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…
Light leaves every point of a subject in all directions. A lens collects some of that and reconverges it, and the entire craft is built on the properties and failures…
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 principle in materials: if a substance behaves oddly in several unrelated ways, there is usually one structural feature responsible for all of them.
Wool behaves oddly…
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 —…