Nathan's Possibly Interesting web site
Commonsense design blog
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of everyday product design
Form follows function; but often both must follow the available materials. Consider the image that comes to mind at a statement like The great king raised his mighty sword to smite his enemies. Surely, you imagine a sword structured something like this: Photo courtesy Søren Niedziella, shared on flickr under CC license. This, after all, … Read more
Back from vacation, having flown a Boeing 737. This lacked the personalized screens seen in longer haul craft but it had a headset jack and a set of volume and channel controls for each passenger. The controls were set in the armrest, in easy reach of the passenger, like this: Cool, huh? Not cool. The … Read more
For some reason, inventors in the first half of the 20th century thought that incorporating a slide rule into a mechanical pencil was a great idea. In reality, these combination devices were of dubious utility, gives their low precision as calculators… but they are certainly ingeniously designed. I describe three of them, including one extremely … Read more
Evolution has crafted some amazing design solutions to the problems of life, and I never have enough of their elegance. Take the crocodile’s heart. Crocodiles have a special bypass short circuiting blood flow to their lungs. Specifically, although they have the same four chambered heart configuration as us mammals, which pumps the blood first to … Read more
Here is a bit of outstandingly smart design I saw in Terminal Five at London Heathrow airport. To fully appreciate the ingenuity, you should know that there are two security inspection areas (you know, where they check your shoes and X-Ray your hand luggage): Security North and Security South. Both serve the same function, and … Read more
My father, God rest his soul, was a young physics student when Israel’s war of independence broke out, and he was among the defenders of the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City. When the quarter fell to the superior forces of the Jordanian Legion, he was taken prisoner and spent 9 months in a POW … Read more
When I was QA manager in an Intel fabrication plant I had this Honda Acura ad copy stuck to my cubicle partition: To fully appreciate the precision that goes into our 24-valve, 2.7 liter, 161-horsepower engine, touch the ashtray. And indeed, a quality product – be it a car or a flashlight – reflects its … Read more
Unlike the US, Israel doesn’t celebrate its Independence Day by sending its president to fight invading aliens in huge spaceships (our presidents are too advanced in years for that). We do, however, have other traditions, and one of the earliest of these has been for the Jewish National Fund to issue each year a small … Read more
Check out the new article in the History of Computing section of my Possibly Interesting Web site: Five Intel chips that changed the world. These are the five “Firsts” that Intel introduced during its first four years as a small start-up: the first chip in each of four key memory types, and the first microprocessor. … Read more
I wrote recently about the batch of WW1 postcards left by my great-uncle Ettore… and while the cards described in that article focus on hate propaganda, there was also one postcard that is quite endearing, and here it is: This postcard was issued 100 years ago by the Third Regiment of Telegraph Operators – basically, … Read more