2015-11-22

Notes.

The Public Radio has a VERY limited number of units for sale for holiday delivery. If you missed our Kickstarter campaign (or are looking for a great $40 gift) head over to our webstore ASAP!

Pathfinding.

• I wrote a short essay on why I want to build a shared additive manufacturing research & development center, and why I think NYC is the place to do it.
• San Francisco banned plastic water bottles.
• A cool method of remeshing quad meshes by sketching directly on them.
• Silver Lake, a PE firm, is investing $100M in SolarCity as they focus on cash flow - and await the expiration of those federal solar tax credits.
• Google/Alphabet's robotics division still isn't much more than the sum of its parts, and with Andy Rubin now off running Playground Capital, they're without a real leader too (thanks, Nick).

Building.

• Two links from Dan:
  1) These "top slogans" from Shenzhen are incredible. My favorites: "Empty Talk Endangers the Nation" and "Practical Work Brings Prosperity." Agreed!
  2) Libyan Wings keeps buying planes, but their home airport (Tripoli) has been destroyed and basically no other countries will recognize them.
• Bosch made a robot that punches weeds, which is apparently a pretty effective way of killing them. Pretty cool.
• New Balance, 3D Systems and Nervous System announced what they say will be a production shoe with 3D printed SLS midsoles.
• A good piece in Develop3D about Form Labs.
• Additive Industries released a bunch of details on their new metal AM machine, which among other things integrates a few additional (but necessary) processes that are usually done by other equipment.

Logistics.

• A startup called Starship Technologies is working on last mile delivery robots that are basically little self driving shopping carts.

Evaluation.

• A long (and informative to me) Twitter conversation I had with Ryan Schmidt (of MeshMixer) about optimization. See also the No Free Lunch Theorem, and my own little diatribe on how "the purpose of optimization should be to help me, as a product manager, design optimal *products* - not to chase some Platonic ideal."
• A very good history of the spline, and the roles that curved lines and surfaces have played in manufacturing, architecture, and animation. Highly recommended, especially if you're interested in design and how CAD works. Related, a link I shared about a year ago: the Bezier Game.
• A professor of computer science says he has created a new way of tackling the graph isomorphism problem. This problem is essentially that as the size of two networks (graphs) grows, it gets *way* harder to tell whether they actually describe the same thing.
• I really like this idea: you can get a decent idea of how reproducible a study will be if you just ask people to bet on it.

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

• On Calvin and Hobbes and loneliness.

And.

Me on 3D scanning and reverse engineering.