2015-01-31

Notes.

It was a long week, with a bunch of nights spent figuring out how to pay for stuff in China. I am excited for someone (Jack Ma?) to fix this.

I also had enough time to go over my first prototype titanium seatmast topper, which did *not* pass the fit/finish test; even after eight iterations, one of the walls is still distorting. Which makes for a difficult story to tell, but I'm working on it anyway - and regardless, I'll be moving forward with more prototypes soon.

Pathing.

• Skymall filed for bankruptcy.
• James Surowiecki on the rise of fast casual and the lead up to Shake Shack's IPO.
• Mori Seiki made a takeover bid for DMG Mori, the combined Japanese-German machine manufacturing company which it has a 25% stake in.
• How Game Theory Helped Improve New York City’s High School Application Process.

Building.

• This NYTimes story (and the video - seriously) about a toddler whose surgeons practiced on 3D printed models before operating on her skull is kind of intense.
• The Common Parts Library is a set of commonly used electronic components for designing, prototyping, and manufacturing electronics. "Often component selection comes down to the question of, “what’s the <component> that everyone uses for <application> and has good availability in the supply chain?” The Common Parts Library should answer this question quickly."

Logistics.

• The importer of all that good British Cadbury's candy settled with Hersheys & agreed to stop doing so immediately.
• This is an older article, but it's *wild* that UPS and FedEx each spend in excess of $1M per quarter *just* on parking tickets in NYC.

Evaluation.

• A smart and ultimately half-hearted defense against Nicholas Kristof's plea for academic writing to be a bit less obscure: "Academic writing and research may be knotty and strange, remote and insular, technical and specialized, forbidding and clannish—but that’s because academia has become that way, too." <= Which is, incidentally, a fallacy of division... but who's counting, right?
• "...researchers found that knowing when and where four credit card transactions occurred was enough to identify 90 percent of people."
• An interesting analysis of just how staggeringly expensive clothing was before the industrial revolution.

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

• Of *course* hockey is better if it's filmed with GoPros.
• This is a really, really interesting article about Chaturbate, an amateur sex site - a subject that decidedly does not fit into my oeuvre. Which makes me somewhat hesitant about posting it, but really it's worth it - even if parts make you squeamish. "Right now I see being sexual on the internet as a bold and risky form of performance. I anticipate that in the future it will just be thought of as sex."
• Words that could conceivably be used to describe both the Super Bowl and a Suberb Owl.

And.

Stiltsville, man.