2015-05-25

Notes.

With the help of an awesome group of NYC friends, Zach and I built 1100 mechanical assemblies for The Public Radio this weekend. Which is crazy for like ten reasons, but there you go.

I spent most of last week doing 3D printing stuff in California, which was awesome. There's so much stuff happening! And I get to be a part of it. Pretty cool.

Pathfinding.

• The new Malcolm Gladwell piece on engineers and the Ford Pinto.
• Patagonia's anti-growth strategy. Patagonia continues to be one of the most fascinating companies in the world. You know they're a B Corp, right?
• Keiretsu are similar to the now-extinct zaibatsu (heavily diversified Japanese industrial conglomerates), except they still exist.

Building.

• A pretty good overview of how nickel is used in aerospace. Nickel alloys are *really* weird.
• John Deere is doing weird IP stuff with their tractors, and not in a good way.
• Shenzhen's stock market is insane.
• Three very good articles (one, two, three) on domestic and grid-scale battery storage (e.g. Tesla's Powerwall), and how huge of an impact it's poised to have. You should read at least one of these articles if you're at all interested in the future of energy management.

Logistics.

• One way Amazon is dealing with last-mile issues in NYC: encouraging delivery people to ride the subway.
• More details on Freightliner's autonomous semi. Self-driving trucks will be *so* big.
• The NYTimes infographic on how much you (assuming you live in the US) are contributing to the California drought.

Evaluation.

• Zach wrote about the level of production that we're going through on The Public Radio, and how the quantity feels a bit awkward. I feel 100% of what he expresses here, though I do disagree with one of his finer points: despite the fact that it's been a *lot* of work recently, I'd actually say that it's pretty close to what I was expecting, i.e. a fucking lot of work.
• Will Leitch, founder of Deadspin, on Bill Simmons' impact on ESPN (in the wake of the announcement that he'll no longer appear there).

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

• This week I played with my uncle's HP-01, a calculator watch from the 70s.
• Lenna is the name of a photograph (originally from Playboy) that's commonly used as an example for image processing.
• It's probably worth knowing (for me, at least) what a combined cycle engine is.

And.

Gratuitous photos of people building a thing I helped design.