Instructables, artists, and preservation of the fundamentals

June 16th, 2007 by k8gu Leave a reply »

I took the car to the shop today for its annual preventative work.  While I was waiting, I flipped through Popular Science.  Wow, that magazine has changed (for the better) over the past few years (I haven’t read it in maybe 5 years).

They have a section called “How 2.0” that has skeleton projects, some with parts lists and vendors.  Cool.  We’ve come full-circle.  It reminds me of the Instructables web site that I stumbled across a couple of years ago.  The Popular Science section is really important because it represents a mainstream publication leading to the reversal of the “Decline of the Fundamentals” described here earlier.

One of the interesting things about this is that many of the characters leading the preservation of fundamental skills are artists.  Not only are artists helping us see our world differently, they are helping us preserve valuable industrial skills.  Sounds wierd to an engineer, doesn’t it?

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