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Field note no. 3
A Tree Is Made of Air
Knock on the nearest piece of wood. Where did all that weight come from? Nearly everyone says the soil, and educated people said so for two thousand years. One man settled it with a bucket, a young tree, and five years of patience.
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Field note no. 2
Fit Never Meant Strong
Find your keys. The one that opens your front door is not the strongest key on the ring — it is the one shaped right for a single lock. That difference is the whole of evolution, and it is the word almost everybody now reads wrong.
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Field note no. 1
The Iron in Your Blood Was Forged in a Star
Put two fingers on your neck. What you can feel is being carried by metal that was made inside a star which died before there was an Earth for it to fall on. Not as a metaphor — as the arithmetic of the periodic table, applied to biology.
The next one goes to the list before it goes here.
A letter every few weeks, from inside the book — passages in progress, the research that did not fit, and word of where the manuscript stands.