2015-11-15

Notes.

Thinking about rebranding this thing. As you probably *don't* know, its name comes from the adage that "fortune favors the prepared," which is descriptive and meaningful to me but pretty useless to anyone else. Also I have reason to believe (thanks, Andy) that the date I've been putting in the subject line results in bad spam filter performance. Anyway, if anyone has thoughts on what it should be called, holler at me.

Also: I just want to say how charmed I am when you all click on a link about how I'm "working with triangles" (top clicked link last week, by a factor of almost two) or whatever - it's seriously heartwarming that you're all interested.

Pathfinding.

• A "mysterious" electric car company called Faraday Future soft launched by saying that they were building a $1B manufacturing facility, but they didn't disclose a CEO or any details on how they got $1B. Some have speculated that it's a front for Apple's efforts, but there's reason to think it's a Chinese company called LeTV.

Building.

• On the recommendation of Daniel (who, I should mention, is blogging about the crazy computer vision & 3D data capturing work he's doing), I'm reading The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner's book about Bell Labs. So far it's pretty good.
• So after my "working with triangles" thing, I've been going deeper into mesh geometries and through twitter I came across these lecture notes from a Stanford "Geometry Processing Algorithms" class that gives a good overview of how STL/OBJ remeshing works. It's obscure and really only useful if you're thinking a lot about improving the printability of 3D lattice structures, but useful if you're thinking about design workflows for additive manufacturing.
• GE says they adapted a steam turbine design in such a way that allows desalination at 20% lower cost than other methods.

Logistics.

• Jordan sends along this video of a bicycle powered rope pump, which is really cool.

Evaluation.

• In defense of 8th Ave and 35th St.
• uBeam is full of shit. This is a great example of what I call "jetpacks" - hyped up technologies that for a bunch of reasons (some technical, some practical) just aren't going to happen anytime soon.
• Alibaba sold a mind boggling amount of stuff on Singles Day, and a lot of the business came in on mobile instead of desktop.
• I would like to see a copy of Notes on Construction of the Empire State Building (explanation).

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

• Just in case anyone wants to buy me a fancy gift, they should check out this briefcase. Classy.
• Gabe was telling me recently about how the Texas power grid is totally independent, and I was like "that's interesting" and didn't really think more about it. But this story about how some Texas utilities are literally giving away power at night (they've got lots of wind generation and presumably it's hard to get the power onto the greater US grids) kind of hammers that home. It's worth checking out a map too.

And.

Geoff Manaugh on what LIDAR sees.