That aesthetic of the Star Wars universe: the do-it-yourself, hotrod ethic that George Lucas exported from his childhood, is exactly the same kind of soul behind what we do and build for the show. It may not look pretty, but it gets the job done.

I just had one of those "what the hell are we doing" moments.

I'm not gonna shoot anyone with the pellet gun... Not unless I have to!

That was cool and that sucked all at the same time.

Isn't television glamourous?

Jamie doesn't like to do anything hastily, and I like to do everything incredibly hastily. So therein you have the dichotomy of our patterns.

This is the point in the show where we say, "Oh, what else do we have in the van that's flammable?"

Failure is always an option.

Am I about to feel really, really stupid?

The only thing that differentiates you and me from a couple of fourteen year old pyromaniacs is balistic glass!

Stand back! I gotta get some rocket fuel out of the fridge!

Firemen have the coolest toys ever!

That's the show. it's like 5 minutes of science and then 10 minutes of me hurting myself.

There is no dignity in television.

My advice is keep your lips away from the spinning things.

In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a "failed experiment." Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.

Bigger is always better.

My dignity and good television - they'll never meet.

I have some ideas on how to fix that. They're not very good ideas, but at least they're ideas!

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

That aesthetic of the Star Wars universe: the do-it-yourself, hotrod ethic that George Lucas exported from his childhood, is exactly the same kind of soul behind what we do and build for the show. It may not look pretty, but it gets the job done.

Jamie's gonna go take a break now, and i am going to continue the on-going process of making a fool of myself and go ahead and try it myself.

Remember kids, I have life insurance.

I would have to say that looked like it hurt.

I am now standing in a mixture of cooling fluid, gasoline, and cola.

The best-case scenario is that the glass shatters in my face! How do you think that makes me feel?

Let's get on our knees and pray. I don't know to whom. Is there a patron saint of ballistics gel?

We're not leaving here without Buster, man. Leave no crash-test dummy behind!

That was excellent! I mean, it didn't do anything, but it looked really cool!

Let's blow some stuff up.

I wouldn't say jamie is an evil genius. I'm not sure he's evil and I'm not sure he's a genius.

Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell, and also making them for myself, obtaining them, appreciating them and diving into them.

Audiences of critical thinkers are my favorite kinds of audiences. There are jokes I tell in the show that don't get laughs unless I am in front of an audience of critical thinkers. Put me in front of a crowd of science teachers or astronauts! The guileless aren't our audience - it's the critical thinkers we love.

Being a geek is all about learning the inventories of things.

Deadlines refine the mind. They remove variables like exotic materials and processes that take too long. The closer the deadline, the more likely you'll start thinking waaay outside the box.

Growing up in New York, I was sort of shocked when I realized that my children are Californians. They are 14 years old, and I explain to them frequently that they will never realize the glory of a snow day. You wake up and the world says, 'Oops, it's too much fun to go to school, you've got to stay home and deal with the snow!'

I go home at the end of the day and I rarely talk about what I did that day. So my wife's experience is just like that of anybody else whose husband goes away to a blue collar job and comes home bruised and dirty and often proud of the work that they're doing.

I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my 'Creative Projects' folder - it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. Any time I have an Internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos.

I just had one of those 'what the hell are we doing' moments.

I learned at an early age that I could make the things that I wanted. That's a very powerful thing to realize as a kid. LEGOs were a key part of that.

I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody's going to take care of you. That you have to do the heavy lifting while you're here. And when you don't, well, you suffer the consequences.

I'm actually the fourth generation in my family to have no practical use for the church, or God, or religion. My children continue this trend.

I'm not a sculptor; I'm a hard-edged model maker. You give me a drawing, you give me a prop to replicate, you give me a crane, scaffolding, parts from 'Star Wars' - especially parts from 'Star Wars' - I can do this stuff all day long. It's exactly how I made my living for 15 years.

I've always thought something that makes you laugh, it makes you laugh because there's a little bit of truth to it.

I've learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving.

In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a 'failed experiment.' Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.

It's sort of a mental attitude about critical thinking and curiosity. It's about mindset of looking at the world in a playful and curious and creative way.

New York State is giant and has some of the most beautiful landscape on the Eastern seaboard. There is so much history in New York State, from the Erie Canal to the Catskills, the birth of American stand-up comedy.

Of course, I love tools. I also love arranging them, to the point where I came up with a name for my organizing metric: first-order retrievability.