When you give a homemade gift, you are giving a part of yourself to the recipient. You can't do that with a mass-produced item.
Mark Frauenfelder
The human-made world is mostly beyond our comprehension. Our daily survival depends on seemingly magical gizmos that provide our food, water, clothing, comfort, transportation, education, well-being, and amusement.
I actually studied engineering in school - I have a degree in mechanical engineering. But, when I got out of school, instead of going to work as an engineer, I was in a band.
Forrest Mims is the author of the famous book 'Getting Started in Electronics,' published by RadioShack for many years. I bought the book in the 1980s and had a blast making the projects in it. When I was editor-in-chief of 'MAKE,' I asked Forrest to write a column for the magazine, called 'The Backyard Scientist.'
The maker movement is about people who want to gain more control of the human design world that they interact with every day. Instead of accepting off-the-shelf solutions from institutions and corporations, makers would like to make, modify, and repair their own tools, clothing, food, toys, furniture, and other physical objects.
If you build your own chair, there is a lot of things that happen. You could probably buy a nice chair for less money than a chair that you built yourself, and it might even look better, but if you build that chair, you're going to take care of it and maintain it because it's your chair. If it breaks, you know how to fix it.
Fear of failure held me back from being a DIYer for many years, especially after a few early attempts at home improvement projects went awry.
My idea of a traditional holiday - the right way to do it - goes back to the days when gift-giving meant sharing homemade things: hand-knit sweaters, carved wooden toys, smoked meats and the like.
Scott Adams is not only a world-famous cartoonist, he's also a world-class failure. And he's the first to admit it. In his new book, 'How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big,' the Dilbert creator explains how failure can lead to success if you develop the right skills to make the most of your mistakes.
Here's one of my bad habits: when I go to someone's house, I head straight to their bookshelf.
Human beings evolved opposable thumbs for a reason. The sense of reward you get from making something with your hands can't be earned any other way. It's obvious that people learn faster from 'hands-on' experience than they do watching someone else do something.
Kids don't need to be taught the value of making; they are natural makers, at least until traditional education makes them afraid of making mistakes. The long-term value of making for kids is in learning to become an active participant in the world around them rather than a consumer of prepackaged products and solutions.
We're trained in school to equate mistakes with bad grades - something to be avoided at all costs. The alpha makers were somehow able to dodge that. They think that mistakes are just part of the creative process and maybe even the best way to learn.
As the editor-in-chief of the do-it-yourself magazine 'Make,' I've met scores of dedicated makers. They come from all walks of life - rich, poor, young, old, male, female, religious, atheist, liberal, conservative.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was George Gamow's 'One Two Three ... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science.'
Cleaning cat litter is an unpleasant daily chore for me, but the DuraScoop makes it much less unpleasant.
I'm very good at making mistakes, so I realized that I should embrace mistakes and learn from them.
Coming up with a way to fix mistakes challenges your creativity and your critical thinking skills and your resourcefulness. Often you end up with something better than what you planned on in the first place.
I wrote and illustrated a science experiment book called 'The Mad Professor'.
I co-founded 'bOING bOING' magazine and the 'Boing Boing Blog' and was an editor at 'Wired' from 1993-1998.
Windell Oskay is the co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, a Silicon Valley company that has designed and produced specialized electronics and robotics kits since 2007.
In this beginner-friendly book, called 'Learn to Program with Minecraft,' you will learn how to do cool things in Minecraft using the Python programming language. No prior programming experience is needed.
John Edgar Park introduced me to the gentle art of recreational lock-picking. It's fun and potentially useful to know how to tickle tumblers in the right way to open door locks and padlocks.
Ted Cruz is the Schroedinger's cat of politicians. He is both eligible and not eligible to be president.
The Cat Dancer is a 30-inch piece of wire with some little cardboard cylinders on the end. My cats go crazy for it. I stuck it on the wall with the adhesive mount, but I ended up taking it off so I could hold it and play directly with my cats.
My problem with mechanical pencils is that I break the lead tips constantly.
Skillshare is a terrific online learning community for creative people. It teaches you new skills through well-made videos with great production values. I've been using Skillshare to teach myself Adobe After Effects. All the videos feature people who are professionals in their field. I love this site.
I can't imagine how much time it took Matt Bucy to cut up 'The Wizard of Oz' and reassemble every word of dialog into alphabetical order. The resulting movie is called 'Of Oz the Wizard.'
My friend Josh Glenn compiles terrific lists of genre novels from the mid-20th century. His latest is a list of the ten best adventure novels of 1966. Josh also includes the cover art of early editions of the books, which are always much better than the art on newer editions. I want to read every book in this list!
In school, we learn that mistakes translate into bad grades. This unfortunate lesson gets burned into our brains, and we go through life shunning challenges that might end in failure.
My advice for raising daughters is to spend time with them doing things you both enjoy.
