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Detroit Maker Faire Was Kinda Awesome
I was excited to have a chance to go to the Detroit Maker Faire this year. I've always wanted to
attend such a thing, but the stars never aligned. I saw an entire tent filled with DIY 3D Printers
making strange objects including the coolest polyhedral dice ever. Utilikilts held in place with suspenders! Haberdashery! Quilting! Blacksmithing! Books! A Cupcake Car! Gomp! Beer! Remote control turtles!
A giant hay bailer! Numerous strange pedal powered forms of locomotion, and an entire
garrison of Star Wars costumes... Besides, it's not often you have the opportunity to witness a giant steel dragon blow fireballs in a parking lot. I've shared a giant collection of photos if you want to see these things and more for a taste of the inspiring insanity I can't wait for next year... and between now and then I have some projects to tackle.
I'm older than most Slashdot readers, so I'm lucky enough to remember when these sort of fairs were commonplace throughout the United States. They truly were hubs of innovation, discovery and amusement. They'd happen at least monthly in most regions.
The so-called "free trade" of the past 30 years has killed all of that. It drove out the true grassroots innovation that made America a powerful and prosperous nation. The jobs, abilities and skills necessary to make anything of value were shipped out to third-world hellholes, and the engineering skills necessary to design the factories and the processes to create such goods left soon after.
Older folks are well, well aware of the sad state of the American economy today. We saw it when it was better. We lived through times when poverty was at its lowest levels ever. This was because America produced real wealth at the time, rather than the only jobs being serving coffee, putting foreign-made clothes on racks, collecting shopping carts, and producing bullshit "financial instruments".
In many ways, it's not surprising that we're seeing this sort of grassroots innovation in the Rust Belt states. They were the first to, dare I say it, suffer from the utter molestation caused by "free trade". Some places, like Detroit, have themselves fallen to third-world living standards thanks to "free trade" and the movement of industry to Mexico, China, India and Vietnam. It would be true justice if these places were the first to bring industry back to the United States, becoming extremely prosperous in the process.
The Henry Ford museum is a steam junkies nirvana. Giant, two-story Edison power plant engines the size of a large ranch home. Original beam engines. An *enormous* Allegheny locomotive engine inside, used to haul mile-long coal trains up mountains. Compressed-air operating engines inside. Operating steam trains (burning coal) outside, along with various steam powered engines and tractors. There's an intact Edison substation, an operating workshop run on an overhead belt system, a working roundhouse where you can watch them work on the engines....
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I was there displaying my video coat, being a human television. We had to run to catch a flight at Detroit Metro, so I didn't have time to pack my gizmo, so went to the airport wearing it.
Now I know what Cory Doctorow was talking about in his novel "Makers" with regard to the excessive searching applied to people who create stuff. As far as they're concerned, a dad with a family in tow, wearing a coat with wires and circuit boards on it, is a human bomb. I was just laughing throughout the whole extended search.
We got on our plane OK, because I didn't give them actual shit, but my kids got a good lesson when I said out loud, "This is the land of the free", and the nice TSA lady said, "Not any more."
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.