2016-01-04

Notes.

It's official: I'm joining nTopology full time, and couldn't be more excited about it. Here's my full announcement; the much abbreviated story is:

1. 3D printed lattice structures offer big engineering & manufacturing advantages over solid forms, and designing them requires a mix of hands-on engineering control and simulation based modeling.
2. Traditional CAD lacks the technical basis, user interface, and philosophical underpinnings required to design & optimize 3D lattice structures. nTopology's software, on the other hand, is built specifically for that purpose.
3. nTopology (the company) is awesome, and I *really* love both their attitude and their approach towards manufacturing.

Being a subscriber to The Prepared, you can be sure that I'll write more about this in the coming months. I'm looking forward to it :)

Pathfinding.

• So Amazon imposed some safety & legal requirements on hoverboards this month, and they've had a huge (negative) impact on the thousands of manufacturers in the Pearl River Delta who've been producing them for, like, the past three months.
• Google is apparently partnering with Ford to build their autonomous cars.
• The city of Milan banned cars during daytime hours last week.

Building.

• A surprisingly compelling description of the cut glass process and history of the American Brilliant cut glass industry.
• Via Jordan, a home machining video with some remarkable production values. The music is terrible, but the stop motion video is really effective.
• Via Tom, a Japanese TV show in which rocket engineers compete with the staff of a conventional precision machine shop to see who can make a better spinning top.

Logistics.

• A really great article on the Flexport blog about those 767s that Amazon is apparently leasing. Ryan points out that while UPS and FedEx make most of their money off of international long haul shipping, Amazon will have a really hard time breaking into that market - because it means that they'd be able to see the freight manifests of their competitors.
• After decades of low ridership, the NYC subway system is now carrying as many daily passengers as it did in the 50s. But as this article goes in a lot of detail to explain, it does so with significantly fewer cars then it had in the past.

Evaluation.

• This newsletter is now two years old. Here's my retrospective.
• DARPA shut down the BigDog robot, made originally by Boston Dynamics/Google/Alphabet.
• A good piece in The New Inquiry about how to watch Star Wars.

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

• Via Jonas, an even better plastics identification chart than the one I posted last week.
• An article about Matt's (nTopology developer) thesis on modified FDM printing.

And.

New crew.