Kitesurfing: The sport of playful scientists. “It's like waterskiing behind a jumbo jet.”

explaining that a rectangle of $10 plywood would There I go again, guilty as charged, characterizing be more effective than their $500 carbon fiber, myself and my glorious peers as eccentrics, cranks, advanced, PCB-impregnated dolphin killer. weirdoes … “mad scientists.”

So now I go to the less popular beaches and seek So let’s go with “playful scientists” instead. Where out the weirdoes — the guys and gals who believe that do you find them? Burning Man is an obvious reposi-having fun is the goal and hacking stuff is the surefire tory, but there are events every weekend populated route to nirvana. Failing is fun, after all. Try something by the sort of people you want to know. Oshkosh’s new, and even if it doesn’t work, it’s likely to be hilari- yearly AirVenture has all the homebuilt airplane ous. I was reminded of this just yesterday when I met nerds that you could ever want to meet. Keep your two new freaks. One had a pair of sunglasses with only eye out for bicycle and car swap meets and carnivals one lens. Unperturbed, he just kept going, looking like — always a rich source. Try emailing or calling people a one-eyed pirate amidst the East Bay fog. who built some cool thing that you found on the web.

His friend farms eBay for used sports stuff to Odds are that they want you to come over and meet modify into wind-powered car-park dragsters, and them; that’s why they put it up on the web. A few we had an excited discussion involving the obvious weeks ago, I learned an enormous amount by visiting link between jet boats, wind-surfing sails, paragliding the Alameda workshop of a custom bike frame builder. lifting winches, and what we should do next weekend. I’ve never seen so many handmade jigs and working I could tell he was my kind of freak because he’d Bridgeports in such a small space. I guess I’m coming recently sold his Porsche in favor of a VW transporter around to the opinion that it’s time for everyone to with a pop-top roof conversion and retrofitted water come out of the closet and celebrate being playful cooling. “It’s way more fun than the Porsche, and it scientists. We may be crazy, but we are not mad. said. The best thing about meeting the weirdoes is that the conversation works to communicate infor- ^{mation first, NDAs later, if ever. It’s all about sharing} Saul Griffith thinks about open source hardware while working each other’s excitement and experience. with the power-nerds at Squid Labs ( squid-labs.com).