Pete Edwards does a bit of toy-megaphone turbo bending in this music video montage shot at the Casper Electronics lab. Dang – this makes me think I should start soldering to music myself! Related: How-To: Wet/dry control for a toy voice changer
The occasion of Dmitri Mendeleev’s birthday seemed like a good opportunity to recognize another great hero of the periodic table and to relate one of my favorite anecdotes about him: Glenn T. Seaborg (Wikipedia), who, among his various stellar achievements, won the 1951 Nobel Prize for “discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements.” By the time of his death in 1999, Seaborg had participated in the discovery and isolation of ten superheavy elements. Shortly after the official 1997 recognition of the name seaborgium for element 106, writer Jeffrey Winters, writing in the January 1998 issue of Discover Magazine, made the following observation:
Born on this date in 1834 in the small village of Aremzyani, in what was then considered Siberia, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev would go on, in 1869, to produce the first periodic table of the chemical elements. Mendeleev used the periodicity he’d observed in the properties of then-known elements to accurately predict many of the properties of germanium, gallium, and scandium, which had not yet been discovered. Mendeleev died in St. Petersburg in 1907, at the age of 72. Element number 101 is named mendelevium in his honor.
It all started when Chris Anderson wrote an article for WIRED titled “In The Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are The New Bits in which he took the position that, in effect, “making” constituted a new paradigm that would reshape the way manufacturing works. Along came feisty blogger Joel Johnson of Gizmodo who penned a withering […]
This 2007 piece by Vancouver artist Steven Shearer (Wikipedia) is called “Geometric Healing Cell for Youth – Model III.” It reminds me of some of my favorite work by Tom Friedman. I love art that redefines our expectations of everyday materials. [via Neatorama]
My friend, Willow Bay, has a brief piece on The Steampunk Workshop called “Why I believe in maker culture.” Snip: All the things I do in life (which, admittedly, is a lot) are about Doing. I’m up to my eyeballs in Stuff to Do and up to my elbows in What I’m Doing because I […]
When I think of horrifically frustrating project experiences that end in an outcome far exceeding expectations, two instances spring to mind. I tell these stories frequently (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) because I think they represent the power of perseverance in the face of projected failure. The first tale I’ve told countless […]
