2015-04-12

Notes.

Some week. I visited a container shipping port, a wastewater treatment plant, and Quirky's live product eval. I went to 30 Rock for Undercurrent and to the Hearst Building for The Public Radio. I got photos of my new 3D printed titanium bike part from Layerwise, and spent most of yesterday setting up The Public Radio's highly coordinated tuning & assembly procedure. Etc.

During all of this, I've been reading a long interview with Bill Watterson (the author of Calvin and Hobbes) from the new book about his work. This excerpt struck me, and I relate to it a lot.

Pathfinding.

• People are strangely motivated by uncertainty.
• 3DSystems acquired Easyway, a Chinese 3D printing service bureau.
• Alibaba signed a big digital distribution deal with BMG, the music holding company.
• Bunnie Huang argues (convincingly, I feel) that a slowdown in Moore's law will spur innovation in open-source and small teams.
• JD.com, the Chinese internet giant, is launching an equity crowdfunding platform.
• Andy Rubin, who built Android, started Playground Global with investment from Google, HP, Hon Hai Precision (Foxconn), Tencent, and Seagate. His business model: help hardware companies out in exchange for an equity stake in their company.

Building.

• Chris Denney, the CTO of The Public Radio's printed circuit board assembly house, wrote up a long blog post describing the Mycronic My600 jet printer solder paste dispensing machine. This thing is really cool - it places tiny little dots of solder at arbitrary places around a printed circuit board, eliminating the need for solder stencils and making more complex soldering processes (component-on-component, etc) possible.
• Pratt & Whitney is putting the first 3D printed metal parts on a production airplane. I'm told it's something like 26 parts in total, made through both DMLS and EBM, but the details are hard to find.
• Intaglio printing is the opposite of relief printing - and is also how US dollar bills are made.

Logistics.

• A pretty good description of the global container shipping industry, with photos.
• Wet wipes have gotten really popular with adults, and they're totally screwing up NYC's waste water treatment operations.
• A thorough list of startups that are working in logistics.
• BitTorrent launched their torrent-based web browser. It's Windows only :/
• An analysis of (and proposal for how to fix) the fact that there are way fewer cabs available at rush hour in NYC.

Evaluation.

• A pretty thoughtful piece on doing drugs (MDMA) as an adult.
• A history of American usage of various spices & flavorings. Turmeric has gotten *way* more popular over the past few years.
• Millennials are significantly less urban than you might think.

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

• When no means yes. <- This is about linguistics, not rape.

And.

BLDG BLOG's recap of our GCT Bayonne trip.