We're going to start off this one with a great piece of video: Adam Savage's TED talk about making his own dodo bird skeleton out of Sculpey and his obsession with making a dead-nuts-accurate copy of The Maltese Falcon. Seriously, take the 15 minutes or so to watch this. If you've ever seen Adam on one of his stream-of-consciousness explanations of something on "Mythbusters" (a show that demonstrates the wonders of tinkering-as-learning on a weekly basis. Talk about "Dream Jobs For Geeks"!), this is that, turned up to 11.

Did you go watch it? Don't worry, I'll wait.

Okay, you've watched it.

The money quote is right at the end: "But really, if we're all going to be honest with ourselves, I have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with, was it?"

BING! The journey is the point of the exercise, not the destination. That, right there, sums up the open sense of wonder, the "tinkering instinct" as it were.

Adam's about a year older than I am. And every new episode of "Mythbusters", you see him tackle that week's myth with the same sense of exploration and wonder that we all had when we were kids and the world was new. Now, I have to admit that I had wondered if he was that manic about it In Real Life as he was on TV, and this TED talk pretty much confirmed it: he didn't create the persona for the TV role, he got the TV role because of his personality. If you look at all of the "Mythbusters" team, in fact, they're all like that. Adam's just the most outwardly manic about it.

I would kill for a shot at being involved with "Mythbusters". Getting paid for Mad Science is my ultimate career goal. I've gotten close a couple times, and to be honest, what I do for a living now is mighty close. It's certainly Applied Mad Science: client comes to us with a problem. Sometimes something we have on the shelf or in the catalog can solve it. Sometimes it's a derivative of something we've done previously. But sometimes it's a "hey, nobody's ever attempted this before" problem. Which is how I end up designing a tool to apply a total of about 1,000,000 pounds of force, distributed between 4 hydraulic actuators, to unstick the latching mechanism on a piece of subsea equipment in about 3600 feet of seawater. Or a tool to reach inside a 13 in x 20 in opening -- the only access to the inside of the device -- to remove and replace a gasket -- all without direct human involvement.

Getting back to my point, with many adults, the sense of wonder has been suppressed, if not outright beaten down. And this is a total shame. It kills the creative urge. It leads to cynical, jaded, unhappy people who don't see the extraordinary things that surround them in their daily life, or if they do, don't give a flying care about how extraordinary they are. I'm a mechanical guy, and I don't pretend to understand how digital data transfer really works (I have a broad clue, just not the details), yet I'm sitting here in Texas typing this on a computer connected to a server in a completely different state, if not country, and once I publish it, it will be readable to anyone with any type of network connection anywhere in the world. Including the folks on the International Space Station in orbit.

Wow.

Just, wow.

I still don't understand exactly how it all works, something about packets of data being routed from one node to another and somehow getting reassembled at the desired destination even though they may not arrive in the same sequence they left and indeed may not have taken the same path from origin to destination. It's all Mysterious Spark Chaser Stuff to me.

Which is fine. We have our specialities. I spent the first part of my career in a speciality that even other automotive engineers thought was bordering on witchcraft. There *is* math that governs multi-phase fluid flow and heat transfer, but it's really unspeakably hairy math with partial differential equations and a whole lot of handwaving, and as a result, most folks who do cooling systems end up learning the ropes and the rules of thumb from one of the Old Guys... and when they achieve Old Guy status themselves, pass it on to the next generation.

I was 35 when I found myself regarded as The Old Guy for the first time. This was bothersome in some respects, because I didn't, and still don't, consider myself old (granted, my body sometimes reminds me that I'm not in my 20s anymore, but "old" and "young" is an attitude, not a physical state).

My point is designing a centrifugal pump or a cooling system is every bit as mysterious to the Sparkies as their stuff is to my fellow Gearheads and me. All I know is I do machines. Mechanical stuff. With electronics sometimes, too, but lots of nuts and bolts and gears and pumps and hoses and valves and...

Sorry, getting excited there.

I don't understand the minute details of the Sparky stuff, but I still have a healthy appreciation for it, and I learn what I can about it when I can. Why? Well, I'm curious.

The person who's lost that sense of wonder, when presented with a situation they have no experience with, retreats. They shut down. They ask "why?" Why do they have to deal with this?

The tinkerer -- someone whose sense of wonder is intact and active -- grabs hold of the situation with both hands and says "Why not?!?" And sometimes the end result is amazingly wonderful, and sometimes it's an amazing train wreck -- on the first attempt ("Oops. Guess we're gonna have to do that a bit differently next time. Anyone have a mop? And a shop vac?" And the phone number for the window company? And have you seen where my lab coat went?").

