There is a constraint on ships that has no equivalent on land and that determines almost everything about how vessels are shaped and sized.
The constraint is that a vessel…
Maya Linton
There is a widespread assumption about roads that is understandable and backwards.
The assumption is that the hard black surface is the road, and that what lies beneath it is…
There is a difference between two ways of putting a mark on a surface, and almost everything about the history of writing materials follows from it.
The first is to…
There is a small category of materials obtained from a living organism without killing it, and a smaller category still where the organism replaces what was taken.
Cork belongs to…
There is a common assumption about concealment that is intuitive and mostly wrong.
The assumption is that hiding means matching — that the way to be invisible is to be…
There is a plant that behaves so differently from a tree that most of what people assume about it is wrong, starting with what it is.
Bamboo is a grass.…