“Without vitamin C,” Anthony writes, “we cannot produce collagen, an essential component of bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues. Collagen binds our wounds, but that binding is replaced continually throughout our lives. Thus in advanced scurvy”—reached when the body has gone too long without vitamin C—“old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.”
In a sense, there is no such thing as healing. From paper cuts to surgical scars, our bodies are catalogues of wounds: imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting, sooner or later, to spring back open.
A piece of milled plexiglass acting as a projecting lens; via the Computer Graphics and Geometry Lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
New milling techniques applied to glass and plexiglass panels could be used to “create windows that are also cryptic projectors, summoning ghostly images from sunlight.”
[Pauly and Bompas] hope that the technique will be used in architectural design, to create windows that mould sunlight and throw images or patterns onto walls or floors,” which, if timed, milled, and manipulated just right, could produce a slowly animated sequence of images being projected by an otherwise empty window during different times of day.
Customers have trouble distinguishing between essential features and those that are just "nice to have." Examples of the latter class: those arbitrarily overlapping windows suggested by the uncritically but widely adopted desktop metaphor; and fancy icons decorating the screen display, such as antique mailboxes and garbage cans that are further enhanced by the visible movement of selected items toward their ultimate destination. These details are cute but not essential, and they have a hidden cost.
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Increased complexity results in large part from our recent penchant for friendly user interaction. I've already mentioned windows and icons; color, gray-scales, shadows, pop-ups, pictures, and all kinds of gadgets can easily be added.