The fidget spinner posts will continue until morale improves. This time, we’re looking at [TannerTech]’s electromagnetic accelerator for a fidget spinner. [Tanner] can spin his fidget spinner electronically using parts he had sitting around and a clever application of magnets and relays! Engineers hate him!
[Tanner]’s build consists of three magnets mounted on the tip of a fidget spinner’s arms, with the North pole facing outwards. The ‘drive circuit’ consists of an electromagnet — an inductor [Tanner] found in an old TV set — a reed switch, and a MOSFET. When the circuit is placed next to the fidget spinner, the reed switch closes, powering the electromagnet, pushing the tip of the fidget spinner forward, and starting the cycle anew. Think of it as the same technology that goes into a particle accelerator or a maglev train. Or a brushless DC motor.
Haven’t gotten your daily fill of fidget spinner hacks and fidget spinner news? Don’t worry, because we got your back, fam. Check out this amazing way to teach STEAM education — the ‘A’ stands for ‘arts’ — with the help of fidget spinner shaped PCBs and a flanged bearing. Is your oscilloscope too boring? Spice it up with some fidget spinner awesomeness. Useless machines are cool, and even [Marvin Minsky], the father of Artificial Intelligence, would say this fidget spinner hack is amazing. Like, share, and subscribe for the latest in fidget spinner news.
It’s great, if slightly ironic, to see people doing something other than fidgeting with their fidget spinners. Who would have thought a fad that began as a few extra skateboard bearings and a 3D-printed blob of plastic would beget so many truly interesting hacks? You can check out [Tanner]’s build video of this amazing hack below.
He’s right. STEAM is the new STEM. I guess some people felt left out because art wasn’t involved.
Why not call it STEAREFSDTVSEEWGBHYLKSsdw%5676vfcs2322bhyY$dDdDDNHGB01100100_01110101_01101101_01100010M so no one feels left out?
Because that’s “dumb”. I see what you did there.
“STEAM is the new STEM” Right, because the (mostly useless) liberal arts people felt left out and decided to add “Art” to the acronym for “Science, Technology, Engineering and Math”… because that’s something we REALLY don’t have enough of – “artists”. Sheesh… And the “study” I read claiming that “art” was great thing for kids was laughable and only served to show that you can “prove” anything to hippies in papers that merely sound scholarly:
Fake academic paper actually published in liberal journal hilariously exposes the absurdity of gender studies
May 21, 2017
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/05/21/fake-academic-paper-published-in-liberal-journal-hilariously-exposes-the-absurdity-of-gender-studies/
We just need to look to that great liberal arts and science school Evergreen college to understand where “Art” is going to take us. I love how they claim “97% of our graduates are working, in graduate or professional schools, or otherwise doing something personally meaningful one year after graduation.” How can they still not have the other 3% with that last qualifier?
What a bunch of ignorant assholes in this thread. There is obvious value in all subjects of study. To limit children to hard science is short sighted at best and completely limits potential.
Agreed there’s a shocking amount of ignorance coming from the science/engineering side.
A wise person welcomes disparate sets of knowledge and skill, and invites everyone to contribute to the task at hand. An ignorant person assumes that a disparate set of knowledge disqualifies someone from any ability to contribute.
As I said in another post:
Poetry might not be able to contribute to engineering, but that doesn’t mean a poet can’t.
AI & XX, I have no problem with art or artists and if people in the arts or STEM fields want to study in the other fields as well then that is fine. What I have a problem with is Artists trying to make art into a science. Art can use STEM fields in its creation but if I want to find the tensile strength of a material within a certain temperature and pressure range then I have to ignore art as part of the equation, likewise if I’m designing an airplane I start with a whole lot of math to build it so it will 1:fly 2: fly safely 3: again not fall out of the sky 4: look nice, notice how the art cannot be the main force in designing an airplane? Every 4th or 5th person I meet seems to be an artist of some kind or another but I only seem to meet people in the STEM fields at STEM functions or in the 2 or 3 a month range just randomly. We don’t need more artists with some science knowledge we need scientists, mathematicians and engineers who can do the hard science and enable the artists and designers.
You haven’t heard of the new progressive STEAM fields?! Allow Count Dankula to explain:
https://youtu.be/jHKW5AWLby0?t=2m3s
Ahahahahahahaaaa, brilliant, he nails the topic and the delivery is hilarious. If anything that is what Art should be.
As for his bafflement at the prices for modern art, it is a scam whereby wealth is created from nothing and them moved around the globe in ways that avoid tax. It is not for the benefit of society, far from it, it is a scam perpetrated by the 1% on everyone else.
This is how it works. Take two brothers Mark and John, John is an artist and sells a work, he put together in a week for $100 in materials, to his brother Mark for $1000, now their family is instantly $900 wealthier as they have a $1000 asset and the remaining $900 in cash, the other $100 probably went to their sister Jill who owns the art materials store. Now add 5 or 6 more zeros to the numbers and you get the idea. That sort of art is as evil and twisted as the diamond trade and serves no social good at all.
Furthermore the reasons behind the push for STEAM come down to access to your children’s minds and the opportunity to influence them politically, by otherwise useless people who have no place in a STEM educational environment. “Art” people realise they are becoming sidelined as education becomes rationalised and dominated by technology and they are desperately trying to maintain their hold on the education system. I am not saying that people should not have access to their ideas, I am saying that they are trying to impose their ideas on every single person who goes through the education system, and that imposition should not be allowed.
