Introducing the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories STEAM T-shirt. Featuring high quality screen printing on 100% cotton tees from American Apparel.
Front side: Science & Technology & Engineering & Art & Mathematics. (Black ink) Back side: The Evil Mad Scientist logo. (Red, brown, and black inks) Shirt color: “New Silver,” a uniform light gray.
These are Great Shirts
Beautiful quality screen printing by Social Imprints of San Francisco (“Printing with Purpose”).
Why Science & Technology & Engineering & Art & Mathematics?
It’s who we are, and it’s what we stand for.
Why not just STEM?
We, like many, manyothers believe that art is a critical component of good design, of good engineering, and of beneficial technology.
Fitzgerald Marine Reserve is a protected marine and intertidal park located at Moss Beach, California, about 40 minutes south of San Francisco, just north of Half Moon bay. It’s a spectacular place to visit at low tide, for some of the finest, most accessible tide pools in the region.
And as you’ll see, there’s definitely a lot to look at.
METEOR ALERT: Sky watchers in North America might see an outburst of meteors during the early hours of June 11th when Earth passes through a stream of cometary debris last seen in 1930. Forecasters Peter Jenniskens (SETI Institute) and Esko Lyytinen (Helsinki, Finland) predict the return of the gamma Delphinid meteor shower this Tuesday morning around 08:30 UT (04:30 am EDT). The shower is expected to last no more than about 30 minutes with an unknown number of bright, fast meteors.
The park is located very northwest corner of California, nestled against Redwood National Park. The two parks are managed together, as part of the “Redwood National and State Parks.” It’s a substantial six hour drive north from San Francisco or Silicon Valley, but as you will see, it’s unique, and arguably worth the trip.
Kitty’s Morning Tea: Kinetic Theory of Matter for Kids, by Christine Liu, is a remarkably charming book and physics lesson for young children. It’s a short twelve-pages about tea, molecules, and kinetic energy that you can read (in its entirety) above, in a digital edition released by the author. We love seeing science-themed educational materials for youngsters— and this is no exception.
Christine and friends are running an (already funded) campaign on Kickstarter to print the book and get it into the hands of children, and you can get your own printed copy as one of the rewards. It’s also available in a Kindle edition, free for the short remaining duration of their campaign.
We have been visiting the Exploratorium in San Francisco again and again since we were teenagers in the early ’90s. And with good cause: The Exploratorium is an unparalleled museum of hands-on science, art, perception, and exploration. It’s not a children’s museum (although it is an amazing place to take children), nor is it a place where you admire giant fossilized skeletons, nor one of those museums that always seems to have a traveling exhibit with a name like “The Science of Jersey Shore.”
Instead, it’s a place full of simple, often-amazing yet not-too-flashy exhibits that (for the most part) you play with to learn about various phenomena. For example, at the Floating in Copper exhibit, you can get a feel for the un-earthly effects that strong magnets have in the presence of a large block of nonmagnetic, highly-conductive material. It’s one thing to read about eddy currents in an article; it’s quite another to release a chunk of metal in mid-air, only to find that it floats down to rest, more gently than a dandelion seed. You may have seen this exact exhibit at other museums (here, for example)— and if so, that’s quite likely because the Exploratorium makes many copies of its exhibits for other museums and publishes plans for others to make their own.
Since moving to the Bay Area in 2005 and starting the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories blog, we’ve also been honored to present some of our own projects at Exploratorium events over the past few years, including the CandyFab, a Bristlebot workshop at the first Young Makers event, and some of our clock projects at the Open Make event on the theme of “Time.”
Exterior of the Exploratorium, at the Palace of Fine Arts (2010). Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid under CC BY-NC-ND license.Interior of the Exploratorium, at the Palace of Fine Arts (2006). Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid under CC BY-NC license
The Exploratorium has, since its founding in 1969, been located in the exhibit hall of the the Palace of Fine Arts— a huge arc of a building left over from the 1915 Worlds Fair, located in the Marina district of San Francisco, as pictured above. As the name implies, the building was designed to be a museum and was a remarkably suitable home for the Exploratorium. However, a few years ago, it came out in the news that they would be moving out of the Palace of Fine Arts, and into a space on one of the San Francisco Piers. Of course, our hearts sank at hearing this, as we could not imagine any more perfect place for the Exploratorium. Nor could we imagine that they could possibly find a place as large and welcoming anywhere else in San Francisco. We were also worried about parking, as the Palace of Fine Arts was blessed with its own parking lots, a rarity in San Francisco.
We were wrong.
