Series
The Senses
The machines at the boundary between the physical world and the digital one: how a camera turns light into numbers, how a screen turns numbers back into colour, how a microphone hears, a speaker speaks, a touchscreen feels you, and a printed code lets a machine read the world. Transducers, all the way down. Part of Under the Hood.
How Cameras Capture Light
A camera doesn't capture a picture; it captures a grid of brightness numbers and then guesses the colours. Every photo you've ever taken is millions of tiny light-counters reporting how many photons fell on them, run through a pile of clever maths that invents most of what you see. How that works explains both the magic and the lies of digital images.
Coming soon