There is a useful principle about signals that applies well beyond sound, and whistles are the clearest everyday demonstration of it.
The principle is that being heard is a matter…
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 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 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…
There is a way of analysing junctions that makes their differences obvious, and it is not the one most people use.
The usual way is to think about rules —…