BTW I have studied, amongst many other more useful things, 3 years of Art, Design and Photography and had an exhibition recognised by a national gallery. i.e. My observations with regard to the natives are from having lived amongst them, as it were.
Whoa there. Art and science are related. Art is simply applying science to the ends of personal expression or individual craft. Engineering is the application of science to solve esoteric problems. STEAM is STEAM because art is another tool, just like engineering. This weird conflation of art with ideas is sort of misguided, while many art people have strong political beliefs, the act of artmaking is not political at all. STEAM makes sense, there is a lot of art in science and science in art.
LOL. have you studied either subject area? There is a big difference between Art and Craft, Art is always political. I have lectured in 2D computer design at a university level and held an academic position at a school of chemistry. WTF else do I have to do to be able to talk about both subjects and their relationship?
There is a lot of “craft” in STEM already and no need for Art to be a compulsory part of it.
Never hire an artist to do an engineers job.
Art is really out of place in that list.
Take any student working on a STEM type degree. They all get training (to one degree or another) in the others; scientists learn some engineering, and definitely get some math, and so on. It’s not uncommon to see these students also take art classes.
How many art majors take any serious STEM classes?
I’ll be more comfortable with including it when I see any serious effort to give artists training in the math, science, and engineering fields.
Well they can’t deal with math, that would require them to be rational, which they reject, therefore they exclude themselves. There is no reason why allowances should be made for their wants (it isn’t a need) as education is a competitive environment.
Art is political – yes, absolutely.
But so is science and engineering*. In STEM, the choices you make about how you solve things, what you research, etc are politically motivated. Not to mention how you present your results.
And that’s assuming your science is actually good & correct, not the ‘science’ that claimed blacks were less evolved and inferior to whites, etc. The fun but is while we can look back at that and see how absurd and biased it was, people of the day thought it was good science. What parts of our science today are equally flawed?
*arguably not Maths, that’s pretty pure. But stats is very political.
You are confusing tools and projects, STEM is about thinking tools, what you do with them is your choice, and having that choice is very important too. There is no such thing as bad science, if it is not compatible with the scientific method is isn’t actually science, it is merely ideology masquerading as science, this is the problem with a lot of psychology, their claims cannot be proven when a significant percentage of the findings in key studies cannot be replicated.
Watching man-horse debate the world is like watching an Ultimate Fighting contest … you know it’s inane, but you just can’t change the channel!
Than you, Hackaday, for another thoroughly enjoyable trollable flame war. Goodness, I love this stuff!
Trolling tis a Art.
Art as a scam…
> ???? ???? says: [prices of modern art], it is a scam whereby wealth is created from nothing and them moved around the globe in ways that avoid tax.
So business as it is always done, you mean?
At least art is (sometimes) nice to look at, as opposed to Dutch sandwiches, double Irishes or virtual letterboxes c/o Mossack Fonseca at Panama.
Brilliant. There are some reasons why modern art is so f-up, its so you have to ask an authority on what it means. It stops you from thinking and get you to accept the authority ideology.
Science, Technology, Engineering, ARTS, Math. Tho there is some disagreement as to whether or not Arts belong in that list, so I can see your point. But personally I figure there are better things to argue over.
I gather you don’t have children, if you did would you seriously not be bothered by having that percentage of their time and cognitive resources wasted on something so essentially useless, a topic that they can explore in their free time should they feel inclined to do so?
That’s a narrow-minded world view, and I absolutely think art education belongs in schools. However, shoehorning it into the acronym of technical fields is silly.
No it is not narrow minded, there is a high probability that I actually know far more about the arts than you do, and I am more technically proficient in that area than you are too. My point is that it should not be anything but an elective subject. I just know what is really important these days and what is really going on, see my other comments here.
http://hackaday.com/2017/06/29/three-magnets-make-fidget-spinners-amazing-and-only-engineers-will-appreciate-this-hack/#comment-3713524
As is often the case, militancy and blindness go hand in hand. The error you make is assuming the entire study of art encompasses only the stupid BS highlighted in the posted video. Your premise is also based on the argument that THOSE types of artists are the ones wanting to be included in STEM. I’m pretty sure the woman shoving spaghetti up her vagina has no interest in being a part of any group that includes bearded, tatoo’ed, face pierced hillbillies who never had a date and lived with their parents until they were 38 years old. See how stupid being arrogant, presumptuous and disrespectful comes across? When one supports their argument with only the most extreme examples, their positon is blatantly undermined.
I’m every bit as disgusted by the garbage highlighted in the video as you are… and I’ve made a career in art. At the same time, I love science and technology. I had some musical abilities (more in the past than now), which led me to designing and building guitars for myself and several friends, which peaked my interest in electronics (I was making electric guitars). I’ve always loved making things of all kinds, mechanical, electronic, I enjoy programming and problem solving. I spent a solid year simplifying a two-way valve in something I was making down to a single moving part. The solution I came up with came down to an elegant shape, which my artistic background absolutely aided in seeing.
