The Stripe Was a Cassette Tape
The brown band on the back of the old cards was magnetic tape, in the same sense that a cassette was magnetic tape, and…
Named after the thing it barely does, and placed under the window deliberately. Here are sixteen.
1. The Name Is Wrong
Only a minority of the heat leaving a typical…
It Does Not Catch Anything
The name does not help and the shape does not help. It is a metal box in an exhaust pipe, the pipe is dirty, and…
The Problem Is Harder Than It Sounds
A machine taking money has to answer a question that a person answers effortlessly and unconsciously: is this a real coin, and which…
Three Pins, Three Completely Different Jobs
It looks like a symmetrical arrangement of three identical things, and it is nothing of the kind. The three pins are doing three unrelated…
The Belief Is Universal and It Is Backwards
Ask anybody how a microwave differs from a conventional oven and you will be told that it heats from the inside out.…