One of the most famous sculptures made in Israel is “Nimrod”, created in 1939 by Itzhak Danziger. A powerful figure in red sandstone, it depicts a naked young man with a falcon on his shoulder and a sword held behind his back, looking intensely ahead. This is Nimrod, the biblical great-grandson of Noah, king of … Read more
Some designs never change… Consider this one: Two instances of the same product exactly – but separated in time by two millennia. The die on the left is one of a collection of bone dice I saw in the archeological museum of Pompeii. The design worked then, and it works now. Nothing to improve… … Read more
A century ago Gilbert Small, of Waltham, Massachusetts, invented a compact pocket calculator that is small, effective, and designed with special attention to usability. Read the new article on my History of Computing site to see what he’d crafted!
Something caught my attention in this children’s playground in our neighborhood, where my kids used to play long years ago. Back then the slide was made of metal, but the new one works just fine. However, back then the slide ended in a large sandbox, which was a major attraction in its own right. Kids … Read more
Check out this humble black marker pen. What about it, you ask? Well, look at the close up: this marker marks most surfaces, is waterproof, practically odorless, safe… and has a cap off time of up to two weeks without drying up. What about it, you ask? Just think of the hi-tech perfection that this … Read more
I happened to look up and noticed this against the evening sky: These skewed towers with the broken antennas on top used to densely decorate every city rooftop when we were kids; every apartment needed an antenna, and the taller its tower, the better the reception – less “snow” and other interference in receiving … Read more
The art of Gauging and Ullaging, i.e. assessing the quantity of liquor, beer or malt in a barrel in order to tax it properly, used to be an important application of mathematics, and resulted in the development of some intricate computing devices over the last few centuries. Check the new article on my History of … Read more
Here are the headlamps of two Mazda cars. On the left, a Mazda 323 from the first half of the past decade, the other a Mazda 3 from the second half. Both fine family cars. See the difference in design strategy? The car on the left has the headlamp split into two parts. The one … Read more
New article on my History of Computing site: Elisha Kally’s water flow calculator, a sophisticated network calculator based on the Hazen-Williams formula. This ingenious slide rule can calculate flows and hydraulic head losses in complicated networks comprising up to six different pipes, all at once. Check it out!
Not all cool ideas are actually good. Back in 1983, around the time the IBM PC made its debut, my boss at Intel had acquired a very innovative personal computer: the Hewlett Packard 150. I remember it well; it was a really cool machine – at least in the context of its day: it had … Read more