Reading through some of the reviews and blogs from folks who have bought Fifty Dangerous Things, one of the more interesting common threads is the awakening of the dormant sense of wonder in the parents... it's as if they've had a chance to throw open the door to a long-shut closet and let all that curiosity about the world and its endless amazements back out into the open.

I'm not sure if Gever had that intention when he put the book together, but it's certainly a pleasant side effect.

And my message to those folks who have re-found their sense of wonder is: Don't put it away again, ever! The sense of wonder leads to exploration which leads to learning which leads to appreciation which leads to knowledge which leads to competence which leads to confidence which leads to self-sufficiency which leads to sharing and teaching by example and that spreads it around to more and more people and this is an insane run-on sentence worthy of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest.

Whew. Needed to breathe there.

Here's an open question for the folks who have done this (public answers not required, but a little feedback would be appreciated): With the reawakening of your sense of wonder, are you happier than you were when it was dormant? I'm willing to wager on the answer being yes.

That's because shutting down the sense of wonder, locking it up in a dark closet at the back of our mind, runs counter to our genetic programming. We are creatures of exploration and learning. It's our natural state. Parts of society have gone to a lot of effort to suppress it for their own reasons (control/subjugation being the most prominent) on both a micro and a macro level, and in big business, particularly, "toeing the line" is rewarded far more often than being the loose cannon.

Which is ironic... no, sorry, it's tragic, because pretty much every single big company that makes a saleable product was founded by a loose cannon ("Hey, I wonder what happens if I do this?") and built upon the innovations of other loose cannons ("That was cool! But if we now do this, it'll be even better!") -- that's how they got big in the first place! Those of us in the United States live in a country founded by loose cannons. Toeing the line is a static, stagnant way to go.

As to why keeping the sense of wonder active is good? Well, if our goal in this life is to make the world a little better place than it was when we found it, how better to do that than to encourage and grow self-sufficient competence amongst our fellow humans?

Those of us who have children in our sphere of influence owe it to them to show them, by example, that retaining that sense of wonder, actively, into adulthood is, in fact, a Good Thing Indeed.

Our kind host, Gever Tulley, is off at Tinkering School doing just that right now.

What's more, willing to bet there's a smile on his face. People with the sense of wonder active and "on" also seem to be happier people. Coincidence? I think not.

Will it become universal in our lifetimes? Unlikely. There are a lot of extraordinarily incurious people out there. "But really, if we're all going to be honest with ourselves, I have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with, was it?"

Everyone wants to get a little attaboy/attagirl for their efforts every now and then. Some little acknowledgement from the boss/parent/spouse/kid that "hey, what you did there was pretty cool".

But what if what you do, while certainly important, isn't something that generates positive feedback as a matter of course?

I spent the bulk of my career in the automotive business designing parts that, if I did my job right, would pass completely unnoticed by 99.999% (the elusive "five nines") of the end user customers. What did I do? I designed parts of the engine cooling system. "Oh, but Jim, that's a very important part of the vehicle!" you say. Yes. Yes, it is (to quote Phineas of Phineas & Ferb). But it's not something a customer writes the CEO of the car company to sing the praises of. I never once saw a letter breathlessly gushing about how great the water pump on the CEO's old college fraternity brother's new Bourgemobile was as he drove the wife up from Palm Springs to Las Vegas for the weekend.

That's because nobody thinks about the water pump, or other bits of the cooling system, until everything goes horribly wrong, and they're on the side of the I-15 about halfway up the hill from Baker, California, hood up, steam pouring out, and they're hot, sweaty, stranded on the side of the road 12 miles away from a town whose biggest attraction is the World's Tallest Thermometer and a restaurant and motel called the Bun Boy. And they know that the World's Tallest Thermometer was displaying 119 degrees F when they went by. And they are most assuredly Not Happy At All.

Then they write the letter to the CEO. And eventually, the engineer sees it. Negative feedback all the way.

And that was something I sort of got used to: lack of feedback = good. Feedback = bad.

Flash forward a few years and I'm working for a supplier company (which has sadly mostly gone away due to all the bankruptcies -- sadly because it was a fantastic place to work if you were an engineer and liked Applied Mad Science). And I'd brought in a prototype design in what had to be world-record time, going from CAD data to finished, machined, assembled, and tested pieces including multiple complex castings, in 19 days (for reference, the standard time to do such a thing was 45-60 days). Didn't sleep much during that time, and neither did any of the rest of my team.

The parts were shipped to our customer on time. And they worked as promised. Better, even.

