Toy "blooming flower" uses nested, dyed fans of tissue paper to surprise, delight Twenty Four Standard Causes of Human Misjudgement Great moments in pedantry: Actually, there is a Jedi mind meld How an algorithm came up with Amazon's KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT t-shirt America's six-strikes copyright system is a nightmare Horror/sf play by a four-year-old Aerial photography ban proposed for all but government Baja in my Westy: Side tracked by Disneyland Toy "blooming flower" uses nested, dyed fans of tissue paper to surprise, delight
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 03, 2013 11:39 am Toysmith's Blooming Flower an incredibly clever little papercraft toy. It consists of a complex of folded and cut tissue paper, sandwiched between two plastic rods. When you open out these rods, the tissue paper fans out to make a lovely paper flower.
Read in browser Twenty Four Standard Causes of Human Misjudgement
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 02, 2013 11:54 pm A great
post on Metafilter turned me on to "Twenty Four Standard Causes of Human Misjudgement," a classic 1995 speech by
Charlie Munger Read in browser Great moments in pedantry: Actually, there is a Jedi mind meld
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Mar 02, 2013 09:04 pm It's right there in the Expanded Universe book series, says Chris Peterson, a research assistant in MIT's Center for Civic Media. It's a form of group communication. What's more, Peterson writes, if you follow the theories of anthropologist and sociologist of science Bruno Latour, the Jedi meld might actually be the most useful tool for ...
Read in browser How an algorithm came up with Amazon's KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT t-shirt
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 02, 2013 08:37 pm You may have heard that Amazon is selling a "KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT" t-shirt. How did such a thing come to pass? Well, as Pete Ashton explains, this is a weird outcome of an automated algorithm that just tries random variations on "KEEP CALM AND," offering them for sale in Amazon's third-party marketplace ...
Read in browser America's six-strikes copyright system is a nightmare
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 02, 2013 05:33 pm A post on Slashdot by Dangerous_Minds links to a parade of horrors with the new "Copyright Alert System" -- the voluntary six-strikes-and-you're-out copyright enforcement system that America's major ISPs have chosen to enact on behalf of the MPAA and the RIAA. It's trivial to hijack, clobbers small business owners who let people use their Internet ...
Read in browser Horror/sf play by a four-year-old
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 02, 2013 03:23 pm Rachel Bublitz's four year old Audrey wrote her first play: Characters: Scare People, F, very tall, wears a mask, growls, 18 years old. She goes to scare people school. She is an octopus monster with wings. Audrey, F, 11 years old. Wears monkey pajamas. Synopsis: Audrey tries to get Scare People out of her house. ...
Read in browser Aerial photography ban proposed for all but government
By Mark Frauenfelder on Mar 02, 2013 01:59 pm AGBeat: "Neal Kurk (R), member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives since 1986 has recently sponsored HB 619-FN to make aerial photography illegal in their state." The proposed bill states: A person is guilty of a class A misdemeanor if such person knowingly creates or assists in creating an image of the exterior of ...
Read in browser Baja in my Westy: Side tracked by Disneyland
By Jason Weisberger on Mar 02, 2013 01:45 pm I got side tracked by Dinseyland. On Thursday AM my traveling companion Jenny landed at LAX. She'd never been to the Magic Kingdom and we had a day to kill before heading to San Diego. What else could I do? It was amazing. We had a wonderful time and even I, a far too frequent ...
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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