There is a structure that appears on rivers everywhere, that most people cannot name correctly, and that does something quite different from what it appears to do.
A weir looks…
There is a useful question to ask about any traditional material: what problem does the processing solve, and what happens if you skip it?
For leather the answer is unusually…
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…
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…