And I do have children, and I fully support them learning art. Not the garbage you’re clearly equating with the field as a whole, but art in all it’s forms as a discipline that holds at it’s core an attention to detail and an understanding of how different elements can compliment and contrast each other. Being able to see, feel and appreciate things from multiple viewpoints will make them better at whatever it is they choose to do.
Open your little mind just a tiny bit. Richard Feynman, who most certainly appreciated art and who himself became a skilled artist, said “You can fool just about anyone, but the easiest one to fool is yourself.”
You suggest I have a closed mind when I have studied and practised both art and science? Well then your entire argument is founded on a blatant lie, that is pathetic! Why did you bother to type a single word if that all is all it encompasses, you are basically just saying “Oh you’re just ignorant because you don’t agree with me..” Furthermore I never said anything against learning art, if it is your area of interest, I reject the idea of making it compulsory, there is a huge difference. FFS read what I have actually written! Oh and BTW those ARE the sort of people who do want to muscle in on STEM, I’ve seen the sort of subjective and biased noise they want to pollute the already crowded curricula with. You can’t rationally defend your right to inflict your subjectivity on other people in a compulsory manner, that is ideological totalitarianism. Or if you do you must also allow Bible/Koran/Tora classes to be inflicted on your kids, because it is exactly the same sort of subjectivity. Having second thoughts now?
“You can’t rationally defend your right to inflict your subjectivity on other people in a compulsory manner, that is ideological totalitarianism”
The irony here is palpable. What singular lie forms the basis of my argument?
No, I have no second thoughts, your post only reinforces your militantly closed mind. You make valid points, but fail to see they are based on extreme examples. You then use those examples to blanket deny a broad range of studies from having any positive effect on a separate one that you’ve chosen to defend.
An open mind can criticize the harmful or wasteful effects of extremes while embracing the value of the moderate. Almost every one of your replies are chock full of dictatorial statements and assertions, sure signs of a narrow and closed mind.
I assume you’ve either not got children, or you’re bringing them up in a very stunted manner. Which, arguably, you should be free to do if you want.
LOL, I have numerous children who are very intelligent, creative, well read, technically skilled, happy and very healthy. They are also good looking. They actually do a lot of “Art”, it is just that it is optional and totally up to them, whereas the core STEM skills are mandatory and they appreciate why. Their enhanced technical skills empower their creative expression anyway, how many 10 y/o girls do you know who know how to use Blender 3D and program LED light displays on an Arduino? 1 in 10,000?
If you haven’t already caught on, BLOCK BLOCK here is more intelligent than anyone else, he has greater life experiences both in depth and breadth, he’s more well read than anyone, he can “get into the minds” of people who have been dead for hundreds of years, and what he discovers in doing so is beyond question, he’s an accomplished artist AND engineer, he’s almost surly more wealthy than you are, if you have 6 pack abs, he has a 12 pack, whatever your opinions are, they’re wrong (if they don’t agree with his), he actually doesn’t have opinions, since everything he thinks is factual and correct, however many children you have, he has more, however intelligent your kids are, his are smarter, however attractive your kids are, his are more. Pretty much anything you can suggest is important, he’s already got in spades… unless he disagrees as to the issue of importance… in which case, you’re wrong and he’s right.
As his posts contain nothing but opinions proffered as facts and no evidence that could verify his astonishingly impressive attributes, he’s basically a preacher. To expect one’s statements to be accepted without evidence, question or debate… is religion. It’s precisely the same snobbery that he criticizes of the art snob. It’s certainly not science.
I’ve seen people toss reading in too, to make it STREAM.
LOL
STEM, STEAM, STREAM, whatever, it’s all just a stream of steamy something!
Look, 30 some years ago when I was in school my own school was rather deficient when it comes to technology and engineering. Really, there just wasn’t any of it at all. No, I’m not talking about technology in the classroom, we had Apple IIs in class even then! What good does that do? They just didn’t teach about how it works, how to make it, or anything even remotely approaching that.
As a pretty geeky kid in terms of wanting to build things I felt school really sucked because they never taught what I wanted to learn…. I remember our math and science books having sections about electronics, mechanics, etc… Our teachers ALWAYS skipped those parts! I hear that down south teachers are afraid to talk about evolution. I didn’t experience that (at least in grade school while I was in the public school system) but they sure seemed damn scared of anything technology!
Were all schools like this? I’m guessing so but how could I know? How many schools out of the thousands in your country did YOU attend?
So.. recently we got a sudden push for STEM. That’s great! I’d love to see more people learn to design and make stuff! Maybe now we can raise the generation that I wish I was born in. Then we get art tacked on. Ok, Art’s cool. I love what I have seen in the maker movement where the ‘geeky’ makers and the artists have come together to make really cool stuff. I’ll approve of that in my kid’s school!
Meanwhile… my kid is in second grade and I have yet to see her bring home any penmanship work. In fact they don’t even seem to have shown the kids the proper strokes to draw a letter! If the kid makes something they can recognize then it counts as ok! And.. my wife.. just a little younger than I… she claims her school never taught her cursive! And both of these schools are supposed to be really good ones!
