Mark Frauenfelder Quotes

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.’

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.

Ted Cruz is the Schroedinger’s cat of politicians. He is both eligible and not eligible to be president.

My advice for raising daughters is to spend time with them doing things you both enjoy.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was George Gamow’s ‘One Two Three … Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science.’

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.’

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.

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’m very good at making mistakes, so I realized that I should embrace mistakes and learn from them.

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.

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.

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!

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.

I wrote and illustrated a science experiment book called ‘The Mad Professor‘.

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.

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.

Here‘s one of my bad habits: when I go to someone’s house, I head straight to their bookshelf.

I co-founded ‘bOING bOING’ magazine and the ‘Boing Boing Blog‘ and was an editor at ‘Wired‘ from 1993-1998.

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.

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.

My problem with mechanical pencils is that I break the lead tips constantly.

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.