There is a structure that appears on rivers everywhere, that most people cannot name correctly, and that does something quite different from what it appears to do.
A weir looks…
Maya Linton
There is a common way of describing chimneys that gets the direction of the mechanism backwards and consequently makes every practical problem inexplicable.
The description is that smoke rises and…
There is a category of vanished industry that seems impossible in retrospect, and the ice trade is the clearest example.
The proposition was to cut a perishable product out of…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a category of institution that was built on a wrong explanation and worked correctly anyway, and it is worth understanding because the pattern recurs.
The wrong explanation,…
There is a useful exercise in considering how recently an ordinary thing became ordinary, and fire on demand is the most striking example available.
Fire itself is extremely old. Reliable…
There is a way of analysing junctions that makes their differences obvious, and it is not the one most people use.
The usual way is to think about rules —…