More about my wife… ‘glad she doesn’t read HaD’. She was in an advanced program for math and science at her school. Apparently this got her out of a lot of social studies type classes. So… when we talk about what is happening in the world.. she is missing crazy obvious bit of knowledge about government, geography, history, etc… Not good in a society where we get to vote! So… I guess Social Studies is important too then…
Now we get STREAM? Yah sure! Reading is very important. Want to know more about STEM, STEAM or even social studies? Read a book… or… a web page. Whatever, you aren’t going to get very far without reading something.
Let’s not forget Gym and Health class too. Kill that damn obesity epidemic already.
What acronym do we need then?
How about one with all the ‘important’ subjects in it… you know.. ALL SUBJECTS BECAUSE EVERY SUBJECT IS IMPORRTANT.
I don’t know exactly what categories to split ‘all subjects’ into but I already know what I want the acronym to be…
SCHOOL
Nope not all subjects are equally important to your economic prosperity (which will ensure you can afford culture diversity), study for the sake of study is a wonderful luxury (that I personally can afford) but you are competing with several billion people who are desperate to have what comforts you already have gained and will out compete you in those professions that provide a reasonable income and ensure the prosperity of your society in general.
My wife and I compile, on a regular basis, curricula that are then submitted for goverment approval and we can clearly see that core subjects are called that for a reason and must be prioritised or the entire point of the exercise is compromised. The problem is when people, for political reasons, try to push distracting rubbish into the core when there is barely enough time to teach what is already in the core adequately. This is a serious problem and even traditional teachers are now finding it hard to cover all of the content in “standardised curricula”. One of the problems is that schools are being asked to teach knowledge that should be gained at home from a rich and meaningful family life, but which is absent due to the deterioration of traditional family lifestyles. Employment and other factors mean that many people are time poor and don’t have much if any meaningful interaction with their kids, particularly on week days.
So we want a society of fat engineers with poor speaking and writing skills? And we want our population to have a poor understanding of government, no knowledge of history nor any grasp of geography? Will these people be voting? Or shall we just give up and go full dictatorship already?
That is the sort of false dichotomy that is typical of an irrational liberal arts type with weak rhetorical skills.
> So we want a society of fat engineers with poor speaking and writing skills?
The irony of somebody asking this in the hackaday comments section
Yeah, LOL, also it is even more ironic when you consider that belittling people with a disability such as dyslexia is utter hypocrisy when from a SJW.
Let’s skip the SC completely for Drama instead. Anybody want to DREAM? ;-)
I have seen STREAM used by Catholic schools, the R is for Religion.
Is there some kind of “engineer-bro” subculture that feels threatened when hard science and engineering somehow intersects with artistic expression? It’s a masculinity thing, isn’t it?
I’m just gonna leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci
The motivation behind it is the problem. People are trying to be more inclusive just for the sake of being inclusive. Art is important in many ways, but it’s just not a technically practical field like STEM is. It doesn’t belong in there.
While I mostly agree with what you’re saying, there is one specific example where I think art can and should be included…
I think the one perfect example of where hard science and engineering intersects artistic expression is vehicles… Ariel Atom, K-1 Attack, C7 Corvette Stingray, S550 Mustangs, sport bikes, etc. I will admit all day long that cars can be beautiful and can be considered a work of art.
If the “art” in STEAM is thought of more as “design”, I think it fits. However, adding a “D” to STEM doesn’t make any good words.
Yeah I’m fine with A representing design, and maybe putting an emphasis on a certain sort of creativity into STEM. So long as there’s a healthy dose of applied mathematics and science involved, I don’t care if you finger paint it too.
I can understand people being suspicious of the A working its way in there, but some of the reactions are way overheated.
Right. They definitely didn’t do that because technology companies like Tesla and Apple became some of the world’s largest companies made most of their money because of their design chops…
Take two products with equal features, one of which integrates some aesthetic sense, the other of which does not. Which one will be more successful? Nature is filled with aesthetics, so many of nature’s most efficient solutions happen to also be aesthetic ones. Is there an aesthetic component to efficient design, or does nature tune us to appreciate aesthetics as a signature of efficiency. If the two are linked, does it really matter?
To say that art is not as technically practical as STEM is so vague as to be meaningless. Which is more technically practical, superstring theory or origami? One is squarely science, one is art. One has not made a single measurable practical contribution to science, the other has found the most efficient way to fold solar panels for launching into space.
I’m as appalled by narrow mindedness displayed by some here as I am by the garbage that passes as art in the posted video. You totally ignore entirely impractical fields of science, technology and math, and utterly fixate on only impractical examples in the field of art.
Let’s not forget our favorite whipping boy, Arduino.
It was designed to let artists do ‘lectronic things they couldn’t do before…
So, whether it is STEM or STEAM, we’re chained to them.
I think it’s more of an economic thing. The people dishing out funding for schools are looking at the labor pool and saying “Hey, we need more engineers if we’re going to compete globally!”, not “It would be great if we had more artists so we can compete globally!”. There’s enough jokes about it and I’m not trying to crack another one here, but you’re not going to employ a pool of great artists and pay them family supporting wages and still make a profit. You _can_ do that with engineers though. Engineering scales better than art.
meh.. some of us have been mad since they added science, technology, and math… we foresaw the eventual letter-salad that just picked up the letter “A” since art is super important, and it should be taught along side other subjects in school… wait… what were we even talking about? Is it a list of courses? Is it a category of knowledge? Sure, engineering sometimes relies on math to implement science into technology (or other combinations of the three, I suppose)… but is that why they started calling it “STEM”?
