2014-08-29

Notes.

The latter half of this summer has lead me, weirdly, to read about the Ormen Lange subsea compression project. That has lead me then to wonder how the hell to fit that into this newsletter, which is ostensibly about being ready for the future but ultimately ends up being about general purpose urban nerdiness - a category Ormen Lange does not fit neatly into.

I've also been going to a lot of weddings, and must insist that you seriously consider putting your bubbly on the rocks.

I had been on a mission to cut unnecessary links recently, but there are a lot this week (been traveling & reading a lot). I think they're worth it.

Pathing.

• Bill Murray drinks champagne right. <-- Confirmed.
• Great infographics on state-to-state migration through the last century.
• Borges' On Exactitude in Science.
• Anyone who tells you that serif typefaces are more readable/legible is full of shit.
• A profile of Regina Dugan, former DARPA director now leading Google ATAP.
• Chinese duplitecture as preemptive French cultural preservation.
• Federal wind power subsidies are drying up, and the wind industry is suffering as a result.
• An essay on agencies that try, and usually fail, to build stuff.

Building.

• The surprisingly toxic ecological effects of making solar panels. Also, transparent solar panels.
• The Coors family (the makers of beer which is apparently always cold) were the first to develop the aluminum beer can, and have an old and *very* interesting high tech ceramics & porcelain business.
• Over 75% of Ikea's product images are actually renderings of 3D models.
• A contest to develop 3D printed pasta.

Logistics.

• Amazon is expanding to Shanghai.
• As a male born in the 80s, I can expect my usage of "uh" to increase 50% (to 7.5 occurrences per 1000 words) between age 20 and 30.
• As drought conditions worsen in the west, GPS networks sense a slight rise in ground levels (~15mm) due to decreased gravitational pull.
• "In .1% of NYC’s total land area, Times Square generates 11% of the city’s economic output and 10% of the city’s jobs."
• An engineer at Pinterest built a spreadsheet tabulating the portion of female engineers at almost 200 startups.
• Verizon is rolling out voice over LTE.
• Photosynthesis is only about 1-2% efficient; some efforts to change that.

Reflecting.

• The section on the white moderate in Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail.
• A California DMV employee's treatise on the philosophy of language, and the utopian language he invented.
• The HMS Dreadnought, commissioned in 1906, defined an entire class of Battleships - despite having seen virtually no combat.
• Estimated total annual building energy consumption at the block and lot level for NYC.
• Some great visualizations of how ancient astronomers explained retrograde motion.
• How a hermit lived in rural Maine for 27 years.

Stuff that doesn't fit into my dumb/arbitrary categories.

• Nine-banded armadillos always have four genetically identical offspring, the result of one single egg.
• Olbers' Paradox asks why the night sky is dark, if the universe is infinite & full of stars.
• Humza Deas, who instagrams the tops of bridges in NYC.
• Mark McNairy's great/gritty diet.
• The difference between hydrocarbons (like gasoline) and carbohydrates (like pasta): carbohydrates contain oxygen and are hydrophilic, while hydrocarbons contain only carbon and hydrogen and are hydrophobic.
• Noam Chomsky will be the new X-Factor judge.
• A charming trailer for a documentary on competitive stone-skipping.

And.

A Chinese program to plant enough trees to increase the
world's forested area by more than 10%.