Brooklyn Brainery

Pretty Awesome: Peer 2 Peer University

jen — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 18:28:41 +0000

A quick shout out to Peer 2 Peer University - a really neat project focused on creating an open online community for continuing education. Their classes are super intensive (think six weeks and college-level), but they're also free, which is, I think, the best combination ever.

The next batch of classes start September 15, though you've got to sign up by September 8 if you want in. A couple of my favorites are this Creative Nonfiction Workshop, DIY Math, and a wicked Intro to Music Theory. There's also a ton of web and programming related courses, so yeah, pretty much anything you want.

All Sorts of Updates

team! — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 03:15:59 +0000

Hey everyone!

First and most importantly, we're about to open a whole new round of classes next week - keep an eye out here and sign up for the mailing list to hear about 'em first!

If you're interested in the stuff we covered last semester, check out a few course wrap-ups on coffee and NYC history (part 1 and part 2).

What else? We're seriously hunting for a permanent space, spending half the day scrolling through Craigslist for new leads and the rest of it walking around Brooklyn scouting out "For Rent" signs. More updates as things progress on that front!

If you donated to our Kickstarter campaign to help find a space, you're likely getting a tote bag for your troubles, and you'll be happy to know hundreds of blank ones are in transit to us at this very moment.

We'll be spending the next couple of weeks screen printing them and then mailing them to you from one of Brooklyn's notoriously long-lined Post Offices. Good news is we'll have a bunch of extras, so if you're itching to add one to your wardrobe, you'll be able to buy one on this very website very shortly.

And finally, if you prefer your Brainery updates in a form other than writing, you can check out an episode of Electric Sheep all about DIY Education (featuring the awesome NYC Resistor as well) or even a video!

As always, send us your ideas and whatever else (real estate advice?!) to info@brooklynbrainery.com.

Coffee Class Wrap Up!

jen — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:39:32 +0000

For the past couple of weeks, our coffee class has benefited from some serious expertise from the folks at Cafe Grumpy and Blue Bottle Coffee. I learned a ton from them about sourcing beans, roasting them up, and turning them into deliciousness, a bit of which is below.

What's a coffee bean anyhow? I don't think I'd ever really considered where coffee comes from, biologically and botanically. Turns out it's the seed of a cherry-like fruit which grows on a coffee plant, a bushy thing that falls somewhere in between a shrub and a tree. (You can totally eat the fruit, should you ever come across any.)

Once the fruit's picked, you need to get that valuable seed out, and this can be accomplished one of two ways - wet vs. dry processing. Dry or "natural" processing is just that; the berries are left out to dry until the fruit falls away, exposing the seed (the bean). In its simplest form, wet processing speeds things up a bit by using water to wash the flesh of the fruit away. (There's also a semi-washed method.) Some people say wet processed coffees are cleaner, while dry processed coffees are more earthy, but like with everything else, it's just about whatever you prefer.

As far as roasting goes, as long as it's done by a competent professional, you should be fine. Neat fact: lighter roasts actually have way more caffeine than darker roasts!

And when it comes to buying beans, sure, you could spend $50/lb. on some Jamaican Blue Mountain, but you're much better off buying beans from people who actually care about the quality of the coffee they sell, roast it freshly, and buy it from good farms. Now that there's a bunch of really good roasters and cafes in the city, it's even easier to do that. It's also a good idea to not buy too much at once, say half a pound, since the beans lose a lot of flavor as they get older.

Making it at home: No matter how you're making your coffee (drip, French Press, whatever), there's four different variables that come into play when you're brewing coffee at home.

* Water temp: Make sure it's not boiling! You want it to be more like 195 - 200 degrees, so let your kettle boil, then take it off for 30 seconds before you start pouring it on your grounds.

* Size of the grind: Different methods need different grind consistencies (which is why it's great if you can grind at home, right before you make your coffee). For a filter cone, you need something finer than you do for a French Press. Here's a guide.

* Proportion of coffee to water: A good rule of thumb for drip and French Press is about 3-4 tablespoons for 8 ounces of water. It seems like a lot, which it is, but you'll absolutely notice the difference!

* Brew time: For a French Press, you want to let is sit for about three minutes. When you're using a filter cone, it's all about trusting your eye. Before you even start brewing, pour in a bit of water to bloom the grounds; they'll absorb a bunch of water and get lighter in color. Once this happens, you can start pouring your less-than-boiling water in circles, using a thin stream of water if you can. You'll know the grounds are used up when they get really light (and you'll probably have a full cup of coffee).

Huge, huge thanks to the incredibly friendly, knowledgeable, and just plain awesome folks over at Blue Bottle and Cafe Grumpy for sharing their secrets on all things coffee.

Quick Skyline Guide

jen — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 21:44:34 +0000

Last night we wrapped up our NYC history class in Dumbo, going over some of the history of the various buildings along the skyline. Here's a super quick summary of the highlights, and huge thanks to everyone in the class for their ridiculously thorough research.

1. Staten Island Ferry Terminals - I don't think the buildings themselves are terribly interesting, but the Ferry itself is full of good facts: it carries 21 million passengers annually on its 5.2 mile route and until 1997 you had to pay for it ($.50). Back in the 1700's, the first private ferry service took you to Bay Ridge, and it mostly helped farmers get their stuff to the market.

2. Woolworth Building - The Woolworth Building's old - 1913 - and was the tallest building in the world for a bit. Back then, architects still weren't really sure what a tall building should look like, so they looked back at other tall buildings from the olden days. Some made their buildings look like columns, but Cass Gilbert went with Gothic and it makes total sense in this case. The Woolworth Building also gets the prize for the most obvious/appropriate nickname Downtown: the "Cathedral of Commerce."

3. South Street Seaport - In the '80's, this building company thought the best way to get people to come to the downtowns of their various empty cities was to build huge malls, euphemistically termed "festival marketplaces." And they built them everywhere; you've probably been to a few of them at some point - Faneuil Hall in Boston, Bayside Marketplace in Miami, National Place in DC.

Well, 25 years later, everyone's waking up to the fact that South Street Seaport's kind of a lame place only tourists go, and they decided to build a big fancy new tower, except then the Landmarks Preservation Committee said you can't really do that in a historic district and then the company went bankrupt. So we'll see about that.

4. City Municipal Building - This was McKim, Mead & White's first skyscraper (1914), and the whole thing has always seemed a little off balance to me. Regardless, it was hugely influential in civic building, where Classical architecture remained relevant way after everyone else took up Modernism. Fun fact: 28,000 people are married here each year!

5. Brooklyn Bridge - Since there's way too much to actually say about the Brooklyn Bridge, here's just a few random facts I cobbled together from Wikipedia and the internet.

*It wasn't until 1885, two years after it opened, that someone decided to jump off the Bridge.

