👀 Making science fun by making it ridiculous

#410 | From NASA to YouTube to glitter bombs

Mark Rober is the coolest engineer EVER. He worked at NASA and Apple and then pivoted hard to YouTube to make elaborate prank videos using physics and engineering. 

I first heard of the guy because of his glitter bomb pranks, in which he took sweet, shiny revenge on people stealing the parcels left on his porch.

He spent six months making one entire swimming pool’s worth of jello to see what it feels like to swim in it.

He built the world’s smallest nerf gun, and then shot an ant with it (spoiler - the gun was so small that the ant blatantly ignored it and then stole it)

What I think is his piece de resistance is a set of mazes he made first for squirrels in his backyard and then a pet octopus to test their wits/ try outsmarting them/ build an alarming animal army. 

And very delightfully, he gave the MIT commencement speech last year, which ended with him attaching his flat graduation hat to a drone and flying it across campus.

He’s now the founder of Crunch Labs, an educational toy subscription setup that lets kids discover and play with basic engineering principles from scratch while building toys. I’m sure it works because I (a 35-year-old woman) want ‘em all (for myself), but this bro is in San Francisco, so I’ll just watch his videos from across the world and be grumpily admiring from afar.

To conclude, I quote the great Jesse Pinkman.

Divya
Part-time marketing consultant, full-time worrier
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