2015-01-23

Notes.

Zach and I have been spending all of the time working on another (final!) prototyping round on The Public Radio. His recap is here, and is truly worth reading. I have two small but fun reports: first, a little shell script I wrote to clean up EAGLE partlist exports; and second, GIFs of all of the revisions our circuit has gone through since December.

I also (finally) got the v1.0 version of my titanium seatmast topper in - but haven't had time to report on it yet, so I guess you'll just need to wait until next week :)

Pathing.

• It's apparently not as simple as World War Z makes it out to be, but Israel does have an engrained culture of contrarianism, including an official Devil's Advocate Office. Key points here, too.

Building.

• The logistics and engineering of underground mountain bike parks.
• Google released a list of the companies that helped them build their self-driving cars.
• Amazon bought a Israeli company that does something with microprocessors, and has ARM as one of its early investors.

Logistics.

• A tool that helps calculate what frequent flier program is best for you, given the airports you usually travel to/from.
• A good explain it like I'm five: Who owns airports and how do they generate money?

Evaluation.

• On Google and GM: "One should be wary of the argument that any new company, no matter how brilliantly successful, has figured it out in a way that no previous company ever could have."
• CAPTCHAs - those blurry words that verify if you're a human - have a super fun acronym name: "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart."

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

• Slow television is a term applied to long broadcasts of generally ordinary events. For example, check this 90 minute video of the South China Sea, as seen from a container ship.
• A Claddagh ring is a particular Irish variant of a fede ring.
• Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
• Spoken Wikipedia is a thing.

And.

The Post Roads of 1839, overlaid on top of modern maps.