If a corporations are people, do they qualify as carpool-lane passengers? Rainbow-colored igloo Commemorative coins are sneaky pork One-armed man arrested in Belarus for clapping Dad hires in-game hitsquad to kill his son's characters If a corporations are people, do they qualify as carpool-lane passengers?
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 06, 2013 08:45 am Marin's Jonathan Frieman set out driving in the carpool lane with his articles of incorporation in the passenger seat, and when he was ticketed, he offered this defense: Corporations are people, I had a corporation in the car with me, therefore I had two people in the car, and qualified for the HOV lane. The ...
Read in browser Rainbow-colored igloo
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 05, 2013 11:00 pm This beautiful, rainbow hued igloo was designed by Edmonton's Brigid Burton, who wanted to entertain her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend (an engineer student), visiting from New Zealand over winter break. Burton froze cartons full of colored water and left the boyfriend, Daniel Gray, to do the rest, building the structure out of 500 ice-bricks. ...
Read in browser Commemorative coins are sneaky pork
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 05, 2013 08:41 pm You know those cool commemorative coins that the US Mint keeps issuing? Turns out that they're a handy way for Congress to get around the ban on porky earmarks for their home district. As reported last April in The Foundry: Here's how it works: In June of last year, Rep. Peter Roksam (R-IL) introduced legislation ...
Read in browser One-armed man arrested in Belarus for clapping
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 05, 2013 08:30 pm The headline says it all: after the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko passed a law making it illegal to clap (because dissidents began using applause as a form of protest), his cops began rounding up and arresting people who applauded, or stood near people who were applauding, or thought about applauding... Anyway, once it became clear ...
Read in browser Dad hires in-game hitsquad to kill his son's characters
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 05, 2013 02:36 pm The Chinese website Tencent reports that a father got so upset with his son's nonstop MMO playing that he hired an in-game hit-squad to kill his son's character whenever it spawned, in the hopes of discouraging the young man from playing. Here's some of Kotaku's English summary, by Eric Jou: Unhappy with his son not ...
Read in browser Meet SparkTruck, an “educational build-mobile” for the twenty-first century.
Dreamed up by a group of Stanford d.school students and funded through Kickstarter, SparkTruck is a mobile maker space currently traveling across the United States. At schools and summer camps and libraries around the country, the SparkTruck team offers workshops to help kids “find their inner maker” as they design and build projects like stamps, stop-motion animation clips, and “vibrobots.”
[video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmRKXqDwieY&feature=plcp]
This might seem all shiny and new. And it is—but only in part. What’s so striking (and exciting) about SparkTruck is the way it combines old and new. It does so in the tools it gets kids using, which range from pipe cleaners to laser cutters. It does so in its educational approach, which combines cutting-edge (get it?) STEM and design pedagogy with the fundamentals of an old-school shop class. And it does so in its method, which combines the iconic, century-old technology of the bookmobile with the hot new form of the maker space.
In doing so, SparkTruck joins a growing number of libraries which are combining time-tested principles (like equal access to information) with new technologies (like 3-D printers), putting in maker spaces and media production labs alongside bookshelves and meeting rooms. As I’ve argued over on bookmobility.org, these combinations make sense because reading and making actually have a lot in common. They’re both creative processes that take existing materials and combine them in new ways. Getting people engaged in those kinds of processes—through imaginative thinking, contemplation, hands-on problem-solving, and collaborative learning—is what both maker spaces and libraries are all about.
Taking that commitment on the road with scissors and hammers and 3-D printers and a great big bookmobile-like truck, SparkTruck serves as a laboratory for new approaches, as well as a reminder that trying new things doesn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t!) necessarily mean tossing old ones out.
After all, what would those vibrobots be without classically crafty pipe cleaners and tongue depressors? And what would a library be without the creative, participatory, straight-up awesome experience of reading?
SparkTruck schedule [sparktruck.org]
How to arrange a visit from SparkTruck [sparktruck.org]
SparkTruck YouTube channel [youtube.com]
Signature: --Derek Attig, bookmobility.org
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