For those dependent on their gardens for fresh food, it was often a case of feast or famine. . . (One settler wrote), "Strawberries were now so plentiful that. . . I made 287 lbs of jam. . . "
John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.