I’m not at the Faire. I’m home in my stuffy, humid home office in Virginia, wishing I was in Detroit, hanging out with my maker peeps and knocking back the Tschunks. But from this distance, scanning Flickr, FB, Twitter, etc. for signs of Motor City maker life, I’m getting certain impressions of what’s going on […]
Sashimi Tabernacle Choir. From Dave Hogg’s Flickr feed Twitpic image from today, spotted on @jonrjohnston’s Twitter feed One of the things I love about Maker Faire (and MAKE and Make: Television and everything else we do) is the relative mainstreaming we offer to creative weirdness. There’s always an element of fringe creativity and over-the-top whimsical […]
Born on this date in 1923 in the Pittsburgh suburb of New Kensington, Stephanie Louise Kwolek (Wikipedia) graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 1946. She would go on, starting in 1964, to discover the remarkable properties of paraphenylene terephtalamide polymers, research which would culminate in 1971 with the advent of Kevlar (Wikipedia), an entirely new field of polymer chemistry, and the countless remarkable applications thereof we now enjoy. Today Dr. Kwolek is 87. Happy Birthday!
Very much digging this classic clip of Herbie Hancock demonstrating a Fairlight CMI to some of the kids from Sesame Street. Guessing such technology may not dazzle today’s youth quite as much.
Phil Shapiro (Takoma Park, Md.) sent us this video of solar cookers being built and deployed by villagers in Darfur. Amazing to think what impact some cardboard and foil material can have on the health and well-being of tens of thousands of people. [Thanks, Phil!] 40,000 solar cookers in Darfur
It wouldn’t be DEtroit without vats of molten metal as bright as the sun pouring and spitting into molds. Poet, painter, photographer, sculptor (AND bartender), Joe Sandor, is providing the hellfire at this weekend’s Maker Faire Detroit. Joe’s actually from Chicago, but we won’t hold that against him. Tonight, at 7pm, he’ll be at the […]
One of my favorite features of Maker Faire Bay Area was the Maker Shed soldering merit badges and the Learn to Solder tent. It looks like it’s a similar hit in Detroit. Marc de Vinck shares this great Maker Faire moment: Marc (asking a kid): “Did you learn to solder? Was it fun?” Kid: “Yeah! […]
