On Documentation
Here’s a partial list of surprising things about human technology:
* Throughout history, when someone has learned something that they…
Scope of Work
Excellent writing about the physical world.
Tallow to Margarine
TW Lim on how we went from mining nature for particular fats, to mining fats for their components.…
TW Lim
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Bare Beauty, Beyond Euclid
Jordan Ellenberg calls geometry “the cilantro of math,” which is to say that few people feel neutral about it. His…
Strangers on boats.
When my grandmother immigrated to Canada from Scotland, she brought a trunk full of her grandmother’s photo albums, which…
We're reading Dust
Dust is so ubiquitous that most people barely notice it. Jay Owens is an exception. She has been paying close…
How Slow Scan TV Shaped The Moon
lee wilkins on slow scan TV, the technology that brought the moon landing to the masses.…
Notes, 2023-12-11
James Coleman on the complexity of incentive structures around negative emissions technologies.…
Notes, 2023-12-04.
With 2023 drawing to a close, I have a New Year’s resolution: I will do more field reporting. This…
Let a Hundred Mechanisms Bloom.
Spencer Wright on antique apple parers, and how an old tool can force you to confront a problem anew.…
Plastic Archeology.
George Cave on the evolution of Lego and the archeology of plastic.…
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