Although many of us bloggers grimaced to read your comments when these posts first went up, time heals all wounds, and we’ve been having a great time on the mailing list bandying about our memories of our best/worst “ouch” moments from Make: Online and CRAFT. I’ve compiled a list of the top/bottom 10 best/worst posts from our trip down memory lane, and have included the best/worst outraged comment, from each, to summarize. Enjoy!
A reader who saw last night’s post about human-powered cranes and lifting machines e-mailed me to point out that many of the Fairbairn hand-cranked cranes featured in that post’s title image are still around, and that there is in fact a Flickr group that collects photos from enthusiasts. At least one of the cranes has […]
Fast Company magazine, which has a pretty good track record of trying to give women a fair shake in the often-testosterone-heavy world of the technology business, is seeking nominations for “the most influential women in tech” to put on the cover in 2011. Past “cover girls” have included Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), Rashmi Sinha, (Slideshare), Morgan Romine (Frag Dolls), Jill Tarter (SETI), and Clara Shih (Hearsay Labs).
I hereby nominate Limor Fried.
MIT Media Lab alum, Eyebeam fellow, recipient of the EFF Pioneer award, entrepreneur, open source advocate, bad-ass engineer, founder of adafruit industries–Ladyada belongs on that cover if anyone does. To chime in with your support, go leave a comment over at Fast Company, or on their Facebook page, or tweet #wit11. Better yet, do all three!
If you’ve been around long enough to have ever actually blown out your flip-flop, stepped on a pop top, you’ve already got one great reason to appreciate the 1975 introduction of the stay-on tab or stay tab: No more little metal razors littering the beaches.
Now, “Engineer Guy” Bill Hammack helps us appreciate the stay tab for another reason: It’s a little gem of mechanical poetry. There’s a lot going on when you pull that little ring. Bill’s video exegesis of that action, like all Bill’s videos, is a little piece of poetry unto itself. I can’t get enough of ’em. [Thanks, Bill!]
Our friends at Alphonso Labs wrote to tell us that Make: Online is featured on their new, free, cross-platform version of the Pulse News reader. MAKE is one of the “Featured Sources.” To access it, after you’ve downloaded the app to your iPhone, iPad, or Android, hit the “+” button at the bottom of the […]
As evidence, nothing beats one’s own senses: I’ll have to see that for myself. But some experiments are too expensive, too time-consuming, or too dangerous for most folks to reproduce on their own, and for these, well, the next best thing is video. And the tubes are rich with great footage of phenomena that have to be seen to be believed. Here’s a sampling of some of the gems we’ve covered, over the years, to get you started.
This mechanical model of a comet’s orbit, based on the action of elliptical gears, is dated to 1766, and is housed at Harvard’s Putnam Gallery. From which:
This apparatus was designed to demonstrate how the speed of a comet varies in its orbit according to Kepler’s law of equal areas. The comet Benjamin Martin chose for this instrument is Halley’s Comet, which goes around the Sun every 75 1/2 years. Martin began producing cometaria before Halley’s Comet made its predicted return, and so was betting that Halley would prove correct in his theory.
Interestingly, the device turns out to be not an entirely accurate demonstration of Kepler’s second law. Physicist Martin Beech of the University of Regina has studied the history and mechanics of cometaria at great length. His clearinghouse page is an excellent source of detailed information.
