The origin of money is inherently unknowable. It happens before the start of the historical record, and archaeological evidence will not have much to say, and anthropological studies are unlikely to find a money-naive culture at the point of discovering the concept. The theories cannot be expected to ever be tested.
“What we've discovered,” says Lee, “uh, what we've concluded, you know, is basically that the machine that would fit a pig's teat is a human breast pump. It fits perfectly.”
Too bad they did not describe what pig's milk is like, or how “Anyone who farms pigs would say that pigs' milk would make an incredible cheese,” How would an ordinary farmer know, having never collected the milk?
It seems odd that the patent system does not take into account whether an invention could be nearly as profitable as a trade secret or on the other hand, could not possibly be kept secret while used for profit.
Imagine a manufacturing process, and a transformative invention that makes the product 10 or 100 times cheaper to make than any method that does not use the invention. The invention is used in-house, and there is no advantage to be gained from licencing the invention. Distributing the process to be closer to raw materials or customers conveys no advantage over centralized production. Given such a situation, the company with the invention is likely to bet they can keep it secret longer than the term of a patent.
Of course I cannot give any specific examples. They are currently secrets, or they are secrets that died with the company or died with the obsolescence of the product.
Counting calories can not be a long term solution for obesity. A workable solution must be based on easier to implement facts such as the more sweets one eats, the more one craves sweets. I would recommend the No S Diet: www.nosdiet.com "I would have them eat a lower-calorie diet. They should eat whatever they normally eat, but eat less. You must carefully measure this. Eat as little as you can get away with, and try to exercise more." -Dr. Jules Hirsch. This is incredibly poor advice, based in physics, and ignoring psychology.
It is a very old saying from when "prove" meant what "test" means now. Exception is meant in the sense of exceptional, unusual. "The unusual event tests the heuristic."
However, for a few evolutionarily novel problems, evolution equipped us with general intelligence so that our ancestors could reason in order to solve them. These evolutionarily novel problems were few and far between.
This implies that the evolutionary selection of intelligence was sexual selection, that our brains evolved like a peacock's tail.