The Art with a Purpose

I'm an art connoisseur. Not the kind of art on display at the Louvre or Guggenheim museum, but rather one that is created, almost as a side effect, when people try to achieve some other practical and often mundane objective. Here are a few examples.

I'm typing it on a 12" aluminum PowerBook G4. Despite being technically obsolete, it's the best computer design I ever saw, and hence a clear choice in computer hardware category. In software, SQLite is as close as one can get to the art status. By its nature software is a little ephemeral and I can't quite put a picture of SQLite here, sorry.

There are many findings in mathematics that can be seen as art, such as the famous Gödel's incompleteness theorem, but few are as concise as Euler's identity. It's just a special case of the more useful Euler formula eix = cos x + i sin x for x = π, just easier to fit on a t-shirt.

Luger P08, also known as Parabellum, is more than 100 years old but remains an icon even today. There are other examples: MG42, PPS-42 (ППС-42), OTs-38 (ОЦ-38) that have that elusive balance in design that allows them to reach the status of art pieces. Now compare P08 with Glock, one of the worst handgun designs I know. Besides looking downright ugly, it has the misfeature of having the safety on the trigger. Just think about it. The popularity of Glock also proves that commercial success is often orthogonal to the quality of the design.

Next example shows a solution to a rather complex problem: how to prevent a rocket from rolling (rotating around its axis) during flight. It's called a rolleron and is nothing more than a wheel with notches, attached via a hinge to the stabilizer. When the missile is launched, the air current spins up the wheel. Now if the rocket starts rolling, gyroscopic force causes rolleron to move, deflecting air and stopping the roll. This picture of Sidewinder rolleron was taken at the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in New York.

The last example is this power amplifier from Russian amateur magazine "Radio" [А. Агеев, "УМЗЧ с малыми нелинейными искажениями", Радио №2, 1987 стр. 26–27]. Mounting pairs of transistors right next to each other on the same heatsinks results in negative thermal feedback: when temperature and idle current of transistors in final stage goes up, they heat up pre-final transistors as well, voltage between base and emitter of pre-finals goes down, which in turn reduces idle current of finals. Also note the two capacitors that pump some of the output voltage back in pre-final emitter followers, resulting in nice "bootstrapping".