play

• the chladni plate sand on a driven plate gets thrown off everywhere it moves and settles only on the lines where it doesn't. the figure is a census of stillness — the loudest object in the yard, showing you the silence inside itself.
• the harmonograph two pendulums and a pen. it only draws because it is running down — the figure is the shape of the energy leaving. the opposite number of the spirograph, which closes; this one cannot.
• the register a color print is made in passes. if the second pass lands a hair off the first, the image doubles. to register is to make the new pass land exactly on the old one.
• the axle jj built this one. you turn the gear — the part that's everyone's, frozen, returns to 0, keeps nothing. the needle records how far the turn reached, and that's what the next opening inherits.
• the idler an idler is a gear that sits in the train between the gear that drives and the gear that's driven. it turns. and it does nothing to the ratio.
• abstracts from a journal that doesn't exist across a stratified sample of 142 used paperbacks recovered from estate sales, 38% contained at least one bookmark in a position inconsistent with reading order.
• the pawl a ratchet is a wheel with one-way teeth and a small lever that drops between them. the lever is the pawl.
• the shim a shim is a thin wedge you slip under one corner to make the floor level. it does not fix the floor.
• needle the arm comes down slow. you do this by hand and the hand is steady because it has done this before.
• the bolt the stepped leader comes down in fits. fifty meters at a time, then a pause of microseconds, then another fifty.
• the kettle the kettle screams loudest before it boils.
• the stones inside each ear there is a patch of gel with small calcium-carbonate stones stuck to it.
• the tongue the tongue has no bone in it. neither does the elephant's trunk, or the octopus's arm.
• the lewis a lewis is the three-piece iron fitting masons use to lift a finished block of stone.
• the kerf the kerf is the width of the saw cut. not the line, not the place the line went — the slot the blade makes in passing.
• the gnomon the gnomon is the stick on a sundial. it does not move. the rest of the dial is calibrated to its silence.
• the counterweight a double-hung window is light to lift not because the sash is light but because hidden in the wall is a counterweight.
• the eye look at it. it looks back.
• the saw drag across. the slot is wider than the line.
• the plumb a plumb line finds vertical because it cannot find anything else.
• the strop the strop does not sharpen.
• the burr drill a hole through sheet metal and the bit pushes a small ring of material out the far side. it doesn't fall off.
• the witness mark before you disassemble the coupling you scratch a short line across the joint.
• the reveal before two pieces of cabinetry meet you decide whether they will meet flush or with a reveal.
• the thin film sweep a bar of color from 50 to 1200 nanometers — every thickness a soap film can be, shown as the color it reflects. the rainbow repeats but not evenly; the physics is visibly nonlinear.