And the day after, I'm at my desk and the boss comes in and says "You did an outstanding job, Jim." And he hands me a print of an e-mail from the customer who was amazed that we had pulled it off -- the first part had gone on the first prototype engine and it fit exactly as it was supposed to. And the customer was very happy and wasn't shy about telling us so.

And that was the first time in my engineering career that the end user - the customer, in this case the engineer at the customer company - had given me positive feedback.

Felt good. No, felt GREAT! And all I could think of was "I'm tired, I'm sore, but it was totally worth every bit of extra energy spent."

How does this relate to the mission of 50 Dangerous Things and Tinkering School?

Feedback is a vital part of the process of learning. There's the immediate and self-dispatching feedback we get for ourselves when something we've done worked, or didn't work. But that external feedback from others - observers, people in positions of authority such as parents and instructors -- is also important. I've seen it done right, and I've seen it done wrong. I've seen kids give their all -- and maybe they came up a bit short of the ultimate, but they gave their everything all the same -- and feeling that little rush we all get from knowing we put it all on the table, there wasn't more to give -- only to have a coach, parent, some other authority in their lives tear them apart. And all that was accomplished was undone by a word or two, and just that fast.

Okay, so the goal wasn't met. The team got beat -- they didn't lose, they got beat. The deadline was missed. The rocket didn't launch. But the effort was put out there. How can you give feedback that is building, not destroying? It's really not that hard:

• Acknowledge the effort.
• Also acknowledge that the goal wasn't met, but don't be mean about it.
• Ask questions: what went right? what went wrong? How can we fix those things that went wrong?
• If the kid(s) are down on themselves, seed the conversation: "Well, this went well, right? Okay, that other bit fell off, but you know how to keep that from happening again, right?" ENGAGE them. Don't dictate the outcome, just get them pointed the right way when they're turned around and give them a little prod. Once the path is visible, boom! they're off down the path.

I know some of this sounds like the rah-rah, no-kid-is-a-failure, self-esteem-is-everything stuff that I, for one, absolutely hate. Real self-worth comes from self-accomplishment. We as notional adults owe it to the following generations to set them up for accomplishment. If you do that, the other falls into place automagically. And even better, the kids grow up to be thinking, capable, skilled-at-self-directed-learning adults.

Which is, when you get right down to it, the point of the exercise.

I look back on my childhood, and the lessons that have stuck with me throughout the rest of my life involved me doing something. Building an engine. Fixing broken stuff. Figuring out the parts of algebra that had me stumped in Algebra 1 (I'd never gotten below an A in math before those Algebra 1 Bs) before Algebra 2 started the next year taught me more than just factoring polynomials -- it taught me a methodology for problem-solving and learning I've used to this day. Yes, there were teachers who absolutely made a difference -- but again, looking at it through the filter of hindsight, that difference was not at the lectern, but in setting a framework in place and then letting us, the students, figure it out ourselves. And yes, some of us were better at it than others. The very best teachers encouraged teamwork amongst the students to help pull the ones not-so-good at figuring it out ourselves up to a functional level.

And it again comes back to feedback. Using that tool to build instead of destroy: "C'mon, Pete, you can do it!" will get a much better result for everyone involved than "Pete, you idiot, you've ruined our chance to win!". Maybe Pete will get all the way there this time. Maybe he won't... but it won't be because he gave up or quit trying, and the next time, Pete will try something just that little bit different that might just push him over the top.

I'm trying to tie this in to the 50 Dangerous Things, and to be honest, I don't have a direct tie-in to anything specific, but only to the whole concept. Because what is more dangerous than encouraging independent thought and self-directed accomplishment these days?

Okay, I just went back and read through this post, and something else struck me: This kind of build-upon-it feedback is important to adults, in a business environment, too. When we're working as a team here at Nameless Employer (there's a clue in my first post here, but humor me a bit, would you?), what comes out of the team environment is greater than the sum of its parts. It's a really heady feeling, and it's something that I still get that little charge out of.

Which gives me an idea for the next post: Why adults should keep that childlike sense of wonder.

Mellow greetings, fellow travelers.

Okay, so I'm not really a terribly mellow person. I'm Jim Crider, mechanical engineer, car guy, and genetically-engineered tinkerer. Some may know my nom de net AutoJim from various and sundry places, but I'm not a net.celebrity by any means. As for how I got here, if I trace the lineage, there are a few blacksmiths and a couple of master mechanic/master machinists in my bloodline. We understand what the machines are telling us in my family (specifically my mom's side). My dad learned early on that any birthday or Christmas presents that were "some assembly required" were best left in that state after I had completely disassembled the Pit Change Charger he spent half of Christmas Eve assembling in about 15 minutes. Most of the fun of that particular toy was in the taking it apart and putting it back together aspect, which was actually designed in -- and there's no way whatsoever anyone could sell such a thing in a toy store today, what with the small screws and *gasp* actual working wrench and screwdriver that came with it. Mid 1970s? Sure. Today? The lawyers would have a stroke.

