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 —…
Nothing here is about packing, which is a separate problem. This is about the evening before - the arrangements, the checks and the decisions that determine whether the departure is…
The heat does not exist in the seed. It is created on demand when the cell structure is broken and water is present, and it is unstable from the moment…
The hard part of a clock was never the gears. It was finding something that does the same thing over and over at exactly the same rate, and then extracting…
Almost everything about how a book feels - whether it stays open, how it turns, how heavy it is for its size - was decided during manufacture rather than design.…