*The granite to build it came all the way from Maine.

*Its suspension cables are 16 inches in diameter.

6. Verizon Building/375 Pearl - I've always wondered why this building was so ugly. Turns out because it wasn't built for people but for telephone switching, which you apparently needed skyscrapers for at one point. The plan now is to put a new facade on it so it isn't quite so offensive to the Brooklyn Bridge.

7. One Wall Street - Just to make this building extra expensive, the entire thing is clad in limestone. It's kind of gorgeous though, and a really nice example of Art Deco architecture. Apparently the inside's amazing too. Lots of gold and red mosaics.

8. 60 Wall Street - A newcomer to the skyline, 60 Wall topped out in 1990 and is oh-so-Postmodern. You can't tell well from the picture above, but the top is full of abstracted classical columns, all aglitter in glass. Check out the lobby, feels a bit like a Las Vegas casino!

9. 70 Pine Street - Another Art Deco skyscraper, like One Wall but with a big spire, the coolest thing about 70 Pine is that is has double decker elevators, to reduce the number of shafts needed. At the moment, it's the third tallest building in the city at 950 feet.

10. Freedom House/120 Wall Street - Here's a textbook example of the skyscraper style that NYC perfected in the 1920's, all the result of some zoning laws. Before 1916, you could build as high as you wanted on your plot of land, whatever the effects on the street below (i.e. plunging it into darkness and shadow and making it an entirely unpleasant place to be.)

After this happened a few too many times, the city decided to impose some zoning regulations, known as the setback laws. Only on 25% of your lot could you build as high as you wanted. Otherwise, once you reached a certain height, the building had to step back from the street to let more light in. You can find these buildings all over the city, and they're a pretty incredible example of public policy influencing aesthetics.

11. Beekman Tower - And now something from Frank Gehry. This'll be 76 stories of apartments, with a big public school and a hospital too. Early reviews are pretty positive, but I think the most interesting thing is that Gehry really has no control over the inside of the building, because real estate developers have their own ideas of what apartments should look like and there's really no changing that.

12. One Chase Manhattan Plaza - Pretty much everyone agrees this is a masterpiece of the International Style (built in 1969), though it was only officially landmarked in 2008. This picture of it is amazing.

13. One New York Plaza - You can identify this building by its strange/cool beehive facade pattern. It also has a wickedly large cornice at the top which makes it easy to tell apart from any other building way down at the tip of the island. Before One New York Plaza was built, the city tried to acquire the land in order to build housing projects here.

Field Trips

jen — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:34:23 +0000

This semester's class on the history of Downtown and Brooklyn is taking on a motley (you could say random) group of neighborhoods during our four weeks.

Partially this is because there's just way too much stuff to learn about in four 90 minute meetings; partially it's a way to try and fit lots of topics in, and partially it's an excuse to do lots of the stuff I've been meaning to do and see since I moved here. Since there's no unifying theme to our exploits, this seemed as good a time as any to recap some of the stuff we've done.

Before class started, I biked out to the city's oldest building - the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House in Flatlands. It's pretty awesome and extremely old (1652!) but also kinda small and unassuming. It's got a super cute park and some nice gardens surrounding it, but there's also a tire shop next door and a McDonald's next to that. There's no train nearby and it's a little out of the way, but that's also what's sort of neat about it. The best part about the Wyckoff House is that it just sort of blends in to the city, and it kinda feels like this secret thing when you find it.

Best fact? All the Wyckoffs in the world (50,000 of them!) are descended from this family, since it was the first time the surname "Wyckoff" had been used. It means something like "town magistrate" in Dutch. Also they have some really old waffle irons there and corn cobs in the walls for insulation. Neat.

Last week we were super lucky to take a walking tour of Crown Heights with a neighborhood expert. We started at the site of another old farm (maybe farms are the theme of the class?!), this one right around the corner of Nostrand Ave. and Macon Street in Bed-Stuy.

We wandered and walked all over the neighborhood, but easily my favorite building was this rambling structure on the corner of New York Ave. and Park Place. It's seriously huge, like half an avenue long. It's the kind of building you stumble upon and makes you feel like you're not in New York anymore. It's a school now, and you can't go in or anything, but it's totally worth the trip just to gawk at it a bit.

This week we met over in the East Village (yep, a farm too) to meet with a local artist and talk a bit about Tompkins Square and the neighborhood. Tompkins Square was never a farm, just a swamp that's had a long history of protests and the occasional riot.

The most infamous riot in Tompkins Square happened in 1988, when the city began enforcing a 1 a.m. curfew in the park after noise complaints started rolling in. A protest of the curfew drew lots and lots of cops to the scene, and eventually things got violent, lasting until dawn. It's another one of those things about New York that's hard to imagine when you see the place today.

Next week's our last class (skyscrapers!), after which I promise some random facts about very tall buildings.

Brooklyn Writers Group

jen — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:53:23 +0000

For all of you writers out there, here's a chance to connect with others locally for advice, crits, and maybe even some workshops. It was first posted over on unclasses, and we're helping to spread the word around these parts.

From the description:

An opportunity for Brooklyn writers to have others read and critique their work and to get insights and suggestions from people interested in the craft. Also a chance to get together and bounce ideas off each other for story-lines, plots, character development, stylistic approaches, etc. Depending on who joins the group and what sort of skill-set they have, this could also create opportunities for members to teach classes and host workshops.

If you're interested in joining, shoot us an email or sign up over on the unclasses page!

Things We Learned This Week

jen — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:48:30 +0000

Our latest semester started Monday, with five classes on five wildly different topics. Here's a couple of my favorite facts from each:

NYC History - I spent the entire weekend reading Forgotten New York and memorizing exceedingly arbitrary things about Brooklyn's streets and neighborhoods.

Want some facts? Before Brooklyn was King's County, it was six separate towns; one of them, New Utrecht, was founded by a pirate and his "somtimes prostitute" wife after they were kicked out of New Amsterdam proper. The name "Gowanus" comes from the name of a local Canarsie chief. Either that or from the Dutch word for "bay," no one's quite sure. There are so many more where that came from.

Typography - Capital letters are called "upper case" letters because they were literally stored at the top of a typsetter's desk. (In case you couldn't guess, this is also how where we get "lower case" from.) Cool.

Whiskey - There's a funny thing called corn whiskey, which is made from a mash of at least 80% corn and doesn't need to be aged at all. Apparently some of it tastes alright once it's aged, but good old Georgia Moon, the one you're most likely to find at the liquor store, most certainly does not.

World Food - Ethiopian food is awesome and really delicious! And fulllllll of ghee, like so much ghee you can't imagine. Ghee's just butter with all the milk solids skimmed off, and it keeps for a super long time without being refrigerated.

