There is a problem in the design of any keyboard instrument that strikes rather than plucks, and solving it took a long time.
The problem is that a string only…
There is a common assumption that different teas come from different plants, in the way that apples and pears come from different trees.
They do not. The overwhelming majority of…
There is a category of invention that is hard to recognise as an invention because it seems like a description of how things obviously are.
Alphabetical order is the clearest…
There is a useful question to ask about any traditional material: what problem does the processing solve, and what happens if you skip it?
For leather the answer is unusually…
There is a common way of describing chimneys that gets the direction of the mechanism backwards and consequently makes every practical problem inexplicable.
The description is that smoke rises and…
Light leaves every point of a subject in all directions. A lens collects some of that and reconverges it, and the entire craft is built on the properties and failures…