Discover
Technology has a habit of hiding interesting ideas in plain sight. Here are a few worth a closer look.
26 stories to explore
This rocket is made of circles.
Nothing here knows what a rocket is. A handful of rotating arrows simply happen to agree on where the pencil should go.
The stripes your camera invented
A fine pattern meets a pixel grid. Their disagreement becomes a pattern of its own.
What a sound looks like
A spectrogram turns a passing vibration into a picture you can read. The choice of window decides what becomes clear.
The curve hiding inside a font
Four points can describe a flowing line, even when the line never passes through two of them.
Why a diagonal becomes a staircase
A pixel has an area. Treating it as a yes-or-no point throws away a useful part of the picture.
Why averaging colours can make a dark middle
The numbers stored in an image are not usually proportional to the light a screen should emit.
Two flat pictures, one clue to depth
A sideways camera shift turns distance into a measurable displacement, provided the geometry is known.
Where parallel lines appear to meet
Perspective preserves straightness while changing scale. The meeting point belongs to a direction, not a destination.
Why some shadows have soft edges
A broad lamp can be partly hidden. That partial visibility draws the transition around a shadow.