I'm originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and currently in Houston (about a year and a half so far) after 18+ years in the greater Detroit area where I designed car parts that, if I did my job right, you'd never really notice. I'll write about the nature of feedback a bit later in the week. Or in this post. Not entirely sure which yet -- I got a late start to my guest week.

What I do these days is design tools for fixing broken stuff subsea.

For fun, I play with cars. I participate with the Sports Car Club of America as a driver in Solo (autocross) competition, and as a racing turn marshal (if you ever watched a road race like the IndyCars at Long Beach in person or on TV, and you see the people on each turn with flags, that's us).

How I met Gever (virtually - I have yet to have the privilege of a face-to-face) is a racing pal of mine, who happens to a) be a computer programming genius and b) has a completely adorable ~4 year old daughter, posted a link to Gever's first TED talk on Facebook. At the time, I'd just written a rather angry open letter to US public school administrators (be forewarned, if you venture around my LiveJournal beyond that post, you may find Adult Words. I try to friend-lock the more opinionated posts and the ones with Adult Words, but sometimes one slips out) and Gever's message at that TED talk really hit home. Struck up a conversation on Twitter in which I linked him to that LJ post, and it's just kinda gone from there.

About my day job: if you watched any of the ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) video feeds from the BP Macondo-252 well blowout response (or, as the press calls it "The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill"... don't get me started on that), beyond the one feed most often shown in the press of the ROV spraying dispersant into the stream of oil and natural gas coming out of the well, you saw some of the stuff my colleagues and I designed and built. I can't at this time get into a lot of detail about specific tools and techniques we used (the lawyers say so), but the general idea is that this is a harsh environment -- at 5000 feet of seawater, the ambient pressure is about 2600 psi, it's pitch black, and about 40 degrees F.

Which leads me to danger as a topic. Gever suggested I talk about how some situations are simply too dangerous for humans to be involved. This is one of them. Just consider that pressure. We humans are intended to be in what we call 1 atmosphere of pressure, about 14.696 psi absolute at sea level. Pounds per square inch. We have a lot of square inches on our bodies (some, like me, more than others). We don't really react well to pressure. Commercial divers use funky gas blends (such as replacing the nitrogen in air with helium) and can go 500-600 feet with LONG preconditioning and decompression sessions, but beyond that you need a hard suit. Even manned military subs rarely go much deeper than 800 feet -- the amount of metal in the hull needed to resist the crushing pressure becomes a diminishing return as the sub gets heavier for its size and harder to keep neutrally buoyant -- and smaller on the inside so you can't put as much stuff in it.

Since we're talking about 5000 feet of seawater, or about 2600 psi, let's do a quick visual. You all know what a Honda Civic looks like, right? It's a smallish car, weighs about 2600 lbs. And everyone knows what a 12 x 12 floor tile looks like. That floor tile has 144 square inches of area (12^2). Lay down on the floor, put the tile on your chest, and park 144 Honda Civics on the tile.

Doesn't feel so good, does it?

Humans are squishy. We will compress. A lot. The Mythbusters did a bit earlier this year about venting the air supply in a commercial dive suit while at about 300 feet of depth. It wasn't pretty (I don't have any desire to navigate the rather Byzantine Discovery Channel website to find a link to the video right now).

Which goes back to danger: there are simply some environments that we humans can't easily go. Yeah, there are specialized deep-submersible vehicles that can take 2 or 3 humans down to even the bottom of the Marianas Trench, but they can't really do much crammed into a 6' titanium sphere with a half-dozen 6" diameter viewports. And the support equipment for maintaining habitability is big and bulky and makes the sub too big to fit into many interesting spaces.

Solution? ROVs! Remove the life support requirements and you have something smaller and, conversely, more capable at depth, while the operator sits in a control booth on the surface in a comfortable chair (ROV dives can go over 10 hours in duration), air conditioning, access to a head ("toilet" for landlubbers), blast music, etc.

There's still danger, but it's danger that is within the realm of reason: we know how to account for the danger, we see that the risk/reward ratio is tipped toward reward.

