You probably know that plastics were first used for toys. You probably don’t know that the first metals were used by artists, as far as archeologists can determine. That’s material science, what about non-material science? Here’s Tyler Cowen:
I’ve been thinking of all those old puzzles where a bunch of guys enter the room and only so many of them have smudges on their foreheads and you have to find the algorithm to reveal that information.
The problem is to separate good banks from bad banks, so that good banks can continue business. A big reason I started self-experimentation was Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. I could sometimes solve Gardner’s made-up puzzles, which gave me confidence when a non-made-up puzzle — waking up too early — came along.
More When I pointed this post out to Tyler, he replied, “Exactly what I was thinking in fact, when I wrote that…I even almost mentioned Martin Gardner.”