Funny story – it was SMET when Dr. Ramaley coined the term.
http://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2009/02/10/STEM-education-is-branching-out/stories/200902100165
^ open in internet explorer since your chrome probably has an ad-blocker and you never got around to adding any extensions to IE.
“^ open in internet explorer since your chrome probably has an ad-blocker and you never got around to adding any extensions to IE.”
Open it in what? ‘We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969’… I don’t think I would even know where to find a machine with IE on it… or Windoze.. guess I’ll have to pass in that case…. sorry.
He was a paedophile, just say’n,
Um.. I don’t want to add fuel to anyone who is saying art is unimportant because as I stated above, ALL subjects are important. But.. many of these responses seem to be thought out as though the person that designs a fancy new car’s sleek, ‘sexy’ body is the same person as the one who designs the drive train and the internals of the engine. I don’t think it works that way!
Leonardo da Vinci was awesome but I think that kind of art & engineering talent don’t normally exist in the same person. Even if they do most companies aren’t hiring the same person for both ends anyway. Most of us will pick one side or the other due to skill or inclination and develop it much further than the other. It’s great when somebody does choose to develop both sides of their skillset but that is likely going to be more of a personal hobby thing, not a labor market need.
Leonardo da Vinci was not an artist, he was a skilled observer of nature, and technical illustrator. There is a big difference between that and what people consider an “Artist” most “artists” are essentially expressing a world view that is both unique and subjective. Leonardo tried hard to be photographic and avoid being subjective, which for a man of his time is astounding. What made an “artist” such as Vincent van Gogh produce such valuable work is the intensity and uniqueness of his (insane/subjective) vision, which allowed it to become a collectable commodity due to supply and demand. It is more about economics but we continue pretend he was a great painter even though artificial intelligence has been able to strip the unique style off a painting and apply them to photographs. We recognise his work, because he had a distinct filter through which he documented his observations, and now we know it really is just a simple filter and nothing profound at all. The dollar value in his work arises from his death, there can never be any more of them, not from how “good” they are technically.
Are you telling us that something that can be reproduced loses its intrinsic value? I would argue the opposite. Something that can be reproduces loses its monetary value, but retains its intrinsic value.
Also, while AI seems (somewhat) capable of imitating van Gogh, it seems incapable of expanding or adding to the vision van Gogh had. So far, it can only take what he has already created and apply it to something else.
Do you refer to the Leonardo da Vinci that Wikipedia describes as “the Italian Renaissance *artist* ” who painted the Mona Lisa “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of *art* in the world”. I think there may be a terms of reference issue, if a “skilled observer of nature, and technical illustrator” is not an artist , then what? And art doesn’t have to be valuable to be art, you don’t even have to like it, as Monty Python’s pope once put it “I may not know much about art, but I know what I like”
I’ve read his notebooks (have you?) , I studied his life and work, I know what he was trying to achieve with that painting and it’s technique. What you call it has nothing to do with his mindset at all, you are talking about yourself, what you think. Have you ever made a serious attempt to get into the mind of the guy, to see the world from his eyes? I am certain that if he was alive today and was given a camera and a CAD workstation he would have never bother to paint or draw at all. He was a scientist working in secret, a lot of the time, because he lived in an age where you could get executed for investigating some of the things he did, such as his medical dissections, and he just did illustration commissions to fund his actual work. When the church has all the power and money you paint religious images, even when you are really working to undermine the myths the church was founded upon. And he had an unhealthy taste for very young men, if you know what I mean… He was definitely more like Alan Turing than Pablo Picasso.
A discussion with BLOCK BLOCK here is futile, because he offers only opinions as statements of fact and then falls back to the unverifiable insinuation of superior knowledge to justify those opinions.
Da Vinci was both an artist and a scientist. The two are complimentary when a practitioner knows each’s strengths, and it’s that understanding that made people like da Vinci and others so notable.
You are right, the designers are not the engineers. And the people designing the body are not engineering the drivetrain.
However, the designers do need to understand many aspects of the engineering that went into the vehicle to design effectively, practically, with the specifications the engineers had in mind, and within many other constraints.
The body of a vehicle, while needing to look “sexy”, also needs to be functional. Aerodynamics, structural rigidity and stiffness (since most vehicles are unibody construction), safety, cost, repairability, and feature richness all need to be considered and implemented when designing a vehicle. Also, these are all things engineers need to consider in order to be effective at designing what’s under the hood. This all applies to the interior designers as well.
I see vehicle designers as engineers, but with their focus shifted heavily toward aesthetics. I suspect the engineers and designers work iteratively and in close coordination. They help each other accomplish the same goal – creating a well-engineered, beautiful vehicle with cost in mind. Designers abilities and creativity shouldn’t be trivialized.
In my opinion… designers != artists. In my mental classification of artist, they don’t work in the gray area between engineering and art. Designers do.
“It’s a masculinity thing, isn’t it?”
What? It’s about not mixing apples and oranges. If you want to mix Art and STEM you should get into Design Engineering, where you can design things and let loose your artistic vein while taking into account their functionality and feasibility and knowing there are limitations.
I don’t say there’s no place for subjectivity and artistic expression on STEM, but the whole point of STEM is adhering yourself to the rules of physics, knowing the limitations of the real world and optimize your designs accordingly.
