Pathing.
- Some touching data on the characteristics of successful relationships.
- A proposal for how the YMCA should take their water consumption more seriously.
- An excellent (old) Paul Graham essay, on essays.
- Autodesk acquired The Living, the architecture firm that built that mushroom tower at PS1.
- How to seem really smart in a meeting.
- The NYTimes story on Ira Glass' decision to take This American Life off of PRI, and Ben Thompson's reaction to it.
Building.
- MakerBot is filing some audacious patents - this time for "Three-dimensional printing of large objects."
- Why Jeff Bezos bought Woot.
- Famed patent troll (and weird food guy) Nathan Myhrvold on how ovens should be better.
- Two-bladed wind turbines pose challenges, and a Chinese company is trying to overcome them.
- A NASA project to develop coatings whose energy absorption & emissivity properties vary as current is run through them.
- IBM says they'll be producing chips with nanotube transistors around 2020.
- A method of making graphene nanoribbons by blasting nanotubes against a wall.
- This article is whatever but I'm converted: Thin, smashed, skillet-cooked burgers are superior.
Logistics.
- Legally grown pot is consuming a lot of power.
- Stripe will allow Alipay users to buy US goods (but I still can't pay Alibaba vendors without sending a wire).
- The NYFD's data analytics operation is pretty interesting.
- A weird military pyramid in the middle of nowhere.
- 538's great analysis of how airlines can save money by reducing weight.
- SolarCities bought a solar panel manufacturer and is planning on building a 1GW PV factory in the US.
Reflecting.
- A thorough reminder that the Fermi Paradox is creepy as shit.
- A very compelling talk (in text + pictures) on the internet and memory.
- Keenan Cummings on what it's like when your company is acquired.
- Increased homogeneity of VC teams is correlated with higher failure rates in the startups they fund.
- robots.txt is 20 years old, and also very interesting.
- An ode to NYC summertime smells.
- EBITDA.
Stuff that doesn't fit into my dumb/arbitrary categories.
- Why did nobody tell me that Justin Vernon recorded a version of I can't Make You Love Me??
- A silly email chain at Buzzfeed.
- An artisanal lorem ipsum generator.
- A really interesting mountain bike.
And.
A weirdly compelling riff on the J Crew catalog.
Love, Spencer.
ps - Thank you to everyone - especially my friends at Gin Lane, Undercurrent, and on twitter - who referred me to everything here.
We should be closer friends. Coffee's on me.