American Sign Language - Signs can be really regionally specific: people around here will understand your signs for the five boroughs, but try doing that in Iowa and no one will get it. The same sign could also mean different things in different places. For example, the sign for Brooklyn (a bouncing letter B), is also the sign for Boston.

Update Time

team! — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 01:02:16 +0000

We've been busy prepping for classes by doing things like making impromptu trips to the oldest surviving structure in New York City (for our NYC history class), and making tons of seed paper for rewards to our (successful!) Kickstarter project, but that hasn't stopped us from doing a whole buncha other stuff too, all below:

Location Survey

Earlier this week, we asked you all to fill in a quick little survey and let us know what neighborhood we should call home. The top three? Park Slope, Williamsburg, and Gowanus. You can still take the survey, and tell us what you want us to do with the space while you're at it!

Ice Cream Club on TV

Check out Ice Cream Club, the Brainery's very good friend and the best ice-cream-trading-club on the planet, on Channel 7! We taped a piece with them the other morning, and it was pretty much the most fun Ice Cream Club meeting ever.

It should be on at 5pm Monday, so tune in if you want to see Soma use the word "esoteric" on the local news. You can also find out everything about making ice cream and sign up to be a member over here!

Classes

Oh yeah, you can still sign up for a few of our July/August classes! Two of them, Downtown and Brooklyn and a second session of Whiskey (with plenty of tastings), start this Monday, July 19th. We've also got a two week session on Gin coming up on August 3rd.

July Classes Open for Registration!

jen — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:44:18 +0000

Next semester starts July 19th, and we've got a whole slew of new two and four week courses coming up!

In American Sign Language we'll learn how to sign - including social conversations, finger spelling and even a bunch of NYC-centric things. After this class you'll finally be able to stop saying sign language is one of those things you wish you had learned in college.

Everyone wears jeans, so you might as well become an expert on them in Denim as She is Worn. We'll cover how they're made, the way denim behaves, and some of the things people do to make awesome jeans today.

Ever wanted to tell the difference between the four kinds of serifs or expertly drop type classifications into casual conversation? Of course! We'll take it all on in Typography, and the class'll wrap up with you designing your own font (!)

Each session, Soma's Foreign Cuisine 101 will figure out the mysteries behind a different cuisine - Ethiopian, Indian, Thai, and Korean - and before you know it you'll be able to define bulgogi and ruminate on the differences among the world's curries.

I'm a huge urban planning and architecture nerd, so Downtown and Brooklyn will satisfy my need to talk about new bike lanes all day. We'll cover other stuff too, like which building is which on the skyline and even a bit of geography.

Just in case four weeks of class is a bit too much to handle during the summer, we've got a couple two week courses lined up on two of everyone's favorite beverages - Whiskey and Coffee.

Pie Crust Workshop

jen — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:54:19 +0000

We're teaming up with with Lauren Cucinotta from the awesome Pie in the Park project to host a workshop that will conquer all your crust making fears.

On Monday, June 21st at 7:30pm, let four pro crust makers show you how to get that perfect crust, with plenty of pie tasting along the way. All levels of pie bakers welcomed with open, flour-y arms!

No advance registration necessary - just come on over to The Gowanus Studio Space, located at 166 7th Street in Brooklyn (take the F, G, R, or M to 4th Ave/9th Street). $15 gets you in, gets you a slice of pie, and helps support Pie in the Park and the Brainery.

To sweeten the deal even more, anyone that comes to the crust class and pledges at least $30 to the Pie in the Park Kickstarter project gets a handmade pie by Lauren (weekend pick-up/delivery only.)

If you'd like to make sure we have a spot for you, feel free to pre-register now so you can just show up and pop in!

How it'll roll:

*Let Minnesota native Anna Muessig walk you through her infamous Vodka Pie Crust recipe. Oh, yes, there's real vodka in there people, and that's what makes her crusts sooo delicious. 21+!

*Alex Arnold knows nothing if he doesn't know a good top crust - that includes lattices and designs - and he's gonna show you how it's done. He got his training spending an entire summer after graduating college in the kitchen with his mom and cooking for hundreds at the esteemed Pyle Inn co-op at Oberlin College. He also has a food blog where he shows off his cooking skills wearing nothing but a nice, tight apron. Hot.

*As the crust-loving founder of Pie in the Park, the event and now Kickstarter projec t, Lauren Cucinotta inherited her crust-love from her Italian great-grandmother Lucy, who came to America with nothing but a pizelle iron, a realllllyyy sharp knife and a rolling pin, which Lauren now uses. Her kitchen is filled with vintage pie accessories and pie cookbooks, and she'll be giving you a run down of the tools every baker needs, as well as showing off her recipe for a Rustic Cornmeal Crust.

*Alison Kave makes such heavenly confections as Spicy Hot Chocolate Pie and Root Beer Cream Pie, both of which are first prize pies. Literally. This pientrepreneur started First Prize Pies after getting a blue ribbon for an especially delicious bourbon and ginger pecan creation. She specializes in unique pie crusts with ingredients like Nilla wafers, salty pretzels, gingersnaps and more and she'll be showing you just how she does it.

Featuring pies from our amazing presenters and Four and Twenty Blackbirds.

Whittlin'

soma — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:55:35 +0000

Last week in Traditional Wood Crafts it was observed that old people don't whittle, people get old whittling. What you think is a simple exercise of a stick versus a knife becomes much more than that, and our unpracticed hands had to take their time with it. Let's take a look at some of the stuff we covered:

Wood selection for whittling is a battle between ease of carving versus timelessness. Softer woods are easier to carve - you can whip something out of balsa very easily (there was at least one teacup), but it's likely to dent before it's out the door. Harder woods will stand up against abuse but will take a lot longer to carve. If you're using wood you buy at a store, a good middle ground is basswood.

The alternative to store-bought wood is sticks are branches. The main benefit of tree wood is that you can get it green, which means it hasn't been dried out yet. When a branch breaks off it has about 85% water content, but after it's been sitting around outside the water leaches out and it drops to about 15%. By starting with something green, you get the benefit of easy-to-carve wood. Once it dries it'll be tougher and more resistant to damage. Fruit trees are the standard tree for found-wood whittling - try 5th Ave in Park Slope after a storm, those pear trees love to give up their branches.

Branches are also neat because they can have forks and knobs on them which can easily translate into elements of your design - arms, legs, and animal ears are all easy pickings. Thin bark can also also be carved into patterns or design elements.

Now that you've got your wood you need to plan out your design. Secret tip: draw all over your wood! Seriously, you're going to be carving it up anyway, that wood isn't going to stick around. For the knife-in-progress above, I drew a line down the middle on the top and the bottom so I'd make sure to stay in-line as I cut away wood. More complicated pieces get multiple dimensions drawn on at multiple times.