For Art to be of some use to the STEM field it has to play by their rules. The real world is constrictive. If you just try to apply Art ignoring the rest you end up with Kickstarter tier stuff, things that look good with nice videos and pictures, but that would have to violate the laws of physics in order to work.
Leonardo Da Vinci was a great artist, but he ultimately was a realist, he tried to describe the world accurately and adhere to the rules that govern it. His art was science in some sort of way, he studied the human body extensively in order to reproduce every vein and muscle and translated that to his paintings and sculptures. I don’t think modern artists can be compared to him.
“his art was science” bullshit, he used his art to explore science, sure but his art wasn’t inherently science, he was a painter first and inventor second and scientist second, not because it was less important, but because painting paid the bills.
the fascination with Leonardo as a scientist is largely a modern thing.
“Engineers hate him!”
Brian is onto something here. At 13:24 in the video he says that he could only get 1440 rpm because the inductor got hot and the wire’s resistance increased due to the temperature and limited the current. I don’t hate him for it but it’s hard to resist the temptation :)
The sarcasm in this post drips so far that it even reaches the tags. Mr. Benchoff, I am impressed.
In the inclusive and progressive future, everyone will work in the SHTEAMPECSUL fields!
(Science, Herstory, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics, PhysicalEducation, CustomerService, Unemployed and Language)
Disagreement with this new acronym will be considered HARASSMENT.
+1 ROFL
People pay twice what an Apple product is worth because of how it looks. Go ahead, keep going on about how Art and aesthetics aren’t a part of the engineering process. You sure do make yourself sound smart. /s
“keep going on about how Art and aesthetics aren’t a part of the engineering process.”
…What are you talking about? STEM does not refer to the engineering process, it’s strictly about academics.
I would also argue that people buy Apple products for more reasons than aesthetics…
People pay twice what an Apple product is worth because of how it [makes them think they look to others].
FTFY.
Sour grapes from someone who doesn’t have stock in Apple?
B^)
I mean how long are we talking here? Within the last month Apple has dropped around 8% which is not really when you want to own stocks.
Aesthetics (and ergonomics) aren’t ART. It is simply aesthetics (and ergonomics). A design principle. ALREADY part of any decent engineering education.
ART is useless. By it’s very definition (according to “art” snobs anyway) art cannot have a purpose other than art. L’art pour l’art. That makes science, technology, engineering and mathematics ALL diametrically opposed to “art”. Even if you consider aesthetics a form of art they are always secondary to good design in all other fronts. A bridge isn’t a bridge if it doesn’t support the load, no matter how good it looks. A car isn’t a good car if it breaks down every 100 miles, no matter if it looks like a Lamborghini Diablo. Function over form is the main point of engineering. If you can make it look good, great, but make it work first.
Maybe some basic art history and education about art styles can help get better looking products from engineers and designers, but if you don’t you still end up with functional products!
The push for STEM educations does not by the way mean it should be taught to the exclusion of all other subjects, but it should be given appropriate weight instead of being the sideline subject it has often been considered.
“ART is useless. By it’s very definition (according to “art” snobs anyway) art cannot have a purpose other than art”
With the logic science is known for, please justify using one person or group’s opinion to factually and absolutely represent an entire diverse field of study. On precisely what grounds do you suggest the art snob’s opinion speaks for every artist or field within the broad range of art? If you’re going to make an argument, you should be prepared to justify it. If you can’t, then you’re really no better than the art snob who simply claims a blue canvas with a white strips is art… because they say so.
Like the other guy who’s been making so many claims – all art is political, etc. At the end of the day, the only basis on which you make your claims is “because I say so”.
I’ll again offer origami as an art that has led to practical, useful, if not uniquely optimal solutions to engineering problems. Satellites have been launched into space with solar panels folded in a manner inspired by art. But in your stated opinion (or at least the stated opinion you suggest is legitimate), art can not have a purpose.
Please, use your powers of logic and reason to explain this contradiction.
Art is only what it is agreed to be. Those in the art world claim art is only art if it serves no other purpose than art. If it serves any other purpose it should be incidental. This isn’t just the opinion of a select few snobs, this is the pervasive and widely agreed upon definition within all those who deal with art, including artists themselves. The origami solar panels are not an example of art in engineering or engineering art. They are an example of engineer saying: that’s clever, could we use that to fold solar panels? There is however no reason to assume no-one would have ever come up with the method if it hadn’t been for origami.
Including Art in STEM in my opinion legitimises the approach of putting “art” and looks of a product first. Designing the appearance first and then seeing if one can make it work. Which 9 times out of 10 leads to the kind of fragile barely functional shit I see coming from “industrial designers” on a daily basis. The few times it does work it’s usually because the designer knows his stuff well enough to take into account the engineering even while designing the appearance.
I’m not saying teaching art isn’t useful, but it IMHO it doesn’t belong in the STEM acronym as a core subject. It’s augmentative not fundamental.
The “A” for arts in STEAM is needed, not for art as people tend to think of it, but more for ascetics – if more engineers, etc has some appreciation of it, think of how much better products designed by engineers, etc could be. – I’ve seen enough ‘hacks’ here that people would complain about if not for ascetics – for example, “steampunk” hacks like the latest nixie clock strongly incorporates ascetics in its design.
