2014-12-06

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.