2016-06-13

Notes.

This past Friday I had the pleasure of spending a day at GE's Niskayuna Global Research Center, talking with some of the brightest and hardest working people in additive manufacturing about New York's AM ecosystem. Earlier in the week, I saw Fred Wilson and Michael Bloomberg talk about the business climate in NYC, and how "if you want to build a company that serves the world, you need to locate it where the world is." More of my thoughts on this here.

Wayfinding & Strategy.

• Larry Page is apparently *really* into flying cars.
• The Government of Estonia maintains an open source repository of the server-side software that runs their internet based election system.
• How manufacturers (namely GE) are recruiting millennials.

Making & Manufacturing.

• A good mini-documentary on Shenzhen.
• Flat lenses made of titanium dioxide (which you'll recall is used heavily to make white pigments).
• I started a Google Map of industrial stuff (factories, research centers, corporate headquarters, etc). If you know of a place I should add (bonus points if they offer tours) let me know!

Distribution & Logistics.

• A pretty clever alternative to the partial cloverleaf highway interchange: diverging diamonds.
• It's looking more and more likely that 14th St. will be shut down to cars while the L is being overhauled.
• An in depth comparison between Google and Apple Maps.
• An improved system for shipping live lobsters to Europe.

Inspection & Testing.

• The LISA - a planned space based gravitational telescope - is pretty wild. It'll basically be a chamber, falling through orbit, that's constantly trying to make sure that two test masses floating inside of it don't bump into any of its walls.
• In praise of the developments that Donald Trump's father built in outer Brooklyn: "In a city that seems to build only for the rich now, we would do well to create a fraction of the affordable housing churned out by profit-hungry speculative builders (like the elder Trump) of the 1920s and 1930s."
• Why cloud rendering never really became a thing.
• Karl Jansky was a scientist at Bell Labs and one of the founding fathers of radio astronomy. It's fun that the difference between something coming from the sun and something coming from the Milky Way is four minutes per day.

Tangents.

• I'm reading But What if We're Wrong, Chuck Klosterman's new book.
• Why it will be hard (from a business perspective) for Apple to really encrypt our data.
• Ben Thompson on the future of podcasting and the Midroll/Stitcher colossus.

Credit to Tarik and Andre for sending links this week. If you see something, send something :)

And.

Alastair Philip Wiper tours the factory that makes Harry's razorblades.