Rubbish, there is a separate specialisation that covers that, industrial design, and it is management and the marketing people who decide how much if anything to spend on that aspect of development.
http://www.worrell.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/id3.jpg
Yes, engineers need more asceticism — they are far too hedonistic.
Or perhaps you meant aesthetics?
Well played! :-)
All these people promoting the inclusion the Art into STEM don’t realize there already exists “design engineering” which deals with designing aesthetically pleasing products which are ALSO functional, a mix of engineering and art.
I’ve seen many artists try to design a product without taking into account if it’s even physically possible or not. Kinda like all that kickstarter crap, looks pretty and promises the world, but they forgot to ask an engineer if it was even remotely possible.
You just can’t jam “Art” into STEM, an artist’s limit is the imagination, an engineer’s limit is the real world, and taking into account those limitations makes a huge difference.
+1
I motion the A be reassigned from Art to Arithmetic as that is needed in STEM
And don’t let that M mean Mathematics! Let it mean Meat!
B^)
Acronyms like STEM, STEAM & STREAM are what you get when experts in industry decide what the education system is lacking and put experts in marketing in charge of fixing it.
Sort of like, komite was how committee was spelled before a committee reviewed it?
B^)
“The fidget spinner posts will continue until morale improves.”
Is that a promise?
Could he also pull the magnet towards the inductor by reversing the polarity?
Not as easily — it’s easy for the coil to remain energized too long and decelerate the rotor. Still doable, but it’s easier to make them work by repulsion.
(Though the more I think about it, the less sure I am… my experience with half-commutated motors involves mechanical commutation by stripping the enamel from part of the winding, not this reed-switch approach. The same timing issues may not apply.)
Not as easily — it’s easy for the coil to remain energized too long and decelerate the rotor. Still doable, but it’s easier to make them work by repulsion.
(Though the more I think about it, the less sure I am… my experience with half-commutated motors involves mechanical commutation by stripping the enamel from part of the winding, not this reed-switch approach. The same timing issues may not apply.)
Oh wow an electric motor…
Who would have tought magnets spinning on a bearing could be used to build a motor? ;-P
I still love this — kind of like the Pokemon Go stuff from last summer it’s good to see some hacking to make spinners more than just mindless passing of time.
It’s all fun until someone loses an eye.. I seriously wonder about hot glueing magnets and them spinning them at 1440RPM. Todays lesson: Centrifuga …. aaaaaaa crap my eye!
So better keep your eyes out of the plane of rotation. And if you are really anxious, you can still use goggles.
“it’s all fun until someone loses an eye”
Then, it becomes Serious Fun!
B^)
Sweet jesus we should start putting trigger warnings on posts for all the precious snowflakes on here…
Yet another typical left wing censorship ploy from Brian, basically a widely cast ad hominem attack on people when he has nothing rational to contribute to the dialogue. Count Dankula has a video about that too,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kPTZ7hz_vs
I’m calling Poe’s Law on Mr 010080 010085 here…
(Dunno what “dank meme” the username is meant to display, but all I see are “I can’t render that” boxes with numbers in them)
Well done you displayed two forms of ignorance in a single comment and served only to belittle yourself.
FFS are you posting from a machine running DOS and have never seen Unicode rendered correctly?
I conditionally withdraw the statement above, if you are using a computer than you designed and made yourself, using nothing but wires, magnets and paperclips.
[abb] writes:
“(Dunno what “dank meme” the username is meant to display, but all I see are “I can’t render that” boxes with numbers in them)”
Oh! I thought they were “boxcars!” as in a pair of die (dice) with six spots on top of each…
First, I am viewing this in Chrome, on windows 7, and can only see two boxes. Second, what Count Dankula is calling the radical left sounds a lot like the radical right in the USA, however radicals are often similar regardless of political leaning.
LOL a Windows user.
Which one of these is not like the others?
Science
Technology
Electronics
Art
Mathematics
Engineering, not Electronics, retard.
Right…
And I would say there are too many dissimilar fields there to be able to pick out one as being uniquely different:
Science and Mathematics are both pursuits of knowledge and understanding, sometimes tangible, but not necessarily so.
As technology is the overall collection of techniques, skills and processes used in the production of things, art would fall under that as well.
Engineering and art are both fields that use technologies to product an end product.
Look, the nonsense “art” in the Scotish guy’s video has no place in the company of STEM. No one is arguing that. But if you’re opinion that the entire diverse field of art can make no contribution to STEM, you’re shortchanging yourself and the children who the push for STEM is targeting.
Do I think it should be renamed to STEAM? No, not really. Because art DOES encompass many subfields that have no interest in those other letters. But one shouldn’t actively seek to discourage artists from pursuing STEM fields, so long as their desire is to advance THOSE FIELDS.
The simplest way I can think to put it is this:
Poetry really can’t help engineering… but that doesn’t mean poets can’t.
//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js
Mixing the “Arts” with STEM is like mixing pizza and pineapple, just no.
Pineapple fits much better on pizza than Arts to STEM. Although pizza Hawaii bears some controversy to some people, I like it.
Wasn’t Hawaiian pizza created by Canadians?
And H bomb by americans, we are even.
