mark mathias has arranged some for the westport library.they're really wonderful festivals of all sorts of tinkering and electronics in art and music. another thing going on these days are these so-called hacker spaces are tinkering, workspaces where you essentially go when and there's all sorts of high-tech equipment you can play around with. it tries to address the problem that some people have mentioned, which is in the old days when tinkering wasn't so high-tech, most people had a workshop in their basement and it has the tools they needed to do anything. today, a lot of people can't afford the more high-tech names that might be needed to do different kinds of tinkering, but you can certainly go visit one of these tech shops for a day or however long you need and try out some of the equipment. hackers are obviously something that i've come up a lot in contemporary culture. the one i focus on in my book is a young guy named george chauncey famously roped into an iphone in a few years later into a sony playstation and in particular tried