Mark Frauenfelder Quotes

#1. I actually studied engineering in school - I have a degree in mechanical engineering. But, when I got out of school, instead of going to work as an engineer, I was in a band.

Mark Frauenfelder

#2. My advice for raising daughters is to spend time with them doing things you both enjoy.

Mark Frauenfelder

#3. I can't imagine how much time it took Matt Bucy to cut up 'The Wizard of Oz' and reassemble every word of dialog into alphabetical order. The resulting movie is called 'Of Oz the Wizard.'

Mark Frauenfelder

#4. The Cat Dancer is a 30-inch piece of wire with some little cardboard cylinders on the end. My cats go crazy for it. I stuck it on the wall with the adhesive mount, but I ended up taking it off so I could hold it and play directly with my cats.

Mark Frauenfelder

#5. As soon as you cross your property line, you might as well write off the possibility of getting anything else done that day.

Mark Frauenfelder

#6. When you give a homemade gift, you are giving a part of yourself to the recipient. You can't do that with a mass-produced item.

Mark Frauenfelder

#7. Here's one of my bad habits: when I go to someone's house, I head straight to their bookshelf.

Mark Frauenfelder

#8. Cleaning cat litter is an unpleasant daily chore for me, but the DuraScoop makes it much less unpleasant.

Mark Frauenfelder

#9. The fact of the matter is that mistakes are really important way to learn.

Mark Frauenfelder

#10. I like hanging around people who knit. They are usually in a good mood. People who are staring into their iPhones *and* demanding your attention at the same time are not as much fun to be around.

Mark Frauenfelder

#11. Human beings evolved opposable thumbs for a reason. The sense of reward you get from making something with your hands can't be earned any other way. It's obvious that people learn faster from 'hands-on' experience than they do watching someone else do something.

Mark Frauenfelder

#12. John Edgar Park introduced me to the gentle art of recreational lock-picking. It's fun and potentially useful to know how to tickle tumblers in the right way to open door locks and padlocks.

Mark Frauenfelder

#13. To be successful, you have to have quantity of quality.

Mark Frauenfelder

#14. In school, we learn that mistakes translate into bad grades. This unfortunate lesson gets burned into our brains, and we go through life shunning challenges that might end in failure.

Mark Frauenfelder

#15. Everyone's crazy except you and me.

Mark Frauenfelder

#16. We're trained in school to equate mistakes with bad grades - something to be avoided at all costs. The alpha makers were somehow able to dodge that. They think that mistakes are just part of the creative process and maybe even the best way to learn.

Mark Frauenfelder

#17. I looked around the iTunes store and came across Dr. Moku's Hiragana Mnemonics. Thirty minutes later I had memorized all 46 hiragana. Now my 9-year-old is learning them, and having a lot of fun.

Mark Frauenfelder

#18. The human-made world is mostly beyond our comprehension. Our daily survival depends on seemingly magical gizmos that provide our food, water, clothing, comfort, transportation, education, well-being, and amusement.

Mark Frauenfelder

#19. Windell Oskay is the co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, a Silicon Valley company that has designed and produced specialized electronics and robotics kits since 2007.

Mark Frauenfelder

#20. Fear of failure held me back from being a DIYer for many years, especially after a few early attempts at home improvement projects went awry.

Mark Frauenfelder

#21. I'm very good at making mistakes, so I realized that I should embrace mistakes and learn from them.

Mark Frauenfelder

#22. My idea of a traditional holiday - the right way to do it - goes back to the days when gift-giving meant sharing homemade things: hand-knit sweaters, carved wooden toys, smoked meats and the like.

Mark Frauenfelder

#23. As the editor-in-chief of the do-it-yourself magazine 'Make,' I've met scores of dedicated makers. They come from all walks of life - rich, poor, young, old, male, female, religious, atheist, liberal, conservative.

Mark Frauenfelder

#24. My problem with mechanical pencils is that I break the lead tips constantly.

Mark Frauenfelder

#25. In this beginner-friendly book, called 'Learn to Program with Minecraft,' you will learn how to do cool things in Minecraft using the Python programming language. No prior programming experience is needed.

Mark Frauenfelder

#26. Ted Cruz is the Schroedinger's cat of politicians. He is both eligible and not eligible to be president.

Mark Frauenfelder

#27. Coming up with a way to fix mistakes challenges your creativity and your critical thinking skills and your resourcefulness. Often you end up with something better than what you planned on in the first place.

Mark Frauenfelder

#28. Who else but the maestro of mathematical creativity, Clifford Pickover, to curate a museum of Strange Brains and write biographies of the scientific geniuses who formerly owned them? I'll never look at a pigeon, a pearl, or a Wheatstone bridge the same way again.

Mark Frauenfelder

#29. I co-founded 'bOING bOING' magazine and the 'Boing Boing Blog' and was an editor at 'Wired' from 1993-1998.

Mark Frauenfelder

#30. When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was George Gamow's 'One Two Three ... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science.'

Mark Frauenfelder

#31. I wrote and illustrated a science experiment book called 'The Mad Professor'.

Mark Frauenfelder