It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.

All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.

I don't like sewing machines. I don't understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It's contrary to nature and it irritates me.

Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying.

So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?

Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.

Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.