Giving away at the age of 89

An 89-year-old retiree volunteers once a week at a school in Washington area to teach math to 6-graders. Eva Jacobs has been a statistician for almost 40 years, a "wonderful career" as she puts it. The idea behind this undertaking is to show that science is real and might be useful as well. For most of the kids it is also the first opportunity to meet a scientist alive and to convince themselves that scientists are not only those long-bearded geeky creatures working on another disastrous weapon that would imminently blow the whole world up.

What strikes me the most is that such projects reveal a cruel truth about our society. Scientists constantly fight with an overwhelming conviction that science is useless, at least a large part of it. Sad as it might be, it is a prevalent stance of most of the students when faced with never-ending facts, formulas, definitions. A universal question expressed by most of the kids is "will I really ever need it?". Obviously good teachers will not miss an opportunity of spending some extra time on telling them about practical uses of even advanced concepts such as general relativity, energy quantization or group theory.

It's ironic that the society so much dependent on technology as ours isolates people from difficulties of inventing those very advancements. Life has to be easy and enjoyable, almost an opposite of a scientific career paved with studying, conducting experiments, putting effort in understanding the problem. Science is a domain of nerds and by definition incomprehensible. All the efforts to change that boil down to desperate attempts to prove that science CAN be fun. But amusing ourselves to death in a Myth-Busters fashion during physics lessons is not the way to go. Eventually someone has to say it loud and clear, education is a painful process with lots of sweat on the way.

The shopping attitude exhibited by many of the parents doesn't help either. A widely controversial initiative taken recently by some of the public schools in Poland seems like the way to go. At the beginning of this school year parents were asked to sign a commitment (link in Polish). In this written form, schools oblige them to provide proper environment for studying at home, to participate in school's life and, what obviously have drawn attention of a number of tabloids, to make sure that kids are clean, decently dressed and groomed... After a short laugh it doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. Especially given that most parents, so busy with assuring their jobs, have assumed their duties to merely checking their progeny's results online.

Make your own gadget

How often have you been annoyed by your newly purchased gadget that it doesn't support this, or that it doesn't have that? Well, it could but you would need to throw another hundred $$$ or so to get that very important feature allowing your MP3 player to stream music directly to your oven’s beeper and display song tags on your microwave.

Companies know that all too well. For most customers, a tiny little feature might easily boost the equipment’s price beyond the acceptable level. Tech savvy geeks, on the other hand, will most likely swallow that bitter pill and just pay. Prior to household financial department’s (=wife) go-ahead, obviously.

So how about designing a gadget with the feature set that you like? That should not be a problem, especially nowadays with gazillions internet fora where unfulfilled Edisons are just waiting for an opportunity to share their wisdom. What posed a real hurdle, at least up to now, was actually manufacturing the bloody thing.

Miniaturization, fancy assembly processes, chip mounting all that requires a rather sophisticated machinery. Something that only serious players in the electronica world could afford. And the Sonys, Panasonics and the likes would be the least interested in following a blueprint of a basement geek who designed this brand new home theatre system cheaper, better and without any marketing-imposed restrictions.

Well, now all of those self-proclaimed geniuses may dust off their dreams of bringing the ideal gadget to the world. The dropping price of overseas (=China) assembly and the increasing flexibility of the factories may finally make it possible. Small batches, a hundred or so, are no longer a problem. Just enough to make the circle of your DIY buddies infinitely happy with that new übercool slingshot with a laser pointer.

But it gets even better. For not much more than a couple of thousands you can do it at home! With a 3D printer you can mold a plastic chassis or use plasma cutters to abuse a piece of metal in a million ways. Sky is the limit.

The internet gave the real voice to the masses. The journalism, photography, video-making have slowly ceased to be domain of THEM - the chosen ones hidden in big corporations. Likewise, the app selling model introduced by Apple made quite few people millionaires by simply giving them the opportunity to quickly sell their software directly to customers.

It looks like now it’s time for hardware to follow that lead. I can easily imagine small groups of customers gathering somewhere in a virtual office and designing a piece of gadgetry they are interested in at that moment. Sending out their blueprints to a factory far, far away, and enjoying their creation few weeks later. Everything done online without even knowing their faces. Are these going to be manufactures of the future? They already have Chris Anderson’s blessing.