READER INPUT

Tales of Senft Stirling engines,

Einstein’s Riddle, and the

joys of generalism.

Thank you so much for creating this great

magazine. It is without question our family’s

Number One Favorite Periodical and it is, therefore,

high time we subscribed to MAKE rather than

continuously purchasing single-issue-after-single-

issue as we’ve done since its inception!

We’ll get signed up for the Digital Subscription

pronto, but thought you might like to see these

photos taken earlier this afternoon of our 11-year-

old son, Stafford, enjoying both summer vacation

and your latest issue! Congratulations on an inspira-

tional and evolving project that’s so well done!

—Robin Morse, BankSide Farm, Duvall, Wash.

I saw you’ve started to add captions to your

videos ( makezine.com/podcast). That’s most

excellent. My wife is deaf, and there are occasions

where I’d like to show her some cool web video, but

a lot of times, without understanding the audio, it

just doesn’t make sense to her. Captions make all

the difference.

Thanks for your forward thinking. Naturally, I’d

expect that from the MAKE people.

—Jared B., Portland, Ore.

Your editorials and articles on sustainability remind me of an incident that happened to a friend of mine and his wife this February.

The couple was driving home when all of a sudden their 2000 Taurus quit running. Luckily they were in sight of the local Ford dealership. They were able to get the car in to the dealer by driving in low gear. At the Ford store, the general manager said, “It would cost more to repair the car than to buy a new one.”

How many times have we consumers heard that in this country over the years? This does not foster a repair culture as you suggest in your articles. This model fosters more consumerism.

Similarly, as a result of the foreclosure mess, there is a new industry created to clean foreclosed

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Make: Volume 18

houses to get ready to sell, and that’s called “ trash-out.” Trash-out is where a company goes in and just guts out a house of personal belongings, with no recycling and no reuse — just fills up the dumps!

—Allan Elgeston, Sonora, Calif.

Until I opened your steampunk issue [MAKE, Volume 17], I didn’t even know that a steampunk subculture existed. With low enough costs of communication, it is easier than ever for subcultures to coalesce around their strange attractors. God bless them, each and every one.

There was a time when scientists were called “natural philosophers,” and today’s hyper-specialization could only be imagined as a crippling deformity on the human soul. Any thinking person was necessarily a generalist, and the entire range of human knowledge was accessible to anyone who had the desire and resources to pursue it. You could make anything imaginable because everything was made by human hands using techniques not too far removed from simple hand tools. Underlying this was the accessibility of the entire scope of art, science, and technology. Specialization? Bah! An evolutionary dead end.

—Paul de Armond, Bellingham, Wash.