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…
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 tendency to think of agricultural history as a matter of which crops were grown, and the tools receive far less attention than the plants.
That gets the…