Tape art stuck to me like glue.
Each year the Maker Faire surprises me. I think it will essentially be the same thing as last year, but I always find something that jumps out at me as wildly creative and inventive.
Which is not to say that all of the exhibits are winners. Occasionally, I'll amble up to a table with a hand-drawn poster board sign inviting me to build something out of pipe cleaners — or something similarly outdated. There are a few exhibits that have clearly been trotted out to every Burning Man and Stanford-sponsored science kids' camp in the last decade. But I'm usually pleasantly surprised, and this year was no different.
This year what stuck with me the most was tape art. If you've never thought of masking tape as an artistic medium, the folks who created Tapigami have found a way to transform ribbons of paper and glue into flowers as pretty as cake icing and tribal village sculptures that cluster together under clothes-hanger covered skies. They'll happily rip off a new piece of one-sided tape and show you how to bend, fold, and crease your way into the art form. They taught me a few tricks to help with architecting formless tape into structures that can stand up to the relentless force of gravity. It's gorgeous and unexpected and wonderful.
I'm surrounded by science nerds in San Francisco, but art and literature and music are the things that inspire me, and based on the photos I took that were worth keeping, it's clear that's what I gravitated toward. One understated booth that impressed me in a big way was the California College of the Arts table (near our own Autodesk cluster of booths). They exhibited student work centered around building egg-like structures. They are constructed of wood, string, and weird plastic-like materials, some of which were even cast from molds. It seemed like the perfect way to get art and design students thinking about how to use 3D modeling software for both art and architecture. It made me want to go to art school.
Finally! The post office is going to 
I've been eating a salad just about every day since I was a kid. Fortunately, my mom always dropped a good green salad on the dinner table alongside the pork chops and bacon-fat fried potatoes. I became a connoisseur of store-bought salad dressings at an early age. Where some science-bent kids mixed up chemicals in basement beakers, I concocted ranch and Italian marriages in the kitchen. I might have gone too far at times. I 
Why are our nation's manhole covers so boring? And who's going to do something about it?
Okay, those are probably the wrong questions to ask, but when you think about it — and I'm going on the supposition you haven't thought about it, ever — manhole cover designs in the United States are almost without exception exceedingly dull. In the United States, manhole covers are all made of iron (cheap, plentiful, heavy) and they nearly all have a ridiculously simplistic design of some sort. I'd like to see that change so that this essential and often overlooked detail of city life might be inspiring, educational, and perhaps even profitable. Forthwith: My modest proposal for manhole innovation.
I sometimes feel like a man out of time. Or, at least I often wish I were.
We’ve all probably been asked, usually at a dinner party, in which era of the past would we have most liked to live. I’ve always felt like — if given such a dangerous choice — I would choose the 1920s. I don’t want the gangsters. Or the flappers. Or the Communist haters and the Ku Klux Klan. God forbid I would have to live through Prohibition.