Time to cut! There are a few main strokes to use when whittling. The first is the rough cut or straightaway cut. It's the same motion you use for peeling carrots. It's used for take off large chunks of wood so you can get down to the detail work. Watch out you don't bury the knife too deep in, though - you're liable to end up prying the wood apart and damaging your piece.

The next cut is the paring cut, or drawcutting. This is the motion you use when peeling an apple, where you brace the piece with your right thumb and pull the knife toward you with the rest of your hand. The secret is to keep your right thumb below the plane of your cut, so that once the knife breaks through you have no chance of cutting yourself. This is used for finer details.

The slicing cut is similar to how you use an X-Acto knife. It ends up being 2 or 3 cuts - the first one goes straight into the wood, then you make secondary and tertiary cuts at an angle to make a bit of a trench. You end up with a (possibly long) V-shaped line.

Another V-related cut is "V"-notching or thumbpushing. You use this to attack corners. You hold the knife like you're giving a thumbs up, then use both thumbs to push down at the same time, making a cut into the wood. You then make a similar gouge at another angle, and voila, the V falls out. It's a lot like the slicing cut, but with a different hand position.

Whittling is a skill that you need to see and practice in order to learn - this blog post sure isn't going to set you up with anything! Hop on over to Tools for Working Wood down in Sunset Park to get a wicked whittling knife and then check out YouTube for some videos, and you'll be all set!

Making Things and Breaking Things

jen — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:27:48 +0000

Rachelle's "Fill Yourself With Wonder" class finished up this week, and thanks to it I now know what the inside of a video camera looks like (shiny, with a really cool eye piece).

One of the first big projects was a group memory map of New York City, with drawings and magazine pages, photos from home and some stuff gathered from around the city. It was cool to see everyone's collective experiences, frightfully weighted toward Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, laid out in one place.

Memory maps are easy to make these days, now that we can all tag Google maps to our heart's content, but there's something still sorta charming about a handmade one. Some of my absolute favorites, if you loosely define memory maps as any remembrance of a place, are these photocollages that some prim Victorian ladies made in England back when photography was still new. They're way less stuffy than anything you'd expect to come out of the 1860's, and even kinda pretty.

The next week, instead of making something, we destroyed stuff. A lot of stuff - video cameras, walkie talkies, laptops, phones - all with lots of circuit boards and batteries and resistors inside. Some of it was super hard to break apart, but some of it was actually kinda beautiful, and there was lots of jewelry just waiting to be made from the bits. I'm still dreaming of bright blue resistor earrings.

Everything wrapped up with a challenge - to make something you can wear from a cardboard box. And though "a cardboard box" is the easy solution to that one, you can actually make some pretty intricate stuff from it, like Soma's rather delicate cardboard fascinator, up above. (PS - fascinators are wild things you put in your hair, google them, you'll be impressed.) You'll also be glad to know that the corrugated paper box was invented right here in Brooklyn.

All of which is to say that even the stuff you think is junk can probably be turned into something pretty neat.

Seasonal Cooking Wrapup

jen — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 19:47:18 +0000

Emily's Seasonal Cooking class wraps up this Wednesday, but we're already missing her expertise about local produce and cooking (not to mention her amazing snacks).

So what'd we eat?

Asparagus! The first real sign of spring, asparagus is basically awesome. And how should you cook it? Use the bigger, thicker stalks for roasting, and save the smaller ones to steam or sautee.

Fact: White asparagus is grown in the dark but doesn't taste any different that green asparagus!

Chives! Chives with their flowers attached are almost too pretty to eat, but Emily turned them into a great and simple chive oil for some steamed potatoes. You can use the beheaded flowers in salads or even deep fry them in tempura - they're super peppery and really good.

Beets! Any vegetable you can both make a cake and hummus out of is officially my favorite. Use the greens like chard (they're from the same family) and if you buy small ones, you don't even need to peel them. If you do peel them, just remember to do it after they're cooked, cause it's pretty much impossible when they're raw.

Mustard Greens! By far the coolest thing about mustard greens is that when you eat them raw, they taste like salad that's already been dressed with vinagrette. If you prefer actual lettuce in your salad, they're also super easy to cook - just sautee them quickly with some ginger, pepper, or even bacon, and you're ready to go.

Peas! If chives are almost too pretty to eat, pea shoots and tendrils definitely are. The shoots are great when you want to infuse something with pea flavor, but not have the peas themselves, and the tendrils taste more like spinach. Mix them all up for a fancy looking salad to impress all your friends.

Besides being pretty and delicious, they're also really, really good for you. A serving of peas even has more protein than an egg!

Rhubarb! I've always been sort of frightened by rhubarb, but it's actually great raw and not nearly as sour as you'd think. You can find it throughout spring and summer, and luckily when you buy it at the Greenmarket the poisonous leaves are already removed, though it wasn't until WWI that people discovered they make you really, really sick.

To turn the stems in to pie filling, just cook them in a saucepot for until it reaches the texture you like. Add 1/4 - 1/2 cup of sugar and 1 tbl. of cornstarch for every pound of rhubarb, and make sure the mixture comes to a boil to cook off that gross raw cornstarch taste.

Fingerling Potatoes! Fingerlings cook really fast, so you can mix up a batch of Emily's god-awfully good potato salad in no time flat. All you need is a 1:1 mix of mayo and whole grain mustard, some dill and some salt, and it's pretty much the best thing you've ever eaten.

When you're cooking potatoes, always test them doneness with a sharp knife and not a dull, squared off fork! It's a lot easier to tell if they're done that way.

Persian Cucumbers! My favorite thing ever about cucumbers is that the inside can be 20 degrees cooler than the skin. Persian cucumbers might be kinda hard to find, but they make great salads since you don't have to skin or seed them; just slice thin and mix with some oil and vinegar.

You can learn way more from Emily (and maybe a little from us) at our Grilling and Smoking workshop coming up in a few weeks. It promises to be smoky and delicious.

Grilling and Smoking Workshop

soma — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:41:38 +0000

On June 27th we're hosting a Grilling and Smoking Workshop as part of Homemade: Brooklyn, featuring the grilling expertise of Emily Beebe of The Wooden Spoonful. It's going on at Metropolitan Green in Williamsburg, over at 439 Metropolitan Ave.

Learn the mysteries of marinades and unravel the intricacies of your grill! Steaks, fish, veggies, kebabs - we'll fill you in on the method to the madness beyond "put it onto the grill."

Incredible fact: Did you know marinades (and rosemary, especially!) reduce carcinogens in grilled meat?

Reach back to your suburban past by learning to produce glorious hunks of smoked meat whether it's on a backyard gas grill or a tabletop Weber on the fire escape.

