Adam Savage’s Maker Tour: MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (Part 1)
At MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, Adam gets a glimpse into the future of making. He starts out his tour with some amazing nano-technologies, including a machine that can see the hairs on the hairs of a baby spider. Welcome to your new robot overlords! (This series and tour is made possible by The Fab Foundation and Chevron.)
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That guy was really annoying always interrupting the students..
Adam…
Speechless..
Amazing…
I think my brain just ruptured… What an incredible lab…
Haha yeah nice, did Adam get any of it? 🙂 And he is a bit of an ego yes, I know those type of guys in my work.
wow, this is amazing stuff, but boooooy, that dude. i mean, he’s not bad at explaining (if a little stilted), but can he wait until it’s clear there is need for an explanation? maybe?
I had a different reaction – he was ok, perhaps under a time constraint. Adam’s technical background is very high. The tested community has a similar technical background. Except for other colleagues, the typical visitor to the lab may not be as skilled as Adam. Perhaps he misread Adam’s background. Being one of the dudes from Mythbusters may have worked against him.
Part of the information might be confidential or not ready for prime time. Journals get peed off if you try to publish work on findings that have gone public. It is hard discussing your work under those circumstances.
I am just impressed at Adam’s reactions, love it. I would love to check out this lab.
you’re probably right. i mean, it also only takes a small step to go from very helpful to a bit obnoxious. especially when you work in a field this far removed from common layman understanding, i can imagine how easy it is to be a smidgen off in one’s calibration.
but if there is a reason like primacy of publication, he still made it look a bit meh with the way he cut off the students with a tone as if they were due for a spanking because they used the wrong words in front of the rube. (that’s the kind of thing you clear beforehand, right? disclosure, not spankings!)
As a teacher, I found this (Spock voice) “fascinating” And as a manufacturing prototype engineer, to get a glimpse into the 21st Century version of MIT/Draper Labs was good stuff. Bring on part 2 !
The mannerisms of the lab supervisor didn’t bother me. Maybe it’s because I meet incredibly knowledgable people across diverse disciplines that don’t always have stellar communications skills like Adam Savage or Carl Sagan. I learn something from everybody and thats cool. I love it when I feel I’m not the smartest person in the lab.
Agree. Hopefully, he will check out the video and our comments.
They seemed pressed for time, and the students/employees may not know the context. One solution would be to allocate more time to everyone, such as the lab’s director to share their vision, the students/employees to share their perspective, and for Adam to tie it all together. There is 3-6 episodes easy of content right there, but I have to think the lab time and the people who work it are constrained.
Personally, I thought his interjections were quite helpful.
It may seem annoying that he was interrupting the students, but I totally understand why. He even said it at one point. People will often times say something in a language that is very “low level” and perhaps profound, the listener if they don’t understand right away or don’t want to seem ignorant, will just pretend to understand. It takes someone who isn’t close to the project/tech/science/etc. some time to really understand what was said. So, he was pausing and trying to explain in more laymen’s terms (or unpacking as he put it) so we can understand the basics of what is being presented.
Regarding the first machine, I got that they genetically engineered E. coli to interface with digital machinery. What did those “liquid handlers” do? The second machine was a Scanning Electron Microscope (nanometers don’t impress me much) that could do chromatography or spectroscopy. Cool! Why is that a manufacturing tool? It does lithography too? Show me. The third machine was based on something I already knew existed. What are they doing with it that is new? It can scan in 3D? Why is that machine important to the future of manufacturing? Don’t explain what these machines do, explain why I care. Because you should bet that I care.
As a Mechanical Engineer fresh out of college, I too have met people with less than stellar communications skills, but that guy was out of line. He is not fully to blame for it. However, I would have been far more engaged, I think, if the students had been allowed to speak for their own work. As a student who has some first hand teaching experience, this man needs to learn that there are ways of communicating complex material to people who don’t know the jargon in ways that are not condescending. It’s hard to do, but if I wanted to teach at MIT I would be sure to learn it. If ever I need to be belittled, I will look for that guy. That said, I look forward to Part 2 of this series.
these guys seemed really pressed for time which is unfortunate considering how massively complex this all is. they could easily spend as much time as this video is long on each of the layers they’re going through. i think this also suffered from lack of prep. they should have gone over , ahead of time, a number of bullet points to talk about with a pause between them to either explain it themselves or let the guide interject with his simplification. That being said while his interjections might be annoying it does seem like he’s trying to slow things down just a tad and interject more detail. student at the end was just about to push right through to the object she’s scanning without pausing any and there was evidently more to be said on what the machine does exactly compared to something similar but more basic.
I loved seeing Adam and Neil together. Two of my heroes in one place. Neil Gershenfeld is a legend of Digital Fabrication. I agree he is an uber nerd but he has a social conscience with it. He is over generous with his knowledge and enthusiasm for all forms of creation. He is the progenitor of the Fab Lab movement and to be honest I doubt the Global Maker Movement would be as strong as it is today without his constant curiosity and far sightedness for pushing personal fabrication. You should check out his TED talk on Fab Labs – https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_gershenfeld_on_fab_labs and this one on nano-materials – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA-wcFtUBE4.
The MIT course ‘How to make (almost) anything’ is the still the gold standard for anyone who wants to learn about the history and future of Digital Fabrication and the Fab Academy short course based on this program is freely available for anyone to watch past lectures – http://archive.fabacademy.org
Enjoy watching all these and I would also highly recommend Neil Gershenfeld’s book FAB – The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop.
Hacked Bacteria? I smell a New movie idea.
Very exciting. I think Neil’s intejections were very helpful. I wish there was more time to delve into how the hacked Ecoli can be used to produce specific sequences.