2016-03-27

Notes.

I'm in the UK this week, visiting companies working in metal 3D printing and speaking at Develop3D Live. If you'll be there, say tally ho! ;)

Pathfinding.

• Three things related to Andy Grove's passing:
  First: Ben Thompson's retrospective on the remarkable transformations that Intel went through during Grove's tenure.
  Second: Grove's 2010 essay on how the US needs both experimentation (startups) *and* scale (manufacturing).
  Third: Intel is giving up on their famous tick-tock product development cycle and moving towards a three step product development process.
• Mongolia's economy is largely based on mining, and their biggest customer by far is China. So as China's manufacturing sector has slowed, Mongolia has been *seriously* hurt.
• A really excellent piece by Zach Holman on firing, writ large.

Building.

• Via Xavier and @MachinePix: linear friction welding wood. Related, a pretty good video showing friction stir welding of metal.
• Via Jay, a time lapse video of a Royal Caribbean Cruise ship being built.
• nVIDIA is making a GPU with 24GB of RAM for autonomous cars.
• Bunnie Huang's awesome teardown of a Form2.
• My first lattice design bike part updates in a while.

Logistics.

• Clearpath Robotics announced a smallish warehouse robot to move individual packages around (you'll recall they make a big one that can lift fully loaded pallets).
• Why the signs in Penn Station are so confusing: Lack of conceptual integrity (via Lianna).
• 7 crazily heavy things that ship for free on Amazon. Note: I bought an inspection plate on Amazon recently, and it cost almost exactly the same as the total cost (part plus shipping) from other suppliers.
• Alibaba's Cianiao logistics arm is reportedly worth $7.7B.

Evaluation.

• Body Labs acquired some patents related to analyzing human forms.
• Via Kane, a history of the Swiss Army knife.
• The linguistics of jawn.
• I'm not sure why, but I went back and read my own retrospective on my bike framebuilding career this week, and again felt glad that I wrote it (and lived through the experience of having to rethink my own decisions) in the first place.

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

• Apparently a company called Polymagnets is working on controlling magnetic orientation & power to a really fine degree (via Josh).
• How Nike lost Steph Curry to Under Armour.
• "New York banana mogul convicted of embezzling retirement funds."

And.

Apple's single-purpose iPhone disassembly robot.