, maintaining backward compatibility becomes a cost-saving measure rather than a revenue-losing one.
The fix might not need to be a specific storage regulation at all. A sufficiently high carbon price makes compatibility economically rational.
A carbon price helps, but it's a blunt instrument. It doesn't specifically target the compatibility problem. You'd need a very high carbon price to make a few millimeters of plastic dimension change economically significant. Targeted regulation — disclosure requirements, minimum support periods — is probably more efficient for this specific problem.
What about IKEA themselves? If they're committed to sustainability, as opposed to just sustainability branding, shouldn't they be ahead of this? Shouldn't they be the ones proposing a compatibility standard?
That's the frustrating thing. IKEA has the scale and the brand motivation to lead on this. If they announced tomorrow that all IKEA storage products would maintain dimensional compatibility for a minimum of ten years, and that any changes would be clearly labeled and supported with a transition period, it would transform the industry. Competitors would have to respond. It would be a genuine sustainability leadership move.
They haven't.
They haven't. And I think the reason is that compatibility is expensive. It constrains design. It means you can't optimize each product generation independently. It means you carry legacy inventory. It means your supply chain has to support multiple generations of accessories simultaneously. For a company built on relentless cost optimization, that's a hard sell internally.
We're back to the tragedy of the commons. Individual rationality, collective irrationality. The only way out is coordination — either through regulation or through a standard that enough of the industry adopts voluntarily.
Voluntary standards in consumer goods have a mixed record. USB succeeded because the major players all saw a shared interest. In furniture, the incentives are more fragmented. IKEA is so dominant that they don't really need industry coordination. They can set their own standards and the market follows. So a voluntary standard probably requires IKEA to initiate it. And they haven't.
Which leaves regulation as the most likely path. ESPR, the delegated act on furniture, the digital product passport. The pieces are on the board. They just haven't been assembled yet.
In the meantime, millions of plastic bins continue their journey from showroom to garage to landfill, victims of a few millimeters of dimensional drift. It's a slow-motion environmental disaster that nobody's paying attention to.
The banality of bin evil.
I wish that weren't such a good summary.
To wrap this back to the prompt — has IKEA addressed the sustainability dimension of product incompatibility? The answer is no, not directly. Their sustainability framework doesn't have a category for it. The regulatory framework that could address it is under construction but not yet operational. And the environmental case for standardization in consumer storage is strong but largely unmade.
The one thing I'd add is that this is a solvable problem. It's not a technical challenge — the Eurobox standard proves dimensional interoperability is achievable. It's not even primarily a cost challenge — the long-run savings from reduced material throughput probably outweigh the short-run design constraints. It's a coordination challenge. Someone needs to convene the conversation, quantify the impact, and build the case. And that hasn't happened yet.
If you're a listener with a garage full of incompatible bins, take heart. Your frustration is not just personal. It's a systemic market failure with measurable environmental consequences. And the solution is not a better recycling program. It's a rule that says bins should fit the lids they came with.
Or at minimum, a label that tells you when they won't.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the high medieval period, the mathematician Ibn al-Samh of the Cordoban school derived a theorem for calculating the azimuth of the qibla using a spherical trigonometric method so precise that it was lost when his works were destroyed during the Berber revolt of the eleventh century — and remained unrediscovered until a fragmentary manuscript surfaced in a Timbuktu library in Niger in two thousand seventeen, where researchers realized he had independently derived what we now call the law of sines for spherical triangles nearly two centuries before it appeared in Persian astronomical tables.
...right.
I'm going to need a minute with that one.
It's a trap.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts.com or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this, leave us a review — it helps other people find the show.
If your storage bins don't stack, know that you're not alone. You're part of a global material flow problem that someone should really get around to regulating.
See you next time.
