And I don’t just mean Thanksgiving! Lately, I’ve run across an exhibit, a discussion, and now an article on things wearing down and breaking, so I figured that meant it was time for a blog post.

It started with my visit to the Exploratorium, who find that stuff breaks, sometimes unexpectedly. Master tinkerers and builders that they are, they made it into an exhibit of worn, bent or flat-out broken parts of their exhibits. It may take hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of uses, but when your visitorship is near a million per year, it doesn’t take that many days to find micro-changes suddenly visible as macro changes.

Then Laura suggested that we keep track of all the equipment we’ve been buying in case of, you guessed it, breaking (or other loss). So we’ve started an inventory that not only will serve as a nice record for the project of all the bits and bobs we’ve had to buy (so far, over 300 feet of speaker wire for just 10 cameras), but also will help us replace them more easily should something go wrong. Which we know it will, eventually, and frankly, we’ll have a sense of how quickly it goes wrong if we keep our records well. In our water-laden touch pools and wave tanks environment, this very likely will be sooner than we hope.

Finally, John Baek’s Open and Online Lifelong Learning newspaper linked to this story from Wired magazine about the people who are deliberately trying to break things, to make the unexpected expected.

So, have a great Thanksgiving break (in the U.S.), and try not to break anything in the process.