I was leafing through the Journal of the American Medical Association discarded, unread, by the doctor down the hall. The cover, as is the tradition for the JAMA, is a reproduction of a famous artwork: Jan van Eyck’s The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin. I was at a loss to explain exactly what about the image bothers me—until I discovered a note inside detailing just how (and possibly why) the convergence is incorrect. Ha! The figures in the foreground are too big to fit through the doorway behind them!

Why don’t my trade journals have moments of Zen like this? Are doctors supposed to have better taste than engineers?