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THE STAIR TASK REDUX

Another weekend spent on the Stair Task. When I went out to delightedly put the finishing touches to my michaelangelic work on Saturday morning, I saw with eyes I somehow hadn't had last weekend that the last riser was four cm too high, which would fool the climbing foot into thinking the riser was the same height as the previous ones and causing stumbles for the next hundred years, couldn't believe I hadn't seen it, even with all those other things to think of, like a cure for cancer, the world economy, the Mets winning the series etc. So I tore the last step out and fixed it, got it the right height only to realize it wasn't centered. So I tore it out again and centered it, only to find out that one riser was in backward. So I tore it out (sometimes the learning curve is more like a flatline), turned it around, put it back in and fixed everything, only to realize that Einstein had no idea what he was talking about. 21 plus 6 equals 27, right? And a 27 cm wide riser-to-riser space would be well covered by a 30cm step, right? Wrong. At least not on my staircase. I think there's some kind of math warp up around my house in the region of the stone staircase, where 27 is bigger than 30. I measured the step: 30 cm wide, as it has always been. I removed it and measured the distance from the bottom of the upper riser to the top of the lower riser: 21 cm. And the thickness of the lower riser: 6cm, as it too has always been. So I put the step back on, and THE RISER STUCK OUT FROM BENEATH THE STEP!!!! Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, you guys had no idea that MATHEMATICS TOO IS RELATIVE!!!! Relative to what, I have no idea, except that it is focused around a stone staircase project in the mountains above a large lake somewhere in the far east that shall remain nameless, lest we get the tabloids over here (RELATIVITY DISPROVEN!! EXPATRIATE VIOLATES EINSTEIN!!). But you have to walk away; you can't let stone staircases drive you stone mad, as Archimedes intimated in his invention of the screw pump. I shall return.