2014-11-07

Notes.

The New York Infrastructure Observatory's notes from our Amazon Distribution Facility tour are up. Check them out, and give a holler if you want to come on our next trip - I *think* it'll be a municipal recycling facility in NYC. Very fun.

Also I built my bed, and it came out well. It was a fun exercise in lightweight outsourced fabrication.

Pathing.

• A long and very good profile of gluten (and the flawed science behind non celiac gluten sensitivity) in the New Yorker.
• "Flat" organizational structures don't necessarily have the effects you'd expect (or want).
• OkCupid's data on the lies people tell on their dating profiles is really interesting.

Building.

• Michael Horodniceanu, President of Capital Construction for the MTA, has basically the most interesting public service job in New York.
• Mazak, the tooling manufacturer, is building a hybrid CNC/metal 3D printer.
• A couple slow motion videos of indexable & HSS tools cutting aluminum.
• A good overview of the Shenzhen hardware ecosystem.
• In 2011, I was building up a prototyping shop for my employer and purchased a Hardinge DV-59 turret lathe. It was a pain to set up but once you did, you could turn yourself basically into a human robot, quickly banging out batches of dozens of parts. There aren't a ton of good videos of manual turret lathes on the internet, but this one is pretty fun.

Logistics.

• Why Waze is so popular in Costa Rica.
• BitTorrent Sync looks *fast.*
• Korean may be splitting into two mutually unintelligible languages.

Reflecting.

• An interesting discussion of what it means for a product to be "made in" a particular country.
• An explainer on the laser headlights (which are cool, but aren't available in the US) in BMW's i8 .
• The history of Wikipedia, excerpted from Walter Isaacson's new book.
• The history of Flying Pigeon, the ubiquitous Chinese bike company, and the future of cycling in China.

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

• A pretty fun takedown of birds.
• There are about 2 million rats in New York City.
• Annabelle Selldorf, the architect who designed (among other things) David Zwirner's Chelsea gallery, also built Sims Municipal Recycling's Sunset Park facility.

And.

Lathes, man. Lathes.