2018-08-06

Planning & Strategy.

• A good overview of the joint development manufacturing model. "Unlike the ODM or OEM model (where you are generally white-labeling an existing product or assembling a commodity product from existing blocks), or the CM model (where you’ve done all the design work in house, and are now tapping a third party to help manufacture it), the JDM model is about collaboration from start to finish."
• More influential women in additive manufacturing who you should know.
• The UK Department of Transport is considering a subsidy grant for people who purchase e-cargobikes.
• "The paradox of good government: the best stuff works well and is thus unnoticeable (and therefore easy to sell off)."

Making & Manufacturing.

• Dot peen engraving is a process in which a carbide or diamond stylus is hammered into a workpiece so that a logo or characters are marked in it.
• An interview with the CEO of JITX, a startup using "artificial intelligence" for PCB design optimization.
• Via Morgan, a reminder that This American Life's piece on NUMMI is a great intro to lean & mass production, re: my endorsement of The Machine that Changed the World.
• A tour of Proto Labs' printing facility.
• The rise of the legal marijuana industry is resulting in a whole new wave of tamper-proof packaging.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• Vice's "State of Repair" video collection. I've linked to a few of these in the newsletter previously; the whole series looks great.
• Scrap steel and concrete from the Tappan Zee Bridge, which spans the Hudson River at a famously wide crossing point, will be repurposed in artificial reefs around Long Island.

Distribution & Logistics.

• The NYTimes on a plan to use Lake Mead + Hoover Dam in a new pumped-storage project. Related, PG&E is looking at replacing three natural gas peaker plants with Li-ion batteries, and earlier this year Arizona Public Service signed a 15-year contract for a FirstSolar solar-plus-batteries proposal that beat out natural gas options head-to-head.
• Scenes from the Yiwu wholesale markets.
• An update on Saildrone, the company deploying autonomous sailboats around the Pacific to analyze meteorological and ecological conditions.

Inspection, Testing & Analysis.

• On "regulated" gold coinage in the early US: In the 1700s, all gold coins in circulation in the US were made abroad. Since gold is valued by weight and there were multiple different gold currencies floating around the colonies - each with their own standard sizes - there developed a system of "regulation," which aimed to produce some consistency and predictability in the coinage that was effectively being used as US currency. Metalsmiths would test each coin for purity, then weigh it and either clip it (remove material) or plug it (add material) until it was the proper size for use in the US. Once a coin had been regulated, the metalsmith would mark it with their known silversmith mark - the same impression that they'd use on the silverware they crafted.
• The size of the Pacific bluefin tuna population is about 3.3% of its unfished level.
• In each lunar landing, dust is blown up and out at speeds from .4 to 3 km/s - well over the lunar escape velocity. "That means a dust ring may have been blown completely off the Moon into solar orbit with each Moon landing." This thread is 40 tweets long, and the whole thing pays off really well.
• A very cool Disney Research project on the characterization of structured surface materials (aka surface lattices.)
• Graeme Obree finally takes his infamous, radical bikes into the wind tunnel.

Tangents.

• On the short but successful history of chocolate in China.
• People simply don't use their formal living & dining rooms.

The logistics of Antarctica.