Thomas Edison was bath at math

Thomas Edison was famously bad at math (he said he had a “distaste” for it), but math was essential to much of the work he did. Rather than force himself to learn it better, he focused where he excelled, and hired mathematicians to assist with his work.

Who built your mouse?

Related, Matt Ridley has a great riff on how there isn’t a single person on earth that can build a computer mouse. Between the plastic, metal, silicon, software, etc, it takes a lot of people to make a relatively simple device. Here’s a quick video of him explaining it:

Websites

You can take it further with websites. I understand WordPress quite well, but I don’t know every bit of it — not even close.

It relies on technologies like PHP and MySQL that I know even less about. A typical website is often running with Apache software on a Linux server, which is essentially where I tap out.

Of course, the hardware of the server itself is a wildly complex beast, at least a few orders of magnitude more complicated than…