Two things are moving in opposite directions the whole time: heat going in, and water coming out as steam. Which one is winning at any moment determines what the food…
Maya Linton
There is a category of behaviour that everybody recognises immediately and nobody can define precisely, which is usually a sign that something interesting is going on.
Play is obvious when…
Source: Wikipedia
There is an intuition about layered rock that is almost universal and substantially wrong.
The intuition is that layers accumulate steadily, like pages in a book, so that a…
There is a category of reform that looks obvious in retrospect and was truly difficult to arrive at, and postal payment is a clean example.
The arrangement that preceded it…
There is a strong intuition that coordinated group movement requires coordination — something issuing instructions, or at minimum some shared signal that everybody is responding to.
That intuition is wrong,…
There is a tendency to think of agricultural history as a matter of which crops were grown, and the tools receive far less attention than the plants.
That gets the…