Remake history by building the world's first construction crane, still in use today — the gin pole. In antiquity, the only way to raise a heavy object was to put a rope on it, climb a ladder, and pull — or if you had enough time, build a ramp. Then the Greeks put a pulley on a pole, and the sky was the limit.
Drawdio is a simple electronic sound synthesizer build onto a pencil! Designed by Jay Silver, then a student in the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, the Drawdio circuit plays a musical tone with a frequency that varies based on the resistance between two points. The wire wrapped around the pencil handle is one point, and the pencil lead itself is another. When you hold Drawdio in your hand, your body becomes part of the resistive loop, and you can do all kinds of fun tricks, like draw yourself a piano and play a little tune!
As a musician I often need to learn new songs, and it can be difficult to hear individual instruments in recordings I want to study. I have often wished for an easy way to eliminate or reduce the vocals and isolate the instruments. Various hardware and software solutions exist but they tend to be expensive or inconvenient. I wanted a cheap method that I could use anywhere, on any device with a 1/8" stereo headphone jack. Then, one night, I was fiddling with a pair of headphones with a defective plug. When moved a certain way, it gave exactly the vocals-canceling effect I had been looking for!








