We’ve all enjoyed playing board games – Timeless ones like Chess and Checkers, and more modern ones like Monopoly and Risk. So I was in the Israel Museum the other day and saw the game in the photo above. This is Senet, a two player game from ancient Egypt. This particular item is from 15th-13th … Read more
My Commonsense Design blog has been active since 2008, sharing my views and observations on product design and the occasional off-topic thought. To my delight, it created discussion when readers cared to share their comments and critique. At this time the blog is moving – with all its content – to the blog section of … Read more
The photographic camera is one of the great inventions of the 19th century, and is quite a simple idea: take a light sensitive surface, put a lens in front of it, add the ability to control exposure time and aperture, and you’re all set. And for more than a century, that’s what cameras were all … Read more
When my kids were at school they were taught addition with colored wooden rods. Well, a century earlier two innovative Frenchmen – Henri Genaille and Edouard Lucas – invented a system that does rapid multiplication and division using much more sophisticated rods, and I have in my collection a box of these ingenious calculation aids. … Read more
Monsieur C.-F. Martin was a retired naval clerk, and evidently he had developed a great love for painstaking calculation. Just see this 100×100 multiplication table and units conversion tables he published at the beginning of the 19th century, to help his countrymen deal with the switch from the old Empire weights and measures to the … Read more
The Gerber Variable Scale, described here, is a thing of beauty and elegance, admirable for its ingenuity and craftsmanship. It is also a “one of a kind” device, or so I thought until my unexpected sighting on eBay of the “Proportional Rule” made by the Data Scaler corporation of Westfield, Massachusetts. This device is a … Read more
The circular slide rule developed around 1920 by Jules Arnault and Louis Paineau comes in a wooden frame, to give it durability and ease of use; but it is so pretty you can – and I did – hang it on your wall! Aside from being pretty, this is an ingeniously designed and very well-made … Read more
Here is a photo of the Jerusalem central bus station, a large blocky building at the entrance to the city. So, maybe it’s just me, but whenever I see it I get reminded of a mathematical construct – the Menger Sponge, a three dimensional fractal. Judge for yourself: OK, OK, the bus station is not … Read more
This new article on my Possibly Interesting site is strictly for radio amateurs and other geeks: a photo-essay depicting circuit and construction details of the SSB transmitter I’d built a long time ago. What makes it interesting (other than the nostalgia of vacuum tubes, that is) is the prevalence of improvised, scavenged and military surplus … Read more
Say “Alice in wonderland”, and the image that comes to mind (well, at least in the generations that used to read books) is a little girl in a tidy Victorian knee-length puffed sleeve dress with a pinafore, and long blond hair – the girl in the image at right. This comes from the famous illustrations … Read more
