2017-04-24

Notes.
My weekly routine has taken an almost amusing turn of character recently. I'm daddy daycare two days a week, something that pushes me to be present in a way that I often, admittedly, am not. It also juxtaposes aspects of my life in interesting ways: Monday I babysit, Tuesday I spend the day brainstorming how the American Society of Mechanical Engineers can address issues in additive manufacturing (my thoughts on this process here) with a panel of industry experts.

It also shifts some pretty obscure engineering work out to the weekend: Just this evening, I finally enabled geometric nonlinearity (which increases the complexity of the analysis by tracking deformation and updating the stiffness matrix of the part) in the lattice beam model that I'm working on in Abaqus/Tosca. Exciting :)

Separately, posting this here again: I'm on the hunt for ~500SF of light industrial space in NYC. My requirements are 1) has good shipping/receiving access, and 2) is friendly. It would only be used for assembly & fulfillment, and would only be used by friendly people (e.g. me)! Holler!

Planning & Strategy.

• A good, long piece on Kickstarter's decision to become a Public Benefit Corporation.
• Bose, whose wireless headphones I myself recommended last holiday season, has apparently been collecting users' listening data through their "Bose Connect" app.
• Juicero, a company who's raised enough almost as much money as the National Endowment for the Arts' annual budget, says that its product is "critical to delivering a consistent and safe food product" even though a) you can squeeze its packs with your hands and get very similar results, and b) cold-press juice is incredibly wasteful and not particularly healthy to boot.
• Bill de Blasio admitted that the BQX trolley might not actually happen.

Making & Manufacturing.

• A rather large tunnel was just completed under Washington DC; it'll be used for stormwater & sewer overflow.
• Type A Machines on their decision to use profiled, rather than round, linear rail on their printers.
• Kickstarter Design & Tech's call for projects - including, happily, manufacturing tools.
• More on Pegatron's Shanghai operation - the same factory that the NYU student worked at from last week - including photos. Apparently that facility has a history of "excessive overtime."

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• On the sham that is Apple's environmental sustainability aspiration: "While its two Liam "recycling robots" look cool in an ad, they're only capable of disassembling a total of 2.4 million phones per year; Apple sold 215.3 million iPhones in 2016." And, of course, "Apple does indeed have so-called "must shred" agreements with recyclers that bar them from salvaging any e-waste" regardless of who originally manufactured the products they recycle. Tangentially, one of Apple's three recycling partners is Sims Metal Management, whose NYC facility I visited with NYIO a few years back.

Distribution & Logistics.

• An interesting piece on trends in the air cargo industry. Of note: "Inanimate air cargo mostly rides in the same planes as the live sort; when rising passenger demand encouraged airlines to buy more planes, the additional cargo capacity flooded the industry, causing air-freight prices to slide."
• A rather nerdy video on the factors that affect Amazon's ability to receive FBA inventory.
• An essay on the Uline catalog, and on looking at industry from the outside.

Inspection & Testing.

• The Metallic Materials Properties Development Standardization, or MMPDS, is a handbook maintained by the US Air Force containing "statistically based design allowables for metallic materials and fastened joints used in the design of aerospace vehicle structures."
• Some pretty good disassembly + knolling porn.

Tangents.

• I'm reading Joseph O'Neill's The Dog, a novel.
• A good essay about NYC's new Fearless Girl sculpture and its rather troubled relationship with Arturo Di Modica, the artist who created the Charging Bull sculpture that she stands in front of.

Thanks as always to our recurring donors for supporting The Prepared. Credit also to Reilly and Jordan for sending links.
NASA JPL's photoset of Voyager's Golden Record being manufactured