Maker Education is such a valuable role. These stories will bring you the latest information and tales of maker educators who area spreading the maker mindset. Help others learn how to make things or how to think like a maker at makerspaces, schools, universities, and local communities. The importance of maker education can not be understated. We appreciate our educators.
YouTuber srobbin identifies this as a “500kV switch opening up in the Nevada desert,” but provides very little detail otherwise. Still: Holy smoke. It arcs for a good six seconds, with a sight and a sound that, even on video, is pretty terrifying. In person…well, I’m not sure I can even begin to imagine what it would be like.
Over the weekend I participated in a group led by Jeff Warren of MIT’s Design Ecology group to build DIY spectrographs using recycled materials. It was a fun weekend citizen science project that’s perfect for families. The spectrographs we made weren’t as nice as what you can build for $20, but then again they were built using trash.
…and a pretty sweet Minority Report-esque dynamic infographic (“infomotion?”), to boot. The point? The world today has more than its share of problems, but we can all be thankful it isn’t the world of 200 years ago.
The charming Swede is Hans Rosling–physician, statistician, and host of BBC 4’s The Joy of Stats. Pretty much everything about this video makes me happy, not least of all that the Brits have a TV program celebrating statistics itself. [Thanks, Dad!]
P.S. If you’re feeling cynical, check out the equally-cool-but-way-less-uplifting Animated Map of Nuclear Explosions, 1945-1998 by Isao Hashimoto.
OK, so I spruced up the sublimely boring image accompanying this interesting question over at Popular Science with a picture of the thermite reaction. I couldn’t find a picture of burning plutonium. C’mon wikimedians! What’s taking so long?
The real answer, it turns out, is something like “at first it would be very exciting, and then it would be very boring.” Here’s a characteristically droll quote from my old quantum mechanics instructor, John Stanton:
Bill Hammack’s video confection is especially sweet this week. Bill scored a vintage Delta “black box” on eBay and, in this week’s installment, tears it apart on camera to show you how they built ’em in the old days to stand up to “three-thousand gees and one-thousand degrees.” I just watched it, and I’m having a hard time resisting my ebullient urge to spoil the ending for you, so I’ll just shut up and let Engineer Guy take it away. [Thanks, Bill!]
An inverting or tippe top is a classic physics toy: a spinning top that spontaneously inverts itself to spin on its handle at high speed, then rolls back over onto its base when it stops. Turns out, four spheres joined in a close-packed tetrahedron will do the same thing, and this quick video tutorial from YouTuber VTK9990 shows one made from four marbles and some epoxy. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]
And you can watch it happen in this literally awesome video from the BBC’s Bang Goes the Theory. I wonder how much that lens cost? I’ve got a shed out back, wouldn’t be too hard to cut a hole in the roof… [via Boing Boing]
