I’ve been ruminating on the subject of personal liberation/gratification/independence that comes as a result of the do-it-yourself attitude. With sites such as Instructables, magazines like MAKE, radical changes in class structure occurring at major universities and development in the third (rural) world, together with the ready availability of raw materials, all a person really needs to join in the hobby fun is a) the knowledge and b) the machines, oh and a healthy dose of time and commitment. But, because enthusiasm and creativity hinge on the network effect (the lone inventor is a myth), what’s really needed is a local Maker Shop/Hobby Shop/Fab Lab in which you can get everyone together.

Once you have such a gathering, how then do you generate a self-sustaining profit?

1. Provide education.
2. Provide a community-oriented repair/manufacture shop for one-off and custom items.
3. Host an online service for the fabrication of hobbiest stuff (custom pcb etching, machine mech parts, etc..)

Here, I’m going to address the Education aspect, because I think they’d be the easiest to convince as investors (esp. considering the proven success of Gershenfeld’s class). Besides, vocational training is an area in which the American Educational system is very weak.

Argument from Education:
• student must provide a short document sketching:
  • the general idea/product
  • step-by-step plan for construction
  • the list of materials/equipment
  • estimated amount of time needed and will be graded on the accuracy of said documents
    ( why this is a good thing: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html )
• student will build/construct/implement above project
• student will document the process and revise original documents accordingly
  (ex: note material substitutions and any schedule/procedure changes that occurred)
• student will produce a final document that contains:
  • actual list of materials used
  • actual procedure followed, with commentary about why (some results, and time spent on each step)
    (ex: we found that hard drive magnet were really difficult to remove from their backing because they were so brittle. In our experience, it was best to put one end of the backing in a vice, and bend the magnet assembly using a sturdy wrench. This causes the magnet to pop off into a cloth waiting to catch it. Only about 1 out of every 5 magnets broke using this method. <photo of magnet mounted in vice with cloth catch> )
  • other people should be able to follow the final document and reproduce the work (further examples of this kind of documentation can be seen on the instructables website)
  • most of the grade should center around the completeness of the final work, rather than the inaccuracy of initial docs some of the discrepancies will even be good: improv use of new methods based of materials available at the time
• there should also be a grading system for when student chooses to build something that another student had done, or something that the found instructions for online
• should probably also make it a policy that a mini training course needs to be completed for each machine (lathe, mill, cutter, …). The course can consist of a set of small projects that demonstrate how each part of the machine works ( should be completeable in less than a day (full day max) )

When I was in college, I once had this crazy notion of a half-derivative. We’d been taking nth-derivatives in physics, and I wondered “why stick to integers?”. Well, as it turned out, others had been there before me. At the time it looked like complete non-sense, and even now, if I had to start from scratch, I doubt I’d be able to generate a formal and operational definition from which you could actually calculate the thing. Last weekend I mentioned this this to my dad’s buddy Captain Smiley during my trip to San Diego for his change of command ceremony.

Also, during that trip I visited Wahrenbrocks Book House (a delightful 3 story used book store (that smells great!) with little piles of books on the old wooden staircase), and purchased a whole box of books (cost $180). Among the many books I purchased was Feynman’s Rainbow, which had this funny tale:

Feynman is answering Mlodinow’s question “Is it foolish to become mature?”

I’m not sure. But an important part of the creative process is play. At least for some scientists. It is hard to maintain as you get older. You get less playful. But you shouldn’t, of course.

I have a large number of entertaining mathematical type of problems, little worlds of this kind that I play in and that I work in from time to time. For example, I first heard about calculus when I was in high school and I saw the formula for the derivative of a function. And the second derivative, and the third… Then I noticed a pattern that worked for the nth derivative, no matter what the integer n was — one, two, three, and so forth.

But then I asked, what about a “half” derivative? I wanted an operation that when you do it to a function gives you a new function, and if you do it twice you get the ordinary first derivative of the function. Do you know that operation? I invented it when I was in high school. But I didn’t know how to calculate it in those days. I was only in high school, so I could only define it. I couldn’t compute anything. And I didn’t know how to do anything to check it or anything. I just defined it. Only later, when I was in the university, did I start over again. And I had a lot of fun with it. And found out that my original definition that I thought up in high school was right. It would work.

Then when I was in Los Alamos working on the atomic bomb, I saw some people doing a complicated equation. And I realized that the form they had corresponded to my half derivative. Well, I had invented a numerical operation for solving it, so I did it, and it worked. We checked it by doing it twice, which is just the ordinary derivative. So I did a nifty numerical method for solving their equation. Everything, well, not everything, but lots of fun stuff turns out to be useful. You just play it out.

So, alright, I’m no Feynman. Though I remember considering nth derivatives in high school (during my calculus class), I never actually performed them until we did it during physics class in college. And it was only then that I thought of the “half” derivative in the same definitional sense that Feynman did when he was in high school. I was never actually (still do not consider myself) capable of independently coming up with a useful operational definition that can actually be calculated.