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…
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 Thing That Is Missing Is Ink
Open a photocopier and there is no liquid anywhere. No reservoir, no cartridge of fluid, no nib, no pad, no ribbon. The consumable…
The Bars Are Not the Code
The intuitive reading of a barcode is that each bar is a symbol, like a letter, and the sequence of bars spells out the…