Maker Faire in the NYT
In today's New York Times, a piece by John Schwartz on the cultural movement embodied in Maker Faire -- and its ties to Burning Man, and other tech/counterculture threads....
At first blush, then, this festival, sponsored by Make magazine, is a gathering place of pyromaniacs and noise junkies, the multiply pierced and the extensively tattooed. But wander awhile, and the showy surface gives way to a wondrous thing: the gathering of folks from all walks of life who blend science, technology, craft and art to make things both goofy and grand.Link to the article (disclaimer: in which Pesco and I are quoted), and some cool multimedia stuff. Image above (Peter Da Silva, NYT) -- "At the Maker Faire, center. Justin Gray and his turbine robots, right, and a physics show participant fighting arcs from a Tesla coil, left."“We are grabbing technology, ripping the back off of it and reaching our hands in where we are not supposed to be,” says Shannon O’Hare, who has brought his three-story Victorian mansion on wheels, one of the most prominent examples of the anachronistic style known as steampunk, to the Faire. He is holding forth in a vintage British military uniform and pith helmet, and is gesturing with a hand that holds a sloshing tankard of ale.
“We’ve been told by corporate America that we cannot fix the things we own,” says Mr. O’Hare, who goes by Major Catastrophe and works as a fabricator for the stage and businesses. “All we can do is buy their stuff and like it.” Cars have become too complex to work on under a shade tree, and people have no idea what is inside their cellphones and cameras. “All this technology, and it’s not ours. It’s somebody else’s,” Mr. O’Hare says. “ Make is about taking that back off and making it yours.”
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That's a great publicity coup. I hope some New Yorkers get inspired and work on a East Coast version of the Faire.
There's a mention of Boing Boing in there too.
My brother-in-law and niece are in there! Keith and Karydis in the muffin!
I work at The Times. In the hallways where the elevators are on every floor there are 10 screens that show pictures that are running in the paper. They're showing shots from the article this week :)
You can fix all the cars you want under the shade tree; you just need to buy different tools to do so. I agree that some auto manufacturers have held some diagnostic functionality and error codes as proprietary, and there has been legislation to address that. I am so tired of this old saw made up by lazy stupid old mechanics who won't learn how to use an oscilloscope or don't want to buy a code reader. Luddites. You want to buy smaller, lighter, more efficient; don't bitch when you need a scanning tunneling microscope to fix a broken chip lead!