On Saturday, we went to a member preview at their new location at Pier 15, which will be opening on April 17. We took a number of pictures as we explored, and in addition to sharing some of the highlights here, we have put up a flickr set from our visit.
The new location at Piers 15 and 17 on the San Francisco Embarcadero is right between the Ferry Building and Fisherman’s Wharf, in the shadow of the Bay Bridge. A huge advantage of the new location is that it is much easier to get to by public transport than the Palace of Fine Arts was. There’s a MUNI train stop, and it’s just a few blocks from BART and the other public transportation that already comes to the Ferry Building.
There are also plenty of nearby parking garages and lots. We had no problem finding an inexpensive lot to park in for the day, and now taking the train is an option for us.
And it turned out beautifully. Here at the end of the pier, there are a number of new exhibits, many about biology and the bay.
The new location is much bigger: there is three times as much space. This view is looking down one of the corridors, from the location pictured previously. The museum is packed with exhibits as far as the eye can see.
All of the spaces are well designed, and extremely good looking, taking advantage of the abundant natural light.
There are many large open areas, as well as cozy corners and nooks. The Tactile Dome is being rebuilt on a larger scale (in a space with a higher ceiling than this) and will be opening this summer.
Activity in the new bio labs is visible through large windows. In neighboring spaces, we saw them growing continuous replacement plants for the touchable plant exhibits and various organisms for people to look at under the microscopes.
The new location has the same spirit, and despite our expectations, still feels like the Exploratorium. The workshop is just as prominent as before, and still out in the open so that visitors can see new exhibits in progress and old ones being repaired.
Our old favorites on electricity and magnetism (like Daisy Dyno) felt right at home, and were as popular as ever.
The acoustics are much more friendly, making conversations and discussions much more enjoyable.
The one new building on the pier is the Bay Observatory, which has stunning views as well as brand new exhibits on bay topics such as geology, geography and tides. Above is a 3D tide table with the tides for each day represented by a the shape of each piece of plastic marked with the time and lunar information.
Since this was an early preview, many exhibits are still in progress or yet to be installed. This outdoor space between Piers 15 and 17 will be opening soon and the museum plans to eventually develop additional space on Pier 17.
Congratulations to the Exploratorium on such a successful move and wonderful new home!
The museum will be opening to the public on April 17, and tickets will be available online soon. There are additional member previews coming up on April 6 and 9 as well— check the calendar for details and other upcoming events.
If you’re anything like us, you’ve at some point come across supposedly-nerdy valentines and thought to yourself, “A real geek would have used an equation to express that sentiment.” And if so, have we have got just the thing for you!
Here’s our collection of six little valentine cards, each of which adds a little authenticity and class to the not entirely uncommon “geek” valentine genre.
Suppose that you want to communicate to your valentine just how hot you think they are. Sure, you could go with a picture of a thermometer— or a Sriracha bottle —but isn’t the thermodynamic definition of temperature itself in a whole category of its own?
And what better way to say “I love you,” than with the gift of trigonometric identities?
You can download the original file here (260 kB .PDF document).
Print it out on (or otherwise affix to) card stock, and [some steps omitted] enjoy the resulting lifelong romance.
Update:New cards have been released! Please check out the 2019 set, which contains all 42 cards from 2013 through 2019.
The Makerspace program is a joint effort by O’Reilly’s Make division and Otherlab to put dedicated space and tools for hands-on making into high schools. They describe their aims on their about page:
By creating makerspaces in an educational context, students can have access to tools and equipment that they might not have otherwise; they can collaborate on projects that are driven by their own interests, and by doing so, develop the capacity and confidence to innovate. We see making as a gateway to deeper engagement in science and engineering but also art and design.
On Monday, September 10, we’ll be attending the Makerspace launch event at the College of San Mateo. We’ll be demoing a few kits and are excited to have the opportunity to meet educators interested in bringing making into the classroom. If you’ll be attending, please stop by our table and say hi!
In a flawless, triumphant technological tour de force, a plutonium-powered rover the size of a small car was lowered at the end of 25-foot-long cables from a hovering rocket stage onto Mars early on Monday morning.
A crowd of some 5000 people gathered on the plaza at NASA Ames Research Center late last night (it was only Monday Morning on the east coast) to watch presentations by mission scientists and finally the live broadcast, on the big screen.
This was a thrill. Not only was the landing process itself incredible— watch this video, “Seven minutes of terror” if you haven’t —but it was amazing to be in a crowd of so many people excited to watch the landing as well. Many of the people in the audience screaming and cheering had worked on various parts of the mission, including the ground-breaking (pun intended) scientific instruments aboard the rover and the new lifting-body heat shield to get it there.
