The hard part of a clock was never the gears. It was finding something that does the same thing over and over at exactly the same rate, and then extracting…
There is a common experience in a large domed building, which is standing underneath and being unable to work out what is holding it up.
That reaction is appropriate. A…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a systematic bias in what the past leaves behind, and it favours hard things.
Bone, shell, wood and teeth survive burial. Skin, muscle, hair, feathers, membranes and…
There is a problem in measurement that comes up whenever something matters and cannot be instrumented reliably.
The problem is that a quantity may be important, variable and consequential while…
There is a class of everyday object where the design solves a problem so completely that the problem becomes invisible, and the pencil is a good example.
The problem is…
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…