2021-02-01

Notes, 2021-02-01.

It's a snow day in NYC - a messy time, but one in which stuff more or less still happens. Let's get to it.

-Spencer Wright

The most clicked link from last week's issue (~14% of opens) was a video of cranes lifting cranes lifting cranes.

Planning & Strategy.

• The Bloodhound SSC/LSR was a British project to set a new supersonic land speed record using a jet engine *and* hybrid rocket booster. It shut down in 2018 due to lack of funding, was subsequently purchased by a retired turbo magnate, and is now apparently back up for sale. The efforts already taken to test the car are pretty wild: In 2013, 317 people worked for 130 days clearing 6000 tons of rocks and pebbles from a South African desert *by hand,* creating a twenty-two million square meter test track - an area roughly the size of 3000 soccer pitches.
• Charlie O’Donnell on the venture capital industry’s complicity in [waves hands at everything that’s happened over the past however long it’s been].
• Bolt is shutting down its Boston office/workshop. I’ve been in a fair number of offices, and Bolt’s was one of the cooler ones.

Making & Manufacturing.

• A short and very cool video of the industrial automation in Tesla’s battery production process.
• A video tour of the BaoGang steel mill, a state-owned facility in Baotou, Inner Mongolia; watch it at 2x speed and just soak up the sensory data. See also Tim Maughan’s 2015 piece on Unknown Fields Divison’s visit to Baotou - just the kind of vacation I (sincerely) really want to take.
• Arris Composites, a startup working on a proprietary “additive molding” process, built a pretty rad composite drone part for Skydio. In The Prepared’s Members’ Slack, Arris’ Simon Lancaster-Laroque says that the part is initially formed as a near net shape via a high speed process which allows for out of plane fiber orientation; it is then subjected to a rapid heat cycle molding (RHCM) process to achieve “extremely good accuracy, surface finish and consolidation.” See also this decent explainer video on RHCM, in which the mold tool is rapidly heated and cooled to help eliminate weld lines, gate marks, etc.
• A compelling (and sobering) piece on a guy in rural Michigan who, after receiving a $50k quote from Comcast to bring high speed internet to his house, formed his own ISP and invested about $145k laying fiber to his and other homes in his neighborhood. “Based on the amount Mauch invested and his expected revenue, he estimates he'll break even within 42 months.”
• Ruth is looking for a Chinese factory which can produce (initially) ~500 unit orders of fully knit, breathable underwear designed for pregnant women. Holler at her here.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• On my personal blog, a recap of the 1940s Walker-Turner drill press restoration I did last fall.
• Used razor blade slot bathroom tiles leave midcentury walls filled with… used razor blades. Related, we got a little sharps container at The Prepared’s workship recently and it’s arguably the smartest purchase I’ve made in years.
• A 3D model of the section of Highway 1 that was washed out near Big Sur over the weekend.
• The New York City subway system is designed for 24 hour service, and its train yards are not large enough to accommodate all of the trains in the system. As a result, trains have continued to move on normal schedules even as 24 hour service has been suspended due to COVID - meaning that the shutdown reduced revenue while keeping costs more or less flat.
• A barge that was carrying toxic sludge from the Gowanus canal sunk (and was eventually re-floated) in the Gowanus bay.

Distribution & Logistics.

• Following up on last week’s note about congestion at the Port of LA, Jonathan wrote in with a link to the Port of Long Beach’s Weekly Advance Volume Estimate, which attempts to project weekly stats for container movements, vessel calls, and loaded/empty exports. He also notes that “unfortunately, the ports do not collaborate on putting together these advance estimates. Terminal operators, shipping lines, and logistics companies do not like sharing detailed information with Port administration; they think it would give business rivals an advantage. If the logistics industry wants to improve its performance, it's going to need to embrace a much more transparent approach to data sharing. This extends from the ocean carriers, freight forwarders, railroads, drayage operators, transload facilities, etc - if even one of these players isn't at the table, it creates a blind spot that causes either delay or excess capacity. The pandemic has created a lasting shift in the demands that individual consumers are placing on the logistics industry, and these data gaps really hold agencies back when it comes to planning for the future - especially if they want to implement a sustainable, low/zero emissions system.”
• NIMBY Rails, a Steam game which bills itself as a way to “Design and run your own railroads for the real world. Solve global transportation dilemmas. Unleash your inner railway engineer and transit policy manager.”
• A Twitter thread of classic tunnels in aerospace.
• The crazy, crazy logistics behind the 1803 smallpox vaccine.

Inspection, Testing & Analysis.

• Umarell is an Italian term that refers to someone (typically an old man) who hangs out near construction sites, observing and offering unsolicited commentary.
• I’ve been really enjoying Behemoth, Joshua Freeman’s 2018 book on the history of factories (which we’re reading in The Prepared’s Members’ reading group). It tells much the same story as The Perfectionists, but is more critical of the people who pioneered the industrial age - including Ford (who was paternalistic, antisemitic, and hated unions) and Henry Clay Frick (who oversaw deadly battles between striking workers and Pinkerton detectives, and was almost assassinated himself). It also includes an extended section on artistic representations of early 20th century factories, which includes a number of striking works:
• Photographer Margaret Bourke-White’s Hot Pigs, Molten Metal, The March of the Dynamos, and her Life cover story on the Fort Peck Dam
• Photographer and painter Charles Sheeler’s Criss-Crossed Conveyors, American Landscape (😍), Classic Landscape, and Amoskeag Mills
• Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals, and Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future, the Rockefeller Plaza mural commissioned and later destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller
• Frita Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital, which depicts her own miscarraige taking place within eyeshot of Ford’s famed River Rouge factory
• See also this blog post on an old exhibit with pieces by Bourke-White, Sheeler, Elsie Driggs, and Ralph Steiner, and this de Young exhibit guide to pieces by Bourke-White, Driggs, and Thomas Pollock Anshutz.

Tangents.

• The U.S. Senate’s official recipe(s!) for Senate Bean Soup.
• Teamsters at the Hunts Point Produce Market will make $1.85/hr more over the next three years, the result of their first strike since 1986.
• A pretty cool library, LocHal, that occupies a former locomotive shed of the Dutch National Railways.

A rather magical record of electricity consumption in Manchester, UK 1951-1954.