Source: Wikipedia
There is an assumption that pre-modern financial systems were crude, and it is worth testing against an example.
The English Exchequer — the department handling royal revenue — kept…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a category of historical decision that turns out correct for reasons nobody involved understood, and this is the clearest example in the history of public works.
A…
Source: Wikipedia
Technologies are usually lost for identifiable reasons. A market disappears, a cheaper substitute arrives, a war interrupts a supply chain, or the last people who knew a process die…
Everybody who has been somewhere completely dark reports the same surprise: the sky is bright.
Not bright like daylight, but visibly not black. There is enough light to see the…
Everything below follows from the same arrangement: water on three sides or more, and one narrow way in by land. Here are seventeen things that produces.
1. The Spit That…
The reason night arrivals go wrong is not the darkness. It is that the desk is closed, the shop is shut, the information point is unstaffed and the transport is…