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,…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a class of invention that is invisible because it is too small to notice, and fastenings are the clearest example on any person's body right now.
The…
Face recognition feels like a single ability that everybody has, working roughly the same way in everybody.
That impression is wrong in the way most impressions about internal experience are…
There is a fact about the past that is difficult to hold onto because it contradicts something we do daily without thinking.
For most of human history, almost nobody had…
There is a constraint that shapes plant biology more than almost anything else, and it is easy to overlook because it is so obvious.
Plants cannot move. Not slightly limited…