Gever and Julie will be at Maker Faire this weekend (May 21-22) at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds. We’ll be doing some Dangerous Things and signing books. The Faire is super-fun, so you should definitely come. And we’d love for you to stop by! We’ll be right outside the entrance to Maker Shed (where, of course, they will have books on sale :-)

More info on Maker Faire

If you’re in Japan, you’ll soon be able to buy 子どもが体験するべき50の危険なこと (otherwise known as 50 Dangerous Things – in Japanese!). O’Reilly Japan has translated our book and it goes on sale next week.

Buy 子どもが体験するべき50の危険なことhere

We had a wonderful time in New York this week.

Gever spoke at TEDxEast (Tinker, Noodle, Obsess) and we met lots of interesting people. His talk should be posted at some point – we’ll update the Press page with the details.

A car picked us up (at the crack of dawn!) for Gever’s appearance on the local PIX-11 Morning News, where he shocked the hosts by having them lick 9-volt batteries.

WPIX-11: Gever Shares Dangerous Things Live on TV

Continuing a challenging trend, another dawn wake-up call for Gever in order to talk to Dan Damon on BBC World Update (heard on the BBC World Service)

BBC World Service, World Update: Gever Tulley Interview

Finally, we introduced a bunch of kids to some Dangerous Things at the Barnes&Noble on the Upper East Side. (If you missed us, they have some signed books available for sale there.) My card reader is having trouble, so I’ll post some photos later.

Gever is now in Bloomington, Indiana, preparing for tomorrow’s TEDxBloomington (The Wisdom of Play). The event will be webcast live – my best guess is that Gever will be speaking shortly after 11am.

TEDxBloomington Livestream

If you live in/near Bloomington and can’t make it to TEDxBloomington, Gever will also be speaking at the Monroe County Public Library in the Auditorium on Sunday, May 15 at 3:30pm.

Gever and Julie will be in New York May 8-13, 2011. Gever will be speaking at TEDxEast and also live on PIX-11.
We’ll both be at Barnes & Noble for a booksigning. More information is available on the Events page.
Please come by – we’d love to see you!

In honor of the re-release of 50 Dangerous Things, we have launched a new version of the website. Not only have we added the ability to Share Your Story, we also have a new Forum for sharing ideas and inspiration.

Thanks for visiting and we look forward to hearing your experiences with 50 Dangerous Things.

Gever will be doing some dangerous things LIVE on PIX Morning News (WPIX-TV) at 8:20am ET on Wednesday, May 11, 2011.

For more information: PIX-11 Morning News

If you missed it, here’s the video:

WPIX-11: Gever Shares Dangerous Things Live on TV

The new edition of Fifty Dangerous Things will be launched by NAL/Penguin on May 3, 2011! That means it should be available at your favorite booksellers (both online and in the stores).

Also, we will be launching an updated version of this website (with our long awaited Share Your Story section!). Please visit us again on May 3 and check it out.

Thanks!
- julie & gever

It’s not too late to get the original edition of Fifty Dangerous Things (you should let your children do). ThinkGeek.com still has books in stock for immediate delivery. Remember these will soon be a collector’s item!

And while you’re there, I’m sure you can find something else suitably dangerous on their site, like a Potato Chip Science Kit or My First Bacon – Talking Plush (?!).

Had to pop in with this one. There’s an interesting article on CNN.com today about “Extreme Parents”, which are sort of the larval form of the helicopter parents we’ve all heard about. Some of the stories are too crazy to be fiction:

“One mother wrote me, is it really OK to have her 6-month-old crawl two miles a day,” says Temple University psychology professor Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. “She found that after a mile her child was getting tired.”

The only reaction I have for that is ::facepalm::.

People are always asking us what tools we recommend for kids. The short answer is that we recommend real tools, and the ones you have are the best ones to teach them to use. But not everyone has a set of tools these days, or you might not want kids using your favorite screwdriver to make holes in the sidewalk (we aren’t suggesting that they should, but these things happen sometimes), so, in the spirit of the season, we proudly present our official 2010 shopping guide for kids. We’ve these tools with kids ages 8 and up, but you know your child better than we do, so use your best judgement.

Tinkerer’s Toolbox (on Amazon)

UPDATE: The link here is no longer active, unfortunately. Because of bandwidth cost (the video has to be uplinked from the surface vessel operating the ROV via satellite to a land-based system) and propriatary information, now that the Macondo well has been closed in, the live feeds were discontinued. If I can find some alternative links to good archival ROV footage, I’ll put a link up. A quick search of YouTube may turn up some ROV video, though.

Would you like to know what’s going on 5000 feet under the surface of the Gulf of Mexico? Click here and take a look at the live video feeds from the Remotely Operated Vehicles working around the BP Macondo-252 well site.

Couple notes about the feeds:

1. There is no audio.
2. Not every sub is in the water and “live” all the time. And some that are in the water are observing, taking instrumentation (off camera) feeds from various devices attached to the well or nearby, and don’t look like they’re doing much.
3. If you click on a feed’s caption, it will open in another window. Click on the video image itself and it will go full-screen. I recommend the former rather than the latter as you get a degraded, pixelated image.
4. If you watch closely, sometimes you can see wildlife. I saw a crab watching the ROV watch it a bit earlier today. The crab was probably very close to a foot across the shell.