At first glance, Stanford’s Cool Products Expo looked like a regular college career fair. That is, until I saw the solar-powered car, tilting trike, Tesla car and BMW’s hydrogen car parked on the lawn. Inside the packed hall, instead of suits touting companies there were dozens of, well, cool products. They ranged from a design […]
Today I attended the annual National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest finals at Purdue University. This year the task was to make a hamburger in no less than 20 steps, and the Purdue Armory was full of great, laboriously contrived burger-making machines. I had the opportunity to interview quite a few of the participants, so look […]
We make money not art has a piece about a retrospective on Ant Farm, the American media art collective from the 1970s. Ant Farm is most famous for their Cadillac Ranch installation in Amarillo, Texas. I had the pleasure of meeting and becoming friends with Ant Farm co-founder Doug Michels in the early ’90s. He […]
There’s something divinely surreal about giant cupcakes tooling around with human heads poking out of their centers. We had the cupcake cars at last year’s Bay Area Maker Faire and I had a laugh every time they trundled by the MAKE booth. In this BBtv video, Xeni rides with the Cupcake Cutthroats (shiver me sprinkles!) […]
In response to our posting of mint tin guitar, a reader pointed us to this Argentine group called Les Luthiers which repurposes everyday objects into instruments. Unfortunately, none of the site is in English. Instrumentos Sección Cuerdas
Here’s the video of last night’s Colbert Report with Dean Kamen talking about his vapor compression distiller. The Colbert Report
Reader Erica points out this story about a resourceful British maker – A British businessman fed up with being targeted by vandals has installed a 30-foot Roman-style catapult on the premises to hurl bucket loads of chicken manure at culprits attacking his rural offices. […] The defense arrangements, which include priming the catapult with chicken […]