And it all comes down to learning - through experience - how to make those risk/reward decisions. That comes from doing dangerous things. As kids, we found ways to take those risks whether or not our parents really overtly allowed it. As adults, we need to set boundaries -- and if you think Gever doesn't set boundaries at Tinkering School, you'd be wrong. It's just that they're well out of the direct view of the casual observer (and most of the kids themselves, I'd expect). And when we adults set boundaries for the kids in our charge, we need to say why. Truthfully. Kids have finely-tuned BS detectors. "Because you'll be eaten by a grue" is a challenge, not a reason. "You haven't checked to see if that lashing can hold up the platform and 10 of you yet" (see what I did there, tying into this year's Tinkering School?) is a reason.

Because the objective is a thinking, capable kid that grows into a thinking, capable adult. The neat thing is that starting a kid on the path to thinking and capability isn't hard to do, because, well, we humans are programmed to learn best that way already anyway. The even neater part is that once that path is started, the artificial boundaries we adults set can open way up and retreat into the shadows.

And that's the value of the 50 Dangerous Things: they provide a kicking-off point, a way to start down that path. Going off on tangents is not only allowed, but encouraged.

Kind of like this post.

Life is like that, too.

I received an email from Parenting.com yesterday with the huge headline, "11 SUMMER DANGERS AND HOW TO AVOID THEM!" Well, course, I just had to find out immediately what was included in  the list of eleven.

Complete with the corresponding fear-mongering subtitles, here's the list of 11:

"Sneaky Beach Bummers"

• Sand
• Rip Currents
• Jellyfish
• Shells

"Hidden Park Hazards"

• Jungle gyms
• Spiders
• Poison Ivy

"Backyard Drags"

• Pools
• Bees
• Sandboxes
• Mosquitos

It's enough to make a new parent want to wrap their children in bubble wrap and keep them indoors forever! What do you think of this article?

Here's a fascinating short video of Bill Hammack, the Engineer Guy, "playfully" taking a look at how a copier works. This should inspire the kids to investigate Dangerous Thing #34 - Deconstruct an Appliance.

Really? Climbing Trees is now considered a dangerous childhood activity? Puh-lease! My middle-aged friends and I laugh in the face of your danger, and we'll go on record to say that they don't make danger the way they used to...

When I was a kid, my brother and I took long car trips lying in the back of our parent's hatchback Citation with nary a seat belt in sight. I traversed city and country roads on my bike with the wind blowing through my hair. What was a helmet anyway? I rode my horse (sans saddle at times) alone on long treks through the woods without an accompanying cell phone or curfew or even a flare.

And Gever Tulley, aka Mr. Danger, what did he do in his childhood? He recently shared his list on the 50 Dangerous Things Facebook page:

(NOTE: Anyone under the age of 95 should not attempt Mr. Tulley's activities, except perhaps the ketchup & chocolate one.)

So, parents and other "oldsters" out there...What dangerous things you do as a kid? (Besides walk to school five miles, one way, uphill and in blinding snowstorms, of course.) Please share in the comments (click "Comments" up by the article title), and we'll compare notes, perhaps nod our heads in agreement, and maybe giggle a little, too.

While Gever's away at Tinkering School, I have the honor this week of being Guest Blogger #1. My name is Deb Nies, and I am a freelance writer and the mom of a tween daughter named Hannah.

I regularly write two columns for the Madison (WI) edition of Examiner.com under the titles of Parenting Tweens Examiner and Hidden Adventure Examiner.

I am a recovering helicopter parent, set free through Gever's TED talk which led to my acquisition of his book, "50 Dangerous Things." Hannah and I are currently plowing through the 50, and making up new dangerous things to do as we take the proverbial road less traveled.

If you asked Hannah's opinion, she'd probably say, "My mom has learned to lighten up a bit."

I look forward to living on the (dangerous) edge with the readers of this blog, Fifty Dangerous Things. Please let me know what you're doing to laugh in the face of danger.

Take a look at some of our adventures:

Our 50 Dangerous Things adventures.

Over at Granola in a Different Bowl, they're inventing new topics - and we wholeheartedly approve! Kev and his crew have built an amazing pond in their backyard. Walking the plank across the pond has become a family habit and we're not above pointing out that it's suspiciously similar to topic #38 Learn Tightrope Walking, we just never expected anyone to build a pond just so they could check that one off.

In considering the possible dangers and benefits of building a pond, Kev has this to say:

I think building a pond constitutes as a dangerous activity because there is a risk of drowning. There is also risk of getting a hernia and/or throwing out your back while moving rocks. I'm almost surprised this did not happen to me with the size of some of those rocks. Oh, and fingers can and almost certainly will get pinched between other rocks. Ouch! So, back to the most serious concern - I think kids who are taught water safety and have regular and varied experiences with water are more likely to know the physical properties and characteristics of water, and be less likely to be harmed by it. They will develop their own level of comfort and risk to keep them as safe as they know how. Is it 100%? Nothing ever is.