There is a satisfying category of question where something entirely familiar turns out to be unexplained, and purring belongs in it.
The sound is known to essentially everybody. It is…
The central fact is that honey contains far more dissolved sugar than water can normally hold, and very little water at all. Almost every peculiar thing about it follows from…
There is a category of behaviour that everybody recognises immediately and nobody can define precisely, which is usually a sign that something interesting is going on.
Play is obvious when…
Source: Wikipedia
There is an intuition about layered rock that is almost universal and substantially wrong.
The intuition is that layers accumulate steadily, like pages in a book, so that a…
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,…