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 Name Has Been Misleading People for Two Centuries
Almost everybody believes a lightning rod attracts lightning. It is an easy belief to hold, because the thing is pointed, it…
Source: Wikipedia
The Problem It Was Invented to Solve
Source: Wikipedia
White paint on a road is nearly useless at night. A headlight beam strikes a painted line at a very shallow…
The Counterintuitive Fact at the Centre of It
For the first half of the twentieth century, cars were built to resist damage. A heavy chassis, thick steel, rigid construction. After…
A smoke alarm is a white plastic disc with a button and a battery, and the assumption is that something inside it can somehow see smoke. Neither of the two…