We'll rehash how to make bacon in your kitchen (courtesy our course about meat), but also learn how to finish the process and get it that applewood smoked flavor.

The workshop is $15, and you can sign up through the links below. For your scheduling pleasure there are two time slots, 2pm and 3:30pm

All spots for the grilling workshops are full! Follow us @bkbrains to hear if any last minute spots open up!

Irrational Decisions wrapup

soma — Wed, 26 May 2010 13:50:25 +0000

Kyle's How To Make Irrational Decisions wrapped up on Monday. I took plenty of notes, so let's go through the things that complicate the choices we make, then look at what we can do to make our decisions easier!

Why Making Decisions Is So Hard

Every time we make a decision, we're looking at two different parts of the result, what we get and when we get it. Sometimes deciding between the two is easy. Do I want $50 or $80? I'll take $80, thanks! Do I want it now or a month from now? Now, obviously!

Life isn't like that, though - the whats and the whens get all mixed up, and the decisions get harder. $50 now or $80 a month from now? Sure, having $50 in your hand right now feels a lot better, but an extra $30 sure makes waiting attractive. Let's illustrate this with adorable children waiting for marshmallows:

There are three different ways to focus your energy - the past, the present, and the future. Would you just eat the first marshmallow? You're present-oriented. Would you wait for the second? Future-oriented. Things like studying hard in school or saving for retirement are good examples of being future-oriented out in the non-marshmallow-related world.

But oh, oh, oh, it gets harder, even! Once uncertainty comes into the picture, everything gets much worse. Do you want $50, or a 50% chance at winning $100, but if you lose you get nothing? Math gives us a way of comparing the two - multiplying the probability by the payout gives the "expected payoff". $100 times 50% is $50, and $50 times 100% is also $50 - math is telling us the two are the same, but our brains sure don't think that way. (Confused? Check this out, or just trust me!)

Once outcomes are uncertain everything becomes a lot more personal. Do you just need $50 to buy a pair of new shoes, or do you really need that $100 to make rent? Are you a risk taker? This is all under the umbrella of risk aversion, which gets a lot more complicated if you head over to Wikipedia.

Now, once we start thinking about how "personal" a decision is we need to start thinking about what that really means. We have an idea that we operate in our own little sphere and are in complete control of all of our ideas and actions, when that's really not true at all.

If you ask someone to write down the word "see" half of people will write 'see' and the other half will write 'sea.' If you make a waving motion with your hand, though, suddenly everyone's writing 'sea.' Right, waves! Every decision you make is influenced by things you've experienced recently, and this is called priming (Wikipedia). Holding a cold drink will make you think more negatively than a hot one. If you just watched a romantic comedy, it might be harder to break up with your boyfriend. You don't make decisions in a vacuum.

Priming doesn't necessarily make decisions easier or harder, it's just something that complicates the idea of making a "best" or "rational" decision - what you think is a perfectly thought-out decision right now might not be the same an hour later after you've had to sit on the subway for a while, or look at an ad, or aren't nearly so hungry. Realizing that in every moment your choices are going to look a little different can go a long way in relaxing about decision-making.

While talking about the "best" decision, regret is an important aspect. Once you've made a decision, you're locking out all the choices you didn't make. You might have a tendency to fixate on everything you've lost out on when you make a decision - this is called the opportunity cost. If you buy this shirt you can't buy those shoes, or how taking one job prevents you from taking another.

Another big thing is sunk costs, which is anything you've spent on something that you can't get back. These costs usually make you want to go further with something, even if you don't like it: spending years in a relationship is a deterrent to leaving it, spending thousands on grad school makes you determined to work in a specific field. I think these are big big big factors when dealing with long-term, important decisions.

Okay, enough depressing stuff, let's talk about how we can make some better decisions!

How to Make Better Decisions

The most important thing about making better decisions is acknowledging that there are a lot of factors at play, and nothing you do is the One True Best Awesome Decision.

The past, the present, the future - all of these are different times to revel in, and one isn't necessarily better than the other. Saving for retirement is a good example: partying down now might seem wasteful to some people, but you don't know if you'll even be alive in 50 years to enjoy the money that you've saved. Maybe spending that money on seeing a band is going to mean more to you than an extra night on a Seniors Cruise down the line. On the other hand, giving up that extra drink might be worth not living in a cardboard box later down the road. Chances are you're looking for balance.

Uncertainty isn't always a bad thing. Understand that there are always unknowns. While we used the $50 or 50% chance at $100 example before, nothing in life is ever that clean-cut. Uncertainty exists along the way, just not in the results. When you go to grad school, you aren't just taking a gamble that you'll get a fancy job when you get out of school - you're also meeting new people and experiencing things you wouldn't have if you were just out in the working world. In the same way, if you get a job instead of going to school you're amassing experiences and business contacts, and each of those interactions changes where your decision is taking you.

Kyle brought up chaos theory as a way of thinking about this - life isn't just X causes Y, it's X sends you towards Y, A interrupts, steers you towards B, but then C edges you back in the direction of W, and etc etc etc forever and ever. No matter how well-informed you are, you never have perfect information about what a decision is going to do and what it is going to mean in the future.

An important take-away from the class for me was that when you are making a decision, you aren't determining the result. When you pick someone to date, that's all you're picking - you haven't secured them in eternal marriage, you don't know if you'll hate how they fold laundry in six years, you don't know if you'll fall for an especially charming gas station attendant. All decisions can do is guide you in a direction, not guarantee an outcome, so you definitely have room to relax.

We talked about priming before, the idea that everything around you is affecting your decision-making. I think the best way to deal with this is to just acknowledge that it exists and move on. Understand that even though you might love to be 100% in control and perfectly rational all of the time, it just can't happen. You can try to look around and see what recent experiences are influencing your decisions, but don't stress out about it too much. Experiences are what make us who we are, and a decision influenced by them is no more or less natural than something perfectly "rational."

The most important thing to remember about sunk costs is that sunk costs are sunk. You are not getting them back, no matter what, so just ignore them! You buy tickets to a baseball game, but it's raining. Don't go. You're miserable in your relationship, but you've been there for 5 years, and you feel like you owe it to all of that effort to keep on going. You don't. You aren't getting your time or money back, so go ahead and make the decision that will make you happiest in the future. Realizing that sunk costs are so much of the reason you want to go to the game or stay in the relationship will help empower you to make the tough decision to ignore the costs and do what will make you happy.

A fun idea some people brought up was the mindset that "Every Decision I Make Is Right." Instead of worrying about your decisions, you just make them, and trust that you've done the right thing. Just like the fox and the grapes, sometimes the way you think about things is even more important than what actually happened.

