Recommended Organizations

Here are a few great Los Angeles organizations I've become involved with or otherwise come to admire:

Iridescent - Engineering outreach connecting engineering students and professionals with underserved youth and their families. I'm a particular fan of their Family Science program, which puts their engineer-educators into schools in the early evening to facilitate science activities for the entire family.

ReDiscover - Take trash, make art, locally. In a tiny storefront and expansive shed out back, this neighborhood arts center reuses the castoffs of local architecture firms, artists, and manufacturers into crafting activities, support to school art programs.

Trash for Teaching - Take trash, make art, on an industrial scale. Like ReDiscover with much more of an industry/manufacturing focus, TFT is in the midst of inventing a science and engineering outlet for their awesome industrial materials, with a goal of serving the entire LA area.

Treepeople - Environmental awareness and advocacy for the watersheds and ecosystems overlaid on this great metropolis.

Skirball Cultural Center - While they have an eclectically wide range of programs for different ages and interests within the context of their theme of Jewish culture, my favorite (and Miriam's) is the Noah's Ark exhibit, a great and beautifully staffed and maintained children's museum of stuffed animals, toys, daily activities and performances, and fascinating animal sculptures made of recycled materials.

The secret of great salad

The secret of great salad, as conveyed to me by Marcella Hazan: toss the greens with the dressing (or just oil) for much longer than you think necessary, to get an even sheen of oil on every face of every leaf.

Magnetic awesomeness

I did a series of workshops on nanomaterials at Iridescent a few weeks ago, which were a lot of fun to put together and teach. One of the best materials we were able to give the kids to experiment with was ferrofluid, which is composed of nano-sized magnets suspended in oil.