Telling stories

We can’t throw a rock across the Web without hitting one of the many articles, posts, books, podcasts or interviews focused on the use of storytelling in business. Arguably kicking the magic out of the hat, most of them address the way stories are used in marketing goods and services (yawn). We need to think…

The Future of UI

Human interface devices are keyboards, mice and screens, things that allow us to give and get information to and from computers. Combined with how software allows us to interact with machines, this is known as User Interface. For the last 70 years or so, User Interfaces have stayed more or less the same. That is…

Cure for the Common Algorithm: True Curation

Curation is fundamental to how we process messages in the world. There is simply just too much information to process without filtering it for content and quality. Curating it. We curate all over the place. Social networks are among the most well-known of curation tools. That is coming under some threat, however. Twitter is now…

Honey, it really works, honey.

Since becoming a grown-up, there are many things about childhood I remember fondly but one of them I was happy to forget about forever and wasn’t anticipating having to deal with again: allergies. For my entire adult life I was allergy-free living in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. . In Chicago, I have tried over-the-counter…

The blog is back

After a couple of years of just letting Twitter dump schwack into it, only human-considered and hand-written articles will be once again posted into this thing. It’s good to be back to something that is only rarely considered nowadays amidst all the cross-posted, scheduled, or otherwise automated tools. Perhaps, one day our children will revert…

Behind the Scenes: WIND

Behind the scenes with the Exploratorium, A Curious Summer and Tinkering Unlimited as they prepare to work with young learners to harness wind’s invisible power through discovering where it comes from and how to predict its behavior while studying aerodynamics and lift. Through tinkering with wind-powered machines and vehicles, such as a paragliding wing, turbines…

Not the Dentist!

From a selection of 29 individual storyboards, we drew two scenes randomly and made a short screenplay from them. Then, using resources immediately available to us, we made this short film in one day on location @ Tinkering School in Montara, California:

Tinkering School: Day 8

Go cart design, assembly and testing by the inimitable Team Tinker with snippets of boat model design and other moments of singular, whimsical tinkering mastery. Thanks to Moby for his song, Porcelain.

dialectic

This one Bergey and I made together:

fate and the wall

A wall is accidentally knocked over leading to a discussion about the roles of choice and fate across cultures.click here to watch on mobile device

conforming 24p

Even though the 5Dmkii has the capability to capture at 24p natively, it’s still a cool effect to capture @ 30p and conform to 24p: click here for html5 version

Maria Montessori

In 1896, Maria Montessori gave a lecture at the Educational Congress in Torino about the training of the disabled. The Italian Minister of Education was in attendance, and was impressed by her arguments sufficiently to appoint her the same year as director of the Scuola Ortofrenica, an institution devoted to the care and education of…

Today’s Solar Wind Forecast

While living in Alaska, I had a heavy habit of checking this every day: a groovily-nerdy resource provided by the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute:

Ken Burns on filmmaking

If you wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or a feature film I could tell you the steps to take to do that, but every working documentary filmmaker I know has gotten there through their own unique path. There is no career path.