2014-09-12

Notes.

None, really. Besides what's below, I'm thinking mostly of bikes, beds, and blowout preventers.

Pathing.

• Zaha Hadid sued the New York Review of Books, displaying a horrible attitude about the safety of construction workers on her projects.
• A strong argument (from 3M and HBR) against using bullet points. Your choice: paywall or free.
• A blood chit is basically a note from the government asking people who find military pilots to help them home.
• If you live in the developed world, there's basically no reason for you to take vitamins.

Building.

• Apple's sapphire production process creates wafers just 46 nanometers thick by blasting them with hydrogen ions at 20,000 km/s, and then heating them in an oven until the ions bubble and shear off a thin slice.
• Satellites vs. high-altitude pseudo-satellites (HAPS).
• Google's still working with D-Wave, but they're also developing their own quantum computer.
• Remember that new Dyson robot vacuum? They spent 16 years developing it.
• Philips is launching a pair of headphones that use the lightning port.
• The ozone layer seems to be coming back.

Logistics.

• The economics of airline cancellations: they're basically *never* in the airline's interest.
• US Spy Satellites Used to Drop Photos in ‘Film Buckets’ from Space for Airplanes to Catch in Mid-Air.
• Starbucks' mobile app is shockingly successful, accounting for 15% of their sales.
• The psycholinguistics of metaphor.
• Every day in Mumbai, ~200,000 home cooked lunches are delivered to office buildings by dabbawalas. The logistics are really amazing.
• Alibaba is delivering fresh oysters thousands of miles across China.

Reflecting.

• Myers-Briggs is bullshit.
• On happiness levels through history: "...it is clear that the immense rise in human power has not been matched by an equal rise in human happiness. We are a thousand times more powerful than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but not even the most optimistic Whig can believe that we are a thousand times happier."
• The Four Pests Campaign is one of the most tragically misguided steps taken by Mao during the Great Leap Forward. Chinese citizens undertook an enormous effort to eradicate sparrows, not realizing that they were key to keeping locusts at bay. The effects contributed to the Great Chinese Famine, killing at least 20 million people.
• Why Roger Goodell should be fired for his (in)actions in the Ray Rice domestic abuse case.
• Mike Monteiro sends feisty tweets to brands who try to co-opt 9/11 remembrance.
• Women make less money than men, but mothers make *way* less than fathers.

Stuff that doesn't fit into my dumb/arbitrary categories.

• The Cobra effect occurs when at attempted solution to a problem actually makes the problem worse.
• Kennedy Fried Chicken - the shady looking joints found in inner city neighborhoods across the Northeast - is actually pretty interesting.
• A good primer on how to go about buying your first (adult) bike.
• Ikea's new bookbook.

And.

Wikipedia entry edits by county, adjusted for population.