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"From Ashes, Reviving a Place of Wild Dreams" and a slide show.Deyrolle’s stuffed menagerie — from black crows to big-game animals — its cases of butterflies and beetles, its signature pedagogic posters and century-old prints have made it a place of pilgrimage.
So after a short circuit triggered a fire in the shop, Paris seemed to come together in an unusual display of solidarity.
French soldiers on a routine patrol smelled the smoke and tried to secure the building. They were joined by dozens of firefighters and hundreds of police officers in battling the blaze. The French Army opened one of its nearby military depots as a warehouse for the burned animals and objects.
Michel Dumont, then the mayor of the Seventh Arrondissement, where Deyrolle is, rushed to the scene and lamented the store’s demise, saying, “It’s a catastrophe, the end of an institution.”
Ninety percent of the shop’s stock, including most of the animals, a celebrated fossil collection, an antique skeleton of a Nile perch and a 19th-century diorama of more than 100 birds, was lost. The dark-wood cabinets that housed birds, butterflies and beetles went up in flames.
But the 18th-century building remained intact. Prince Louis Albert de Broglie, a former banker who created a national conservatory with 650 varieties of tomatoes at his chateau, had bought the financially troubled Deyrolle in 2001 and eventually restored it to solvency. He vowed to rebuild.
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1. There wasn't much disunity in the party between Clinton and Obama supporters. I knew this because, while the television networks were reporting a big division, you just didn't see it in Denver. When there were demonstrators, it was always the same group of about ten people. They looked like the people you see at street demos in Berkeley, who, sorry to say, no one takes seriously. There were far more abortion protestors present than Hillary protestors. Orders of magnitude more. You could also see it by talking to people who wore Hillary badges in the convention center, which I did. A few times I sat next to them, or was in a line with them, and we talked and everyone agreed that this was a Democratic year, and nothing would stand in the way of that. I think McCain's people listened too much to the TV people, and didn't bother to check with the people at the show and they overestimated division in the party.
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I've had a few months for the Comcast debacle to settle in, and have a few thoughts this morning to share.
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20x200 : think-make-think.... Clifton writes -
In April of 2007, John Maeda wrote a haiku entitled think-make-think and posted it to his blog. I think that it went relatively unnoticed. Over the next few months, that haiku often found its way to the forefront of my mind. When our studio, the Public Design Center, acquired the remnants of a discarded arrow sign, it was immediately clear to me that think-make-think was the perfect piece for the sign due to the haiku's small size and its potency.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!
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Have a G1 Android Google phone? If you want to get hours and hours of extra talk, stand by, web and video time the do-it-yourself open source MintyBoost charger works great with it! via Ladyada.
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When my kids were smaller, we had some really fun craft parties. I especially liked helping kids make holiday presents for their parents; projects like these easy beeswax candles were a great success! Check out this Wikipedia article on beeswax, too. Via Crafting a Green World
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Last week at the Duxbury Student Union, Lee Pulis and I held a workshop on using trash to learn about electricity, design and mechanical devices. We used CD drives from old computers. Inside the drives we found motors, gears, switches, and lots of interesting looking stuff. The main tools were small phillips head screwdrivers and pliers. We had some copper tape on hand, some batteries and electrical tape. Other tan the new batteries, everything we used for supplies and tools was either from the dump or a local discount store for cheap.
What started out as two boxes of computer parts was soon spread out over tables and laps in various states of disassembly. Our intention was to show that there are lots of interesting things inside the castoffs of our modern society, and from this junk, we can find the ideas, inspiration and supplies for many projects. Participants were aged from 5th to 9th grade, and everybody seemed to have a nice time.
We used some AA batteries for power, mostly just one battery per motor. There was a lot more that we could have gotten to, like wiring batteries in series to increase voltage, controlling the circuit with a switch, lighting LEDs and a lot more. Two and a half hours went pretty quickly. Several youth had devices that were pretty close to the Vibrobot from the cover of Make 10 by closing time.
Check out the photos
Have you tried teaching with junk? What does working with castoff parts show you about design, history of technology, circuit design, the way kids think?
If you are in a school, how do other teachers, administrators or students think about projects like this? Does it matter that not everybody is going to end up with similar or exactly alike outcomes? Where can a project like this lead to? How do projects like this encourage learning, exploration and inquiry? Post up in the comments with your thoughts and opinions!
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Nice round up of things for makers, science lovers and more to do in Boston @ The NYTimes...
When you run an ice cream parlor down the street from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you expect your customers to chat about stem cell research or trade theories about neutrinos between licks of burnt caramel. But Gus Rancatore, whose Toscanini’s shop in Cambridge, Mass., is renowned as much for its deep-thinking clientele as for its sundaes, discovered long ago that catering to the technology-minded crowd could have unforeseen advantages...Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in MAKE Playlist | Digg this!
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I took my first stab at sewing the conductive thread from the Lilypad e-sewing kit into my Maker's Notebook bookmark ribbon. I have gotten some great suggestions from readers on switches and wires and things, which I have yet to try. Currently, I'm just putting the coin battery into the battery holder to test out my sewing job. It works pretty well, and puts out enough light to scribble ideas late at night without disturbing anyone who's sleeping. What's this "sleep" they speak of, anyway?

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I understand Maker Faire Austin is done and gone, but I'm still thinking about how much fun it was. Over the next week or 2, I'll continue to share some highlights from the most make-tastic event Austin's ever seen.
Here's a nice photostream from Aaron, one of many Maker Faire visitors who sported penchant for photography:
And, if you've got your own, tag them 'makerfaireaustin2008' and they'll show up with several thousand others here:
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