1–10 of 85 posts
Meta-programming, in ruby (the power of code that creates code, being released from the tyranny of typing)
Social psychology (Social proof, hacks for relating to people, hacks for appealing to the opposite sex, hacks for reading people)
Economics (Why the minimum wage is damaging, why free trade is good)
Mathematical things: A clever geometric proof of the AM-GM inequality, the Monty Hall problem, functional programming.
Architectures are designed to solve the known set of problems at the time of inception. When that problem set changes people try to adapt the architecture to solve the new problem set. Usually this is done through the path of least resistance. The easiest to implement with the least known side effects.
My favorite example: Web browsers were never ever meant to host applications when they were first designed. They can only passably do so today through elaborate hacks. This is why writing a good web application is so difficult and time consuming. These hacks are now well known established parts of what is the accepted architecture of web browsers but they were once hacks and are still hacks.
Similar examples exist all over the place. Design for the future and build for today...
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...
Differential calculus. Lisp. The circle of fifths.
Sexual selection is the second child of Darwin that people haven't paid as much attention to, but he spent a significant amount of time devoting study to it. It poses interesting questions on the canonical natural selection mechanisms, when mate selection is factored in. When you look at the mating systems of other animals, there's a wide wide variety. From males that care for the young, polygamy being the norm in birds, homosexuality not all that uncommon in the animal kingdom, and factors that affect male:female size ratio. After learning about it, you dismiss arguments people make about how this or that aspect of nature is 'unnatural'. Chances are, they've never looked, and think all mating systems are like human ones.
Quitting the for-loop through functional programming styles. Hello map, inject, and each. Understanding the power of Lisp, and why it has parens everywhere. Understanding continuations are functions that don't return, and you merely chain them together. Still working on monads though.
That conservation laws follow from deeper symmetry principles (Noether's theorem). Symmetry under translation corresponds to conservation of momentum, symmetry under rotation to conservation of angular momentum, symmetry in time to conservation of energy!