Haha, that sounds about right.
Evidently, Brian, but oh what grand entertainment this has provided tonight!
Perhaps HaD should consider a total number of comment words allowed per username per story, applied especially to the “self important” comment words. ;-)
He just wanted to bump up the comments count by tossing a troll bit out.
Brian Benchoff triggers EVERYONE.
Bravo, Benchoff. This is the kind of content I come here for. Keep up the great work.
What, no inclusion of history? I think it should be “STHEAM” so that you rightfully sound retarded when you say it. ;D
No, it should be “SHTEAM” so you sound like Sean Connery when you say it.
“This pills make your penis a magic wand. Pornstars have been hidding this secret from you. You will apreciate this”
The title of this post sounds exactly the same as the ads in porn sites. And second… i shouldnt say this…. but, not a hack. I saw this already 20 years ago, and probably my father saw this 50 years ago too
Lets end the boring spinny stuff
http://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/jYBIYFm
with knives!
Thanks so much Hackaday for posting my creation on your website! It is pretty cool to see how much attention this is getting. My video even got 3000 views in the past hour!
PS: Why are all the comments about STEAM AND STEM?
> PS: Why are all the comments about STEAM AND STEM?
Because I know how to manipulate people on the Internet.
https://imgur.com/a/Ccy6L
Thanks, stealing this
Because I know how people manipulate me on the Internet.
ftfy
wow a useless device for a useless device… only an arseduino is missing here to complete the trilogy
And a Strawberry Pie.
Also, many people complained about the lack of IoT features.
I think some are missing the point of the Art in STEAM. Projects like Arduino and Processing exist to enable those who have an idea to implement that idea, even if they are not full on Engineers. Hackaday itself is full of *art* projects, a steampunk nixie clock, infinity mirror devices , halloween pumpkins,giant robots ,even retro multi-chip computers. You don’t build these because of science, tech,eng or math. Art is the motivation for these, the tools to achieve them are the technology and engineering. If you look at something and think “that’s a cool hack” that’s Art . (IMO)
Word!
finally someone with a bit of perspective and sense.
Yes! Let’s kill him!
B^)
Okay, I enjoy art, I did a lot of work with Mandelbrot’s trying to create art long ago, but at the end of the day they would look cool but I would still see the math while my wife saw the art. I was an industrial mechanic and an engineering technician for many years and I did many a hack to keep a machine running for another 24 to 48 hours while parts were found and downtime was scheduled, most of those hacks required knowledge of material properties and lots of math, but they were ugly as sin and went straight to the recycling bin as soon the real fix was done, not a bit of art was used it was all science, engineering and math(s). STEM was an idea to try and get young people interested in those areas that lets face it are really hard to learn or even understand at some levels and then give them the tools to learn.
The “PI’s, the Arduino’s, CHIPS, “bits, Et al. are basically learning tools and shortcut development boards that kids, beginning students, and artists can use because the learning curve on them is shorter then designing a complete electrical circuit to blink some light in response to different stimulus. An artist or a beginner isn’t going to want to start with a 555 and try and figure it out but STEM is meant to take the kid that wants to go further than a ‘duino and say here try this rf4ce and see what you can do, or the kid that gets lost for days in wolfram alfa on the pi and figure out just what kind of math they want to do.
Artists use STEM all the time in creating their art, STEM works very well without any artists being involved, Its ugly but it works. Art has a huge community already supporting it, STEM not so much, Please leave STEM as its own thing and stop trying to justify art as a “HARD” science.
“The fidget spinner posts will continue until morale improves.”
Well fidget spinner related anything is why morale is in the toilet to begin with
EAT ME!
B^)
First, This is a cool project, I never would have thought of this circuit.
Second, Art is important. Modern art isn’t art. Art is supposed to play with your emotions, and provoke thought. Modern art technically does this, but for me, all it provokes is confusion and revulsion.
I like art.
Modern/post-modern art just makes me wonder why $10mil in taxpayer money was spent on a single I-beam in front of city hall when the elementary school is still running Windows 98.
Plenty of us get a lot out of modern art. We all have those art forms that don’t do much for us, but mean a lot to other people. It’s fine if you don’t care about modern art, but please speak for yourself when you say it’s “not art”
Where is the indiegogo (flexible goal obviously) I’m down for $20k
I just realised how retarded and wrong this STEAM argument is, every single “hack” is creative by it very nature, it is inventive. Suggesting there is something missing from STEM is just idiotic and insulting to all of those brilliant and creative hackers who spend there days solving problems that require thinking out side of the box, or at least breaking open the box and making it do stuff that the supplier never imagined! Hackers of HAD, the STEAM promoters hate you because you are more creative than they are! Don’t believe their hype, you are awesome and your work is awesome and you don’t need to change because they don’t approve of how you see the world. Furthermore it is people like you who created the modern world, not liberal arts wielding SJWs with nothing better to do that to raise their importance by putting you down and suggesting you are inadequate and not creative.
I’m an Engineer. I am not offended if you say I’m not artistic because I’m not, I am creative. Once someone studies calculus they can be admitted to the STEM club. (While I’m at it there are are no Sanitation Engineers, there are janitors.) There are meaningful contributions by most passionate people whatever their study is. Everyone can’t be an Engineer. Give them a participation trophy and move on!