{"id":9518,"date":"2007-04-05T18:13:51","date_gmt":"2007-04-05T18:13:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/streettech.dreamhosters.com\/?p=9518"},"modified":"2007-04-05T18:13:51","modified_gmt":"2007-04-05T18:13:51","slug":"make-vol-9-is-a-keeper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/?p=9518","title":{"rendered":"MAKE Vol. 9 is a Keeper!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I finally got a chance to read my issue of MAKE Vol. 9<\/a>, the Fringe issue, and I think it’s one of the better ones they’ve done. I kind of winced at the Fringe theme, thinking it was going to be a lot of psychic silliness, reinforced by the Kirlian “aura” on the cover. But they do an awesome job of maintaining skepticism and decent B.S. detection, while still being open-minded and not forgetting the fun. <\/p>\n

One of the more intriguing pieces in the Fringe section is a piece on the Freemasons, by MAKE’s Project Editor Paul Spinrad. The basic point of the piece is that the Masons started out as a society of geeks, stone masons\/ engineers, who knew the “secrets” of cathedral building. He calls this period “operative Masonry.” Over time, more and more members joined who weren’t geeks\/engineers and didn’t have any direct experience of the knowledge held in the Order. He calls this “speculative Masonry.” Paul asks the question: Wouldn’t it be cool if geeks reclaimed the Masons by joining in large numbers to a create new generation of operative Masonry, a place where people doing amazing things with technology could get together and share their discoveries? As he points out, the Masons have an amazing infrastructure, with lots of cool resources and swanky Lodge buildings. The Masonic membership is looking very gray these days and some Lodges have allegedly closed down because of dwindling membership. <\/p>\n

\"Digg!\"\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love the idea of geeks taking over a “secret” society. What’s interesting to me in terms of possible converging cultural vectors is that I’d recently become interested in the Masons and had already thought about joining, just for the heck of it. Maybe it’s a function of my own graying, but it makes me wonder if there isn’t an emerging interest among aging technoweenies. And I live in Das Capitol, so there’s Masonry out the ying-yang here. Hell, we even have the Masonic Temple right down the street, in Alexandria, modeled on the Lighthouse from Alexandria 1.0. I’ve never been in it, but I hear it’s beyond strange. <\/p>\n

BTW: The Fringe theme is only a small portion of the volume. There’s also a great article on getting started in carbon composite, how to etch metal, building a one-string electric guitar, and a piece on building a cracker box amplifier, using the LM386 chip, the same op-amp chip we use in the Mousey\/Herbie robots. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}