gavin noxious i think i got that right devanoxius g says do you consider hackers a part of the
makers community a lot of hacker spaces go by maker spaces now of course i do hacking
is totally making um to be fair white hat hacking i i yeah let's let's be really clear uh like yeah
but i mean ha the hacker ethos which comes out of mit in the 50s comes from a group of people
wanting to go look at things that might have been locked behind uh locked away from their view
and their goal was to see things and then leave what they saw exactly as they found it
that is an absolutely a maker ethos uh actually a guy came up to me
there were a lot of tears in the there have been a lot of tears in the autographed lines um
over the last four cons and on sunday in in portland a guy came up early on and he said
uh he asked me to sign a copy of my book and in the first chapter of my book i talk about coding
being making because somebody came up to me at maker faire in san mateo and said i don't make
stuff i'm a coder and i yelled coding is making and i tell that story in the book and this guy
came up and he said he want what he wanted to say was that really affected me when you said
that coding is making but he didn't get it out because just saying the words made him choke up um
and that's that's how him that's how much impact we can have when we are not gatekeeping when
we're not testing people for their worthiness of their opinions for the things that we love
when we are not saying your experience isn't valid because you haven't gone through the same thing
i have when we are inclusive we can change the lives of people without even knowing it
this guy read that coding is making and telling me about it two years after my book came out got him
choked up that's a really powerful experience and i am sorry that that person spent so long
thinking that somehow their work was less than because it fell into some other category that
somebody thought wasn't making i'm really glad that no one shits on 3d printing anymore or at
least i haven't been seeing it in a long time um because for a long time there were
people in the cosplay community saying that 3d printing was cheating and anybody who's ever
printed something and then tried to make it look great knows that they're there's cheat
no there's no cheating man you still gotta do the labor it's real um yeah hackers are makers
joanna ellsworth asks this great question i work in education she says with a lot of stem
steam focused students at a space museum and some of them tend to become frustrated
when we encourage them to be creative with their solutions to science or engineering problems
and then she asks how important is creativity when it comes to your bills or busting myths
what do you do when you have a problem that can't be solved immediately what is the weirdest most
creative solution to a problem you are proudest of those are all really really big questions
but i'd like to talk about the biggest question you're you're asking which is um
right so you say i work with a lot of stem students and i say steam
because i add the a but for arts some of them become frustrated when we encourage
them to be creative with their solutions so i'm guessing that part of that frustration
might be to them the idea of creativity as a disconnect within a scientific frame
and the most beautiful and amazing thing i learned from 13 years of doing mythbusters is that science
is an absolutely deeply creative discipline and it is in the first step of the scientific method
form a hypothesis well i guess there's question is the first step and then to answer the question
you form a hypothesis forming a hypothesis is a creative act where does that hypothesis come from
you might think that your hypothesis is low-hanging fruit but low-hanging fruit to you
might not be to somebody else um robert piercing this isn't my revelation either this comes from
robert piercing from zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance and it changed my life when he said
in that book the scientific method is a deeply creative process moreover in the same way that the
more explorations you do creatively the more you can do creatively like they are self-generating
so are hypotheses the more hypotheses you come up with the more you can come up with the weirder you
go the more strange things occur to you and a lot of solutions come about because of people getting
as weird as they possibly can and then chasing these things down to their natural conclusions
so creativity isn't just important it's intrinsic so the thing maybe to understand
is again when you're saying to a kid that's in a science program be creative
it i can imagine that they might coming from the specific frame they're coming from
might imagine that you're asking to do something outside of the purview
of what they've expected and the trick for us is to help everybody understand
that creativity is intrinsic to this process not not an adjunct not ancillary not an add-on it is
it is it is deeply embedded in that process um the only way you come up with solutions to difficult
problems is by thinking creatively about the future and positing alternate futures that's
creativity right there jamie loves to point out that for us building the lead balloon
was us figuring out all the ways to keep this material from failing and in order to do that
we had to think about all the ways in which it was going to fail and then we had to run them
off at the pass and the way jamie described it and i love this is he said it's the closest that
i've ever been to looking into the future because we did encounter every single problem we posited
and we had a workaround for every single one and then we got the balloon to float
that is looking into the future and that's doing it i mean i'm using the same part of
my brain that robert heinlein was using when he writes science fiction um that neil stephenson
is using when he writes one of his books this is we are positing imagined imagined realities
and then we're comparing and adjusting ours to fit it or to to help us understand the present
the weirdest most creative solution to a problem that i am proudest of
um right now i am totally ecstatic that my iron man mark 1 was painted with chrome magic markers
that's thrilling to me and that's a little bit of a making a little bit of a cheat i
use the molotow mark markers that you can get on amazon i buy their refills and then i thin them
with lacquer thinner and airbrush them and they spread just magnificently but ultimately like i
never if you told 10 year old me one day you'll make a suit of armor that looks like it weighs
hundreds of pounds and it's going to be colored with magic markers i would have been surprised
all right
how james morgan wants to know how is your sword idea coming and would
you have any interest in learning historical european martial arts otherwise known as hema
my sword idea proceeds i have purchased a blank and the blank has been correctly hardened and it
is mostly shaped so now it requires me to do the fine grinding on it and then to make the jewelry
for it the cross guard the hilt and the pommel and the the scabbard um it's a beautiful blade
it's it's a so i found somebody who takes water cut or laser-cut steel blades uh made out of uh
excellent steel and then hardens them they sell them in different you can buy them as just blanks
or you can buy them as shaped blanks i think that i can provide a link that we can include when we
put this up it's a lovely piece i'm not going to show it to you yet because that's going to
be part of a set of videos but i am very excited about a functional steel blade uh that fits like
i found exactly the shape of blade that i wanted uh and now that it's the correct type of steel
grinding it's gonna be a long process and i am just starting to think about about how its
jewelry shapes out but i'm psyched thank you for asking i'm glad you're paying attention um
let's see here
uh eric meyer wants to know have you read have i read the second and third installments in
the three body problems series these are three unbelievable science fiction novels by uh luci
i'm sorry [ __ ] and lou i'm so sorry about my butchering of his his name his books are
incredible absolutely beautiful books um i did read the second and the third book and i loved
them immensely um i did a i did a bunch of both reading and listening to them i was traveling
a ton uh while i was moving through the second one so i did i listened to that one most that was
the book i listened to the most of and it's like an 18 hour book or something like that
and the third one the first and third i i mostly read but i think they're magnificent
the the construction of the sofon the wall facers amazing the the the finale of the second book was
so surprising to me and i was so surprised that i could be surprised but that was the whole point of
it is that it had to be a surprise to absolutely everyone except that character who came up with
the solution i'm trying to tell you this in ways that don't include any spoilers um but yeah the
way the second book ends is wonderfully beautiful and you're right the scale of the third book is
just so out of proportion and incredible i i dug all three all three books have pieces
about science fiction that i had not encountered before um not to say that my reading within the
canon of science fiction is incredibly deep um i have huge blank spots in my reading list but
uh so many concepts in those books that are thrilling to sort of sit and imagine um i loved
them also ball lightning which is a sort of fourth book ball lightning is also phenomenal every time
one of his books comes out in translation i'm just i'm buying it i'm reading it i'm loving it