Maker Faire

[torquill]

I didn't expect anything from this year's event; I just went to bask in the geekiness. I came away happy.

I got to see the Crucible fire trucks again (so strange to think of such a thing as comforting). We discovered that if we want to see the naval battles, we need to grab tickets early on. The steampunk carnival was small and clever, complete with a woman who can play a theremin as accurately as a violin. We got good seats for Mousetrap this time, and a decent position for one of the Tesla coil demos. The Long Now project finally has a full-size piece of the ten-thousand-year clock built -- the chime assembly -- and it is, for lack of a better word, mesmerizing. I got complimented several times on my xkcd "Stand Back: Science" shirt, and saw many other people wearing that or other xkcd shirts. I hurt my brain again trying to figure out the chemistry behind walnut hull gasification. I bought a solar LED lantern kit which I hope I'll have time to assemble before Burning Man. And there were other cool things, familiar and unfamiliar: the giraffe, the Orb Swarm, the mechanical hand, so many others.

I went with a family friend (Beth), eastbaygreg, farmount, and a fellow grad student, Margaret. I ran into a co-worker, surprisingly; I had no idea that Yan would be manning the booth with the giant bacteriophage model. We also ran into hopeforyou and starry_sigh, whom we had hoped to see there; I saw the back of roadknight's head in the crowd. I had rather expected to recognize more people, but other than a couple of "oh, hey, you look familiar" encounters, that was it.

That's okay. What I love is plunging into a crowd of strangers and knowing that we all speak a common language. There is a group of people who are "my" people. I need to be reminded of that sometimes, as I while away the months in Davis: that there is a place where I belong, where I can go after all this is over. That's why I went today.

Comments

[knaveofhearts.livejournal.com]

Bah! I *looked* for the Long Now people, I asked around to see if I could find them, bah bah bah. That was the one thing I wanted to see that I didn't get to see.

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

They were hidden in the back corner behind the Tesla coils. :/ We only got to see them because we went back to see the Tesla coil demo.

One other cool thing they had (which they will doubtless have next year) was a pendulum bob -- the prototype, made out of aluminum, next to a finished tungsten one. The difference in mass had to be felt to be believed.