The toughest part about making a decision is the period before you actually make it. You stress out, you overthink things, you take ages of pain to come to a conclusion. Just decide! There are enough unknowns out there that neither can really be the best, I promise. My rule of thumb is to take the path that seems to give you the most options down the road - even if you didn't make the "right" decision right now, one of those choices later on is sure to make up for it. So just embrace the fact that there's a lot more going on that you could ever account for, take a deep relaxing breath, and go on making those irrational decisions!

Lending libraries

jen — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:32:52 +0000

One of the things we're most excited about doing in our own space is having a bunch of awesome supplies libraries. They'll be full of useful things you can mess around with and borrow that aren't just a bunch of books.

Getting into a new hobby can cost a lot! You end up buying things that you only use once, or only need a little bit of. Sure, making block prints for a few birthday cards would be awesome, but is it really worth dropping all that money on blocks and ink and lino cutters when you aren't going to use them the other 350 days of the year? Just use our stuff.

And remember that time you decided you were going to learn how to whittle? But then you realized you definitely didn't have a veiner or a carvers mallet, and you didn't even really know if whittling was going to be any fun in the first place. You can borrow our equipment and see if you like it first.

Or let's say you leave Scents & Sensibility determined to start your own fragrance line, but you need to learn all of the essential oils first. Don't drop $600 on a hundred different vials, just check out our library.

And maybe your kitchen isn't very chemistry friendly and it's really getting in the way of the gentleman scientist thing you're going for. We'll have enough beakers and pipettes to keep you covered.

What about when you need to borrow tools? Tool lending libraries have been around forever, but let's have one here! We promise that even though you need that jigsaw today, you probably won't need it tomorrow.

Send us your ideas for other lending libraries right on over at info@brooklynbrainery.com. You can also help us find a place to keep all these whittling tools and perfume vials by donating a few bucks to our Kickstarter campaign.

Semester Kickoff Party Debriefing

soma — Mon, 17 May 2010 11:55:59 +0000

Our Semester Kickoff Party last Saturday was an awesome success! Not only did we ring in the new semester, but we also demolished 55 pounds of crawfish and raised around $500 towards getting our own space. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who came out!

Here are a million pictures of the crawfish boil on Facebook. We were hosted by the ever-gracious LaunchPad, which you should totally stop by if you happen to be in the area. it's a really sweet space with a great backyard.

THINGS WE LEARNED:

NUMBER ONE, there are helpful transplants from Louisiana and Alabama all over the place, so if you ever get stuck on how to tear the tail off of a crawfish just send up a batsignal.

NUMBER TWO, steam burns can make it hard to write blog posts two days later.

NUMBER THREE, everyone wants to teach a class! If you're interested in leading a class about something you're interested in, pop on over to our teacher suggestion page.

NUMBER FOUR, people really like this jambalaya recipe (courtesy The American Table by Ronald Johnson, the most perfect cookbook in the world. Mine is dog-eared and falling apart, but everything that comes out of it is amazing. Best Amazon review: "Ronald Johnson is a God Damned Joy"):

4 onions, chopped
2 T butter
1 green pepper, seeded, chopped
6 green onions, chopped
1 lb learn pork, cut into small cubes
1 cup chopped cooked ham (or ham hocks)
1/2 lb sausage
2 cups rice
3 cups beef stock
pinch of cayenne (many pinches!)
1/2 t chili powder
2 bay leaves
pinch of cloves

Saute the onions until they're golden-brown. Add vegetables + pork and cook for 15 minutes over medium heat, stirring now and again.

Add the ham and the sausage, then the rice. Stir well! Add the stock and the seasonings, cover, turn the heat to low and cook for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Remove the lid and cook 15 minutes to work the water either into the rice or out of the pot.

This recipe is really forgiving, I doubled some parts and tripled some others, so don't be afraid of following the directions too closely! And now, the ever-photogenic crawfish:

A million more pictures on Facebook

NY ジャピオン！

soma — Wed, 12 May 2010 17:10:41 +0000

We made a showing in this week's NY Japion, a Japanese-language weekly I found at a startling number of places around Midtown. If you come across one take a peek in the insert, we're on the first page!

They sent one of their writers to last month's perfume workshop, which was a one-hour rush through our 4-week Scents & Sensibility class. If you want to know more you'll have to check out the article itself. My 日本語 skills have dropped off since ye olden days, so you're on your own for translation duty!

Help us grow!

soma — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:49:16 +0000

We've started a Kickstarter campaign to raise some money to move into our own space.

Head on over to our page there to find out more!

What we're up to

soma — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 14:24:30 +0000

Honestly, a lot is about to happen.

We'll be releasing our May semester course list this week, with not six but with an amazing eight different classes, spanning the gamut from perfume to brain science. Get on the mailing list for first dibs.

Workshops are on the way! Instead of dedicating yourself to something for a full four weeks (it's hard, we know), we're going to start pulling out one day short courses. We'll try to keep them on the free side, too. Again: mailing list!

We're also starting a drive to find interesting people out there who'd enjoy leading classes - if you are interested in absolutely anything or know anyone who is neat in the slightest, go fill out this fun-times form. You don't need to be an expert. You don't need a PhD from a highly esteemed East-coast university. You just need a tiny pinch of passion and everything goes from there.

AND IN ADDITION: ARE YOU INTERESTED IN ANYTHING AT ALL? TELL US WHAT IT IS. We can't have a class about it if we don't know that you want it!

Second semester registration is open!

soma — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:43:43 +0000

Get hyped, 'cause registration is open for our second semester! Each course meets once a week for a month, so there's plenty of time to dig deep into the topic. We've expanded from four courses to six, and we are ready to get our learn on:

The ever-popular Meat is back, since I can't get enough of introducing people to Chinatown beef jerky. If you've ever wanted to cure bacon or wondered what to do with top round, this is the class for you.

Learn about the daily occurrence we call The Weather in Applied Meteorology. Cold and warm fronts, cumulonimbus clouds, and DIY barometers are all on the menu. Clouds'll still look like sheep, but you'll know what their water-vapor hearts conceal.

I just got a backyard, so Introduction to Gardening is going to help me make the most of it. I wonder about things like seedlings and pruning and what puts the magic in Miracle-Gro, and we'll cover that and more. Even if you live in a shoebox, let's grow some green thumbs!

Modern Poetry will sate your poetical academic desires, and letting you know when it's okay to do that snappy thing you've seen in movies about beatniks. Formalism, modernism, minimalism!

There are a million things you can do with paper and we're going to do them all in Paper Arts. We'll bind books, fold origami, make fancy-pants paper from scratch and a ton more!

