I’ve always been amazed by the directional microphones in my hearing aids. They are super-sensitive, they can be adjusted to catch noise either 360 degrees or just from the person speaking to me, and they are smaller than your fingernail. The technology that has to go into such finely tuned instruments is amazing, and I recently came across a good video of Daniel Warren, director of research for Knowles Electronics, that gives a flavor of the rocket science behind them. (It’s a promotional video for Wolfram Research, known for the Mathematica software tools used by engineers and, more recently, for the revolutionary computational search engine, Wolfram Alpha, developed over the past decade by computer science genius Steve Wolfram). The video is also a good example of the pains engineers have to go through to explain in layman’s terms how their inventions work and why they are so important. My rule of thumb is, even if I can’t understand half of what they say, if the product works, I will use it.