2015-01-10

Notes.

Posting a lot of links this week.

I sold my car, which put me in a mood to reflect on status symbols and personal values. This article reflects some of my feelings, and gives an interesting demographic context.

We also got development boards for The Public Radio, and my DMLS partners finished the first functional prototype of my titanium seatmast topper.

Pathing.

• Wu-Tang is selling an album on Paddle8. In case you missed it, this is an LP of which there's only one copy; Wu is trying to treat music more like fine art.
• A good article on how the economics of solar energy could change in the coming decades.
• Some guys are climbing the Dawn Wall of El Cap without ropes.
• "Of America’s 100 top-paid CEOs, 29 worked schemes that enabled them to collect more in compensation than their corporations paid in income taxes."
• 23andMe inked a big, important deal with Genentech.
• CES 2015: The year of fields that are "waiting for the thing that will take it to the next level."
• Apparently last year Amazon decided to cancel the payments processing service that Kickstarter has used for years. So Kickstarter just switched over to Stripe, which makes a ton of sense. And then here comes this story about how Amazon is trying to woo inventors & makers away from Kickstarter, Grand St., Etsy, and Quirky. Interesting.

Building.

• Bunnie Huang wrote a long post about reverse engineering a Mediatek cell phone SoC. It's *really* interesting, and he goes into some depth on the IP implications of being a startup and wanting to use a powerful chip.
• An awesome video of how Brilliant Bicycles' wheels are built. I wondered what a wheel truing machine looked like for a *long* time - it was really cool seeing this one in action.
• Autodesk & Voxel8 are building a 3D printer that can print circuits.
• MICA is an metal 3D printing process that produces *tiny* things. I want to learn more about this.

Logistics.

• Man, flying is *really* bad for the environment.
• A good (old) story on how the NY Flower Market is slowly being pushed out of Manhattan.
• Formlabs changed the way they build support structures in a pretty cool way.

Evaluation.

• The New Yorker's 3 under 3 list.
• A good explanation of the history of & prognosis for string theory.
• An analysis of the computers on North Korean intranet.
• Authentise is putting computer vision into FDM printers, allowing you to remotely monitor (and pause) 3D prints from afar.
• Kickstarter's 2014 by the numbers. <- Pretty cool.
• Diversity data for a bunch of police departments around the country, and whether or not that matters.

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

• The Dassault Group makes fighter & commercial jets (Dassault Aviation), 3D design & PLM software (Dassault Systèmes; Solidworks, etc), and wine (Chateau Dassault).
• Mirror galvanometers (galvos) are basically controllable actuated mirrors, and are commonly used to direct lasers. Applications include barcode scanners, laser light shows, and DMLS.
• An interview with the Assistant Commissioner for Strategic Data at the New York City Office of Emergency Management - the guy with the best GIS data in the city.
• Carlos Ghosn is super interesting. The guy is CEO and Chairman of both Renault *and* Nissan, and turned the latter of those around in a totally crazy way.
• Homemade Subway.

And.

Basically all of Whittier, Alaska's 200 residents live
in one apartment building.