The reason I admire Lenore and Windell (aka The Evil Mad Scientists) so much is because they are curious about the world and they design and make lots of things to help them understand it better. They also put a great deal of thought into making their creations look nice and the photos they take are always fun.
Recently they bought a heated mattress pad. They took a close look at the controller's "digital" readout and learned that it wasn't really digital at all.
What seems to be a digital seven-segment LED display is actually a rear-lit cutout in the shape of a seven-segment display, with one cutout in the shape of each number. The rotating dial just masks the other shapes so that you only see one at a time.
In other words, it's about as digital as blip.
…
Somewhere around this point we went from saying "WTF?" to "What the heck!" — because it's a clever cheap trick, and if they can do it, so can we.
And so they made a giant-sized, colorful version of the display for no other reason than it was "hilarious" to do so.
