2014-10-10

Notes.

Mostly, I'm consumed with The Public Radio's Kickstarter. Last weekend I wrote a long piece on the economics of the project, which aimed to be as transparent as possible about our motivations and how we will handle our campaign's success. Check it out; it took a lot of time to write - and CNET says "it should be required reading for anyone who aspires to launching a new crowdfunding project."

Oh, also: I was *shocked* at how many of you clicked on the Eric Schmidt email rules thing. Possible that I oversold it?

Pathing.

• Love And Radio is the *best* podcast and this episode about Hasidism in South Williamsburg is just so cool.
• This Vice profile of Matthew Lesko - the guy who wears a question mark suit and screams about how you can get free money from the government - is really interesting.
• What will happen to HP's research labs now that the company is splitting up.

Building.

• tilde.club (and the essay explaining it).
• Songdo, South Korea is an interesting foray into the future of urbanity.
• Electric motors account for 43-36% of worldwide energy consumption, and the resistivity of the copper windings in motors is a correspondingly large portion of global energy inefficiency. So of course someone's working on swapping the copper out for carbon nanotubes, which could cut Joule Losses in half.
• Pepsi filed a patent to put pop rocks in a granola bar. <- Wow.

Logistics.

• Maersk's new "Triple-E" container ships are quite large; see also this NYTimes article about them.
• Lufthansa has a serious system for taking care of people who get sick on planes.
• All of the English East India Company's ship routes from 1798-1834, animated.
• Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination between agents or actions.

Reflecting.

• Diesel engines are about 43% efficient. In order to figure out how to improve that, a team created a *really* precise simulation of a half-second of a diesel engine's power cycle.
• A fun video of people actually using medieval armor, like with swords and stuff.
• Google's European version stopped indexing five pages on the NYTimes last month, in accordance with the EU's "right to be forgotten" law.
• The National Museum of American History has a cartridge of McDonald's tartar sauce (with dispenser) in its collection.
• Thirteen ways of looking at Greg Maddux. <- This is only kind of about Greg Maddux.

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

• Minorities earn less than their counterparts in skilled (startup-y) jobs.
• Before the 1964 World's Fair, Robert Moses tried to incorporate Willets Point, Queens into Flushing Meadows-Corona park. The auto junkyard owners there hired Mario Cuomo as their lawyer, who defeated an aging Moses and went on to become governor.
• Baby laughing hysterically at ripping paper explained.
• Theres a 101km stretch of I19 that is measured in kilometers.

And.

Some cool analysis of the pronouns that Facebook users use,
by age ranges.