Math, science & engineering
you can hold.
Gadgets we actually own, covet, or can’t stop thinking about — clever, useful, and a little fun. Curated slowly, one object at a time.
- Desk
- Wall
- Workshop
- Play
- Analog
TICKEY
A 45-gram aluminum card with a 3.7-inch color e-paper screen. It doesn't glow, doesn't buzz, and keeps its picture even with the battery dead. The wallet photo, brought into this century.
Read the story
№ 02Desk$$$$Mark II
A highlighter-shaped scanner that carries a sentence from a paper book to your phone. John Locke was doing the same job in 1685 with a two-page index.
Read
№ 03Play$$$$Stampville
Aurélien Débat's city in a matchbox — 25 rubber stamps and two ink pads, yellow and blue, that quietly make a third colour where they overlap.
Read
№ 04Play$$$$Bauhaus Chess Set
In Josef Hartwig's 1924 Bauhaus set the shape of each piece shows how it moves and its volume shows how much it is worth — geometry written as a rulebook.
Read
№ 05Desk$$$$Craighill Metrolog
A CNC-milled aluminium ruler carrying inch and millimetre scales on one body — and across eight inches they land on the same line exactly once, at five inches.
Read
№ 06Play$$$$Brilliant Labs Halo
Brilliant Labs' 40-gram open-source glasses — a color micro-OLED in the corner of the lens, an on-device AI processor, and every design file sitting on GitHub.
Read
№ 07Play$$$$Swarovski AX Visio
The world's first AI binocular names the bird you're looking at from a database of 9,000+ species. A Marc Newson body, Cornell's Merlin behind the glass, and a 13-megapixel third eye.
Read
№ 08Play$$$$Kodak Charmera
A keychain camera the size of a chestnut and a descendant of the 1987 Kodak Fling. 1.6 megapixels, a blind-box surprise, and the most charming gift idea I've come across in years.
Read
№ 09Desk$$$$Teenage Engineering TP-7
A confession about a $1,499 field recorder. A motorized reel you scrub with a finger, 24-bit/96 kHz recording, and a browser tab I can't bring myself to close.
Read
№ 10Play$$$$Helicone: A Pine Cone in Your Palm
A kinetic sculpture that appears when a scientist turns the spiral arrangement of a pine cone into numbers.
Read
№ 11Wall$$$$The Mandelmap Poster
Bill Tavis spent over a year turning the Mandelbrot set into a seventeenth-century sea chart — compass rose, sea monsters, and named valleys you can actually sail to. A vintage map of infinite complexity.
Read
№ 12Desk$$$$Author Clock
A desk clock that tells time through literary quotes. E-paper display, white oak housing, brass base. It raised nearly a million dollars on Kickstarter and is sold at MoMA.
Read
№ 13Workshop$$$$Bambu Lab P2S
Platonic solids, Fibonacci spirals, bridge load tests. The printer that makes abstract math something a child can hold.
Read
№ 14Play$$$$Martin's Chocolatier Chocolate Planets
Nine handmade Belgian truffles. Eight planets plus the Sun. Zero Pluto.
Read
№ 15Workshop$$$$xTool F1 Ultra
Two lasers, one desk. Fiber for metal, diode for wood — both at research-grade precision.
Read
№ 16Analog$$$$Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk
A Stanford professor cleared Amazon overnight. It was just chalk. Or was it?
Read- № 17Play$$$$
Galton Board
Three thousand steel beads fall through a forest of pegs and, every single time, agree to form a bell curve. The central limit theorem as desk furniture.
In the lab - № 18Analog$$$$
Curta Type II
A mechanical calculator shaped like a pepper grinder, machined in Liechtenstein. Six hundred parts, zero batteries — crank the handle and it carries the digits for you.
In the lab - № 19Desk$$$$
Acme Klein Bottle
A hand-blown glass bottle with one side, no edge, and zero volume — shipped by astronomer Cliff Stoll, often from the crawl space under his California house.
In the lab - № 20Desk$$$$
Time Since Launch
Pull the pin and a clock starts counting up — for the next 2,738 years. A single-use instrument for marking the moments that divide a life into before and after.
In the lab
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