Notes.
It's advanced manufacturing time for me. Cool stuff: laser sintered tungsten (refractory metals are hard to sinter, because they tend to crack) and platinum-based metallic glass. I also read a bunch of cool papers on SLM scanning strategies, and wrote up a tl;dr version here.
...and, I should have my first physical DMLS part, which I designed, and will be printed out of titanium, next week. Which is kinda crazy.
Pathing.
- Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk is *so* cool.
- HP's printer will use Autodesk's Spark platform. This is a big deal.
- The Chinese Ministry for Truth banned punning.
- Kickstarter is now a B Corp. B Corps are interesting; learn on Wikipedia.
Building.
- This is a little specific but it's really interesting how different the production processes for Easton's and Mad Fiber's carbon bicycle rims are.
- Schwalbe's tour of their tire & inner tube manufacturing process is good.
- The NYTimes exposé on the ballooning cost of the new PATH station, which looks cool but is also basically just a Calatrava building.
- A pretty awesome video with a bunch of CNC machining, plus hand finishing, anodizing, assembly & box build of a consumer electronics product. If you're like, "what's CNC machining?" then you should check this out.
Logistics.
- The (really short and not particularly useful but cool nonetheless) video of Kiva robots in an Amazon fulfillment center.
- Girl Scouts are now allowed to sell cookies online.
- Obama set up a $263M fund to pay for police body cameras.
- Vice's video on NYC's wastewater treatment process is pretty good, though they do use the word "shit" rather gratuitously.
- Want to learn how to drive a container ship? Go to this *awesome* French shiphandling school.
- ThyssenKrupp says they'll build two-axis maglev elevators by 2016.
Reflecting.
- Calorie counts on menus might not actually effect how much people eat.
- An awesome set of interactive graphics showing how cold each county in the US gets, and when its coldest day of the year is.
- Brining turkey is bullshit.
Stuff that doesn't fit into my dumb/arbitrary categories.
- China had a state-controlled salt monopoly for 2600 years. This bears repeating: China had a state-controlled salt monopoly for 2600 years!
- Microsoft killed Clip Art. Its replacement: Bing.
- fsn is (was) an is an experimental application to view a file system in 3D.
- You know how divorce rates are so high? Well, they aren't - especially if you're well educated.
And.
London's new subway - which will increase the city's rail
capacity by 10% - is 60% complete and on budget.
Love, Spencer.
ps - Thank you to everyone - especially my friends at Gin Lane, Undercurrent, Brilliant Bicycles and on twitter - who referred me to everything here.
We should be closer friends. Coffee's on me.
