The pattern is consistent: name the colour after the thing, then keep the name long after nobody uses the thing. Here are fifteen.
1. Maroon
From the French for chestnut,…
The useful way to think about vision is not as a recording but as a reconstruction — a best guess assembled from partial data. Here are twelve of the shortcuts…
Before anyone thought to define units against physical constants, they were defined against whatever was to hand — literally. Most of those origins are still buried in the words. Here…
Time feels like the most objective thing we measure, and the system we use to measure it is almost entirely a set of historical accidents. Here are twelve of them.…
When something arrives from elsewhere, people tend to name it after wherever it came through rather than wherever it came from. Multiply that by a few centuries of trade and…
Military research has a habit of producing things nobody anticipated, which then outlive the purpose they were built for. These twelve are all in ordinary use now, and all began…