2015-01-03

Notes.

I've mostly been doing family stuff, but did find time over the holiday to write up a bunch of overdue blog posts about my trip to Taiwan with Brilliant Bikes. Want to learn about how tires, cardboard boxes, and bicycle frames and forks are made? Look no further.

I also put up my notes from the Boeing factory that I saw before Christmas. Which means I got about half of the things posted that I had wanted to, but that's okay. This was the longest vacation I've taken since at least 2012, but even then I spent much of my trip doing work. So I'd say I did pretty well this time.

Pathing.

• Amazon says that 10 million people signed up for a free Prime trial over the holidays, and maybe 70% of them will end up paying for a year-long membership. Wow.
• You can make a *lot* of money being a teacher in South Korea.
• Alcoa (the Aluminum Company of America) has a pretty interesting range of engineering and manufacturing businesses. Also, I had no idea they were headquartered at Lever House.

Building.

• Boeing's 777 wings are painted by articulated robots.
• Hoover (the vacuum maker) put a bunch of replacement parts on Thingiverse for consumers to download and print.
• The list of things that Corning is trying to get Gorilla Glass to do is cool. Also Willow Glass, which I had never heard of but is being touted as the future of flexible displays.
• A Canadian company called Arctic Fibre is going to lay a cable from the UK to Japan. The types of depth & terrain scanning they'll do (listed at the end of this article) are interesting.

Logistics.

• Volvo is working with Ericsson and POC (a Swedish sporting goods company) to make bike helmets that get alerts from oncoming cars.
• A smart highway is being built in Europe.
• A good piece on the NYC wholesale flower market on 28th St. Seems like a fun place to visit.
• So as the earth travels through space, we pass through dark matter, which induces glitches in space-time, and you can measure those glitches as they pass through/across the GPS satellite network.

Evaluation.

• Mario Cuomo, 3-time NY Governor, died on Thursday. The Times' piece on his impact on Queens, the borough in which he was raised, is a good reminder of how drastically the city's cultural geography changed over the last half century.
• A pretty good video on the certification testing that the Boeing 787 went through. Also, an older article on how repairs are done on the 787's composite body.
• Nine commercial aircraft are currently using sensors to assess their structural condition. The FAA is in the process of certifying that integrated sensors "meet the same performance and reliability standards as those required for current maintenance inspections."

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

• A kind of intense short film about escorts.
• This stuff about the dropping price of solar power is weird and hopeful. I have this feeling that it doesn't account for the way solar equipment is financed, but what do I know.
• A Klein Bottle is a non-orientable, two-dimensional manifold surface. Think of it like a Möbius strip with an additional dimension.

And.

Reflecting on one year of The Prepared, which has gone from
zero to being one of the most important things that I do.
Thanks to all of you for your support!