Beauty School Dropout is a lot about makeup and a little about hair. We'll cover the history, politics and chemistry of cosmetics, along with more fun things like picking and applying makeup. How can a conditioner give your curls bounce or soothe split ends? We'll find out!

crowd control

soma — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:19:01 +0000

Man, classes are filling up like crazy - we only have a few spots left in Looking At Things, grab 'em while we got 'em (and learn to stop talking about art like a third grader)! If you missed your chance, get thee to our mailing list if you want to hear about when we open next semester's courses up for registration.

Waving

jen — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:21:41 +0000

A couple months ago all the cool kids were atwitter with excitement over Google Wave and how, one day, maybe, when everyone else has it too, it’s going to make group collaboration awesome. I have had about one active wave ever, and I don't understand how it works at all, but that's not going to stop us from giving everyone in Brainery classes invites (though I'm sure you all have them already, cool kids that you are) and going wild.

Hopefully, Wave will be an extension of each class—a place to post pictures of your jerky experiment gone horribly wrong, link to some crazy website that sells fiber optic cable, suggest ideas for next week, whatever. If that doesn’t work, we can always use it to reenact scenes from Pulp Fiction.

time out new york!

soma — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:17:36 +0000

Hey hey we're in Time Out New York! We sound alarmingly interesting in it, too.

In other news I got one of the telescope building books for Optical Collusion in the mail yesterday and it is crazy. Did you know you shouldn't look at stars over the tops of houses? Apparently heat rises off of roofs at night and creates distortion in the air which makes the stars flickery and blurrier. You're already struggling enough trying to get your star-light through the whorls and turbulent bits of the atmosphere and you don't need to add anything else for it to fight through. You'd think that if that light traveled millions of light years it wouldn't wimp out at the last moment.

Also: sign up for classes before they fill up!

brby around town

soma — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:54:58 +0000

Oh my, people like us!

It's kind of old news by now, but we were on NYPost.com: Calling all nerds: Brooklyn Brainery launches Jan. The best part is my completely inane, obscenely modifier-ridden "I ... get really into things for a really short period of time a lot."

Brokelyn, everyone's favorite guide to living on the cheap, included us in a write-up about adult education. We're nestled between Babeland classes about pregnancy sex and Brooklyn Kitchen classes about choppin' pigs' heads off. If you're more into reading about pig-head-chopping than watching it happen, I'll go ahead and recommend our class about meat!

It's so cold in the D

jen — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:36:25 +0000

This whole thing will not get built, but if it does, I am leaving the newly shadowed over streets of Brooklyn forever. Say, maybe, for Detroit.

And maybe, if a whole bunch of people who own businesses or make art and are way more creative than I am move there too, then maybe Detroit will rebuild its tax base a bit, and old beautiful houses will eventually get restored, and maybe in thirty years everyone will have new monster development plans to rage against in the Motor City.

And so, to hasten your trip our west, here are a handful of links about Detroit, including this awesome recent article from The Economist, which gives you lots of good facts (population’s now less than ½ of what it was in 1950; avg. house price is 15K) as well as being a lovely portrait of the art currently coming from there.

-Also, a nice thorough piece from Model D about the coming wave of gentrification (but it’s from 2005--I’m too late!)

-Another long article about Detroit and urban farming, from Harper's in 2007. I haven't read it yet but it seems pretty definitive.

-A good, long, old Salon interview with Richard Florida, who long ago wrote about the rise of the creative class and gentrification in cities.

About Detroit specifically: “They got trapped in the organizational age; they thought we really live in a patriarchal, white, corporate society and that the key to success was to strap on your tie, go to work 9 to 5, and behave yourself. There was no room for people with new ideas.” Well, there's plenty of room now!

-From CNN, a nice overview of the D's current situation. Fact: Detroit has more murders than New York this year, but we have 10X as many people here.

cul-de-sacs are kind of dumb

jen — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:05:03 +0000

I have this awesome little book called Pattern Language, which is sort of a 1200 page choose-you-own-adventure about urban planning, architecture, furniture and anything else that takes physical form in your life. The end of each section leads you to about 5 more connected chapters and there are lots of little charming hand-drawn diagrams, very Berkeley in the 70s. (which is a good thing!)

This book rules because it doesn't require my short attention span to stay active for more than 5 minutes at once, they bold all the important things, and they illustrate all the really, really important things, which is kind of like the author giving up straight from the get go and never even once thinking you will read the whole thing.

So this book is full of these great little nuggets of information and I happened to stumble on one today about decentralizing education that seemed kind of pertinent. The general argument is this: destroy centralized educational systems and physically disperse the act of learning throughout the city, to houses, workshops, museums, shops, everywhere. Everyone should be constantly engaged in both learning from those around them to the point where there are 100 home classes for 10,000 people. (The best parts of this book are the ways they assign very specific numbers to everything--it is a pattern book, after all). The shape of education transforms from a pyramid to a grid-like web, with connections being made all over the place.

This last bit, about the web, made me think about this cool tidbit from the Times' Year in Ideas section, about the pretty near banning of cul-de-sacs in Virginia and a bunch of other places around the country, because they're inefficient, cause all kinds of traffic issues, make kids fatter since they can't walk anywhere, and pretty much make life miserable.

And so, if there's one lesson to learn from all this rambling, it's that grids are the way to go, even when they're six grids all patched together that really make no sense and cause people who live in South Brooklyn to be utterly confused every time they venture up the G to Metropolitan, but I guess that's another story.

REGISTRATION IS OOOPEEEEN

soma — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:12:28 +0000

Registration is open open open open oooopeeeen! You can now sign up for classes to your heart's content.

$25 apiece, and if you want to take multiples sign up for one and drop us an email and we can try to cut you a break on the rest.

Let's do an overview:

Scents & Sensibility: I'm teaching this one because F.I.T. wouldn't let me take a class about perfume! And because it's a good excuse to make a bunch of stuff with my ice cream maker in the name of Science.

Visual-Eyes: Looking at Things: Once upon a time Jen went to school for Art History and then graduated and got a job, and now she just wants to talk about buildings that look like ducks (I PROMISE. READ THE COURSE DESCRIPTION.) I am taking this class so I don't sound like an infant when I try to discuss art.

Optical Collusion: Bump and grind some lenses and mirrors! We are going to be putting light into the corner until it bends to our collective will. We'll balance out the sciencetown aspect of it with cool light sculptures involving stuff like electroluminescent panels.

And that's about it! Now please sign up for classes so I can stop telling you to sign up for classes.

dear everyone in my class at F.I.T.

soma — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:25:25 +0000

Dear everyone in my class at F.I.T. who I just preached to (and everyone else, for that matter!),

We need you to take these classes. For serious.

The thing that makes Brooklyn Brainery work is the people in the classes, and what they bring to it. Since we don't have an official bossy teacher, a lot of the class relies on our backgrounds and experiences and own personal knowledge to. Maybe I know about Ethiopian food, and Jen knows about what trees are in Fort Greene park, and there's a billion things you could know that we sure don't. Everyone brings something different, and I'm convinced that you (all and any of you!) know plenty that other people would be interested in.

