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mini t's avatar

"The first step is to develop science kits. These kits should contain microchips, sensors," but we /have/ a sizeable arduino/raspi hobby gang, and if you want to build your chip from 'scratch' (or scratchier-you can't go from scratch) there are YouTube's like Ben Eater , but this is all so small next to big tech industries

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Tom Swift's avatar

A lot of these kits are made by fly-by-night Chinese firms and have very poor quality instructions. Most of them do not provide a coherent picture of the laws of physics, and are not aligned with a curriculum. In the United States, public education actually promotes virtual content instead of physical engineering. In order to solve the problems you have mentioned, I am currently developing a series of high-quality kits aligned to fundamental principles of science. Stay tuned for more!

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The 13th Grade's avatar

I agree completely with this article. Engineering school did not teach me to be the kind of engineer I wanted to be; it was all math and coding and nothing was hands on.

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Tom Swift's avatar

Stay tuned for the article in which I outline my experience building my own electrical engineering lab for under $4000.

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N of 1's avatar

Very worthy aspiration; great image as well

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Centaur Write Satyr, MBA's avatar

There's a Yarvin post from a 1-2 years ago about non-digital tech that I cannot find. Essentially, he envisions a future where arborists, farmers, and construction workers are using giant mech suits. Sign me up.

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maximum drive's avatar

Behind all men lies an ideal, and I agree with your diagnose that the romanticization of the inventor was lost in the 20th century to the values promoted by the hippies.

How do you think we recapture this ideal?

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Tom Swift's avatar

This is eventually going to be a magazine with content similar to what Scientific American or Popular Mechanics published in the first part of the twentieth century. To recapture the heroic inventor ideal, we need to create a mass market youth magazine covering science, engineering and science fiction.

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BlackBeardII's avatar

This is an incredible article. Love how it touches on how inventors have been usurped by corporations. Something else this has done is remove the artistry with products and inventions. Looking back at inventions prior to our current era, they were as much art as they were technology. I'm hopeful this will return once heroic inventors make their return.

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Bingo Bobbins's avatar

This reminds me of a line Peter Thiel dropped in a discussion along these lines: "We were promised flying cars, what we got was 128 characters"

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