Marbles engineering, worm eating mushrooms, tech hero // Tom Goren

Culture

Wintergatan is a musician, maker, engineer, vlogger, creator. He has a very famous video showing his original magical marble machine. Meanwhile he’s been sharing in great detail the creative process of building his studio, and his next generation marvel. I haven’t been tracking every step of the way, but I did watch this display of epic determination and mechanical troubleshooting. He delivers some hard earned wisdom toward the end of the episode, which is sage advice for anyone trying to accomplish anything.
Chandler Travis and his band “Travis, Shook, and the Club Wow” used to open for George Carlin. I love their song “No Place Like Earth”.
Paul Stamets, world reknowned mycologist, has a great instructional video on “Garden Giants” (Stropharia rugosoannulata). It turns out that these fungi are “Nematophagous”, meaning that they eat nematodes (tiny worms).
A fun mouthbow demonstration, accompanied by spoons.
A sad yet beautifully curated tale from Asheville’s local history.

From a farm with no running water or electricity, through building spy machines for the NSA, to leading efforts to optimize compilers for decades, Frances Allen was a pioneer and a legend. In 1989 Ms. Allen became the first female IBM fellow, and in 2006 she was the first woman to win a Turing award.