Aaaaand let's be honest, I'd rather hear your take on Draping or Accessories Drawing than drop a thousand dollars learning the two.

So, everyone! Even if you aren't interested in the classes this semester (although you should all want to take my perfume class), sign up for the mailing list. Really. It's up top. We're going to host at least 4 classes every couple months, and at some point we're going to run across something you want to learn.

Or just tell us you want to teach a class! Let's say you kind of like domesticating falcons, maybe we'll go ahead and have a how-to-turn-dangerous-birds-into-pets class. And someone will know how to sew and we'll all get those wicked gloves!

Brooklyn Brainery will be awesome, but that'll really be thanks to you.

bkskillsharein'

soma — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:10:37 +0000

Back in October we went to the Brooklyn Skillshare and spent a day a-learnin'. For the underinformed, the skillshare was a day-long event broken into 5 1.5-hour-long blocks. For each block you chose between 3 classes. Classes were taught by a variety of teachers, from hobbyists to professionals. And O, the Cost!: a ten-dollar sliding scale donation. If you aren't good at economics, that means it's basically free. A ton of people showed up, with probably a solid thirty to seventy people attending every class.

Now for a completely navel-gazing essay about the good, the bad, and how Brooklyn Brainery is the other half of the cheap Brooklyn education puzzle.

The Skillshare was successful in getting a huge group of people introduced to a lot of varied topics. I didn't know a damn thing about bike maintenance beforehand, but I can now fix wobbly tires on my too-heavy girls' bike with ease. Same thing with silversmithing. It would have taken either a pricy class or a whoooole lot of youtube to cover everything we did in those 90 minutes.

A necessity of cheap classes is that you end up with inexperienced teachers, or reaaaallly nice professionals who don’t mind working for free. The instructors at the Skillshare were reasonably well put-together, especially the one presenting bike maintenance (he fielded questions like a champ). A downside to pulling your instructors from hobbyists is that they aren't necessarily all that skilled in their field, and you end up with a situation where members of the audience might know more than the presenter. The top-down teaching method that lectures necessarily use can be tough in a less-experienced-instructor situation; misinformation or incomplete understanding is easily transmitted to the students because there's no vehicle for communication or second-guessing (too much audience participation can really, really kill an otherwise good lecture).

There really isn't any way to combat that outside of having small classes, which is what we're doing at the Brainery. You go into classes at BrBy knowing that the instructor doesn't know a damn thing, so everything is open to questioning and exploration. Don't take this as a shortcoming of the Skillshare, though! It's just how things have to be - you can't teach anything to six dozen people without the teacher having a degree of authority (which, in the case of the Skillshare, they actually deserve).

Hour and a half long lectures, which is a great great length for a short introduction, really don't let you get too deep into a subject. Add in large classes (which generally prevent much hands-on work, though the knitting class seemed to handle the multitudes unexpectedly well) and you're really only going to skim the surface. That's why our classes are 4 weeks long - we want to take the interest something like the Skillshare generates and make it bear some sort of fruit. I'll let you know when I figure out a pun about growing seasons.

Something I really enjoyed about the Skillshare was how mobile you were allowed to be - you weren't shut up in a classroom and restricted to one class for a whole block. When I ended up in a lecture that wasn’t really for me, I could just run off to another one! Brooklyn Brainery definitely doesn't have that - our draconian policies require you to sign up and pay for specific classes. We do this to help raise funds but also to make sure we have a steady group that can go through the topic together. Accumulating knowledge and familiarity over a few class meetings will go a long way in cultivating ownership over a topic. Also! we're probably old fogeys who love tradition and are going to make you say the Pledge of Allegiance before every class at least twice.

If you're reading this and haven't signed up for our mailing list yet, you're breaking my heart into a hundred thousand pieces. You'd also be breaking your own if you knew what you were missing! The sign-up form is in the ATTENTION-GRABBING yellow box up at the top of every page, and filling it out lets you get incredibly, amazingly cool emails from us about classes and registration and the like, which is the opposite of the spam you're used to. So please do. Oh and follow @bkbrains, too.

On the Origin of Brainery

jen — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:07:51 +0000

Had you any idea that brainery is a real word?!

Neither did I, and actually, I'm still not sure. It's here, but not in the dictionary, and the Scrabble dictionary is down so I can't tell you if it's legal on the big board, but I'm gonna guess no. (Have you ever read that book, Word Freak? Highly recommended.)

Across the internet, there are 66,700 search results for "brainery" but the only one that seems remotely interesting is The General George Squier Brainery, a conference named after the founder of Muzak (they're a company?). They even had a performance by The Constellations, a band that once recorded a song with Asher Roth, of all people. I could not have made any of that up if I had tried.

In case the above wasn't educational enough for you, here's a couple of random, entirely unrelated facts I've been telling everyone lately:

Bangladesh is the world's 7th most populous country!

Phoenix is the 5th largest city in the US!

If your friends are anything like mine, they will only be mildly impressed by these facts, but it's a start.

welcome to the land of "things are working"

soma — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:49:23 +0000

Our web site is up! That means we're one step closer to us teaching you and you teaching us and you (sing.) teaching you (pl.) and it will all just be very excellent together.

Pretty much Jen and I spend a horrifying amount of time going to lectures and taking classes. Whether it's a talk on Papua New Guinea Secret Science Club, metalworking at 3rd Ward, something about embalming at Observatory, we've got a lot of learning going on. But I'll be damned if everything we do isn't either short or expensive. Lectures are great, but sometimes you want a little more of an in-depth look at something. And as for the latter, I'm admirably cheap.

Enter Brooklyn Brainery! Cheap, weekly classes of all stripes. How do we do it? First, another anecdote!

I've been taking some cobbling classes at FIT and decided I wanted to learn a bit about perfumes. But, oh burn!, not being a Cosmetics & Fragrances graduate student kept me out of every single slightly awesome class. Cue despair, and a lot of my mumbling and grumbling along the lines of "I could do all of this myself!"

And so we're going to.

Take a bunch of people who want to learn the same thing. Find some materials they can use to teach themselves. Give them instructors whose job is not to teach, but facilitate. These people will learn.

If you (over there) have read every wikipedia page related to steam disillation and you (right here) have read The Secret of Scent and someone over there actually wears perfume we've got a pretty good start to a collaborative learning experience. Everyone brings something different to the table, even if it's just curiosity. Add in someone whose job it is to keep us on task (that's me!) and you are going to learn the hell out of some scents.

So, that's us! If I've gotten you sufficiently psyched you can check out the course offerings, or if you'd like to read a little more about us you can check out the about us page.