2015-02-22

Notes.

I woke up early on Saturday and wrote a thing about workaholism, creative freedom, and my own ambition. It's not something I have totally figured out, but it was good to get some of my thoughts down.

Pathing.

• Chris Bannon left WNYC to do content development for Midroll Media. Bannon was a big name in public media over the past few years, and he's joining an ever-stronger podcast development team at Midroll, which is most famously known for Scott Aukerman's Comedy Bang Bang.

Building.

• So I was reading a thing about machine shop productivity and it was talking about horizontal machining centers and I realized I didn't totally understand the benefits of horizontal vs. vertical CNCs. So I asked on Quora, and posted it to Twitter too, and my internet friend Greg Koenig went and wrote a really, really detailed explanation. Pretty cool, internet.
• Elon Musk's vertical energy management thing is coming along nicely. Related, a pair of really interesting blog posts about the (troubled) future of traditional energy business models.
• Rolls Royce and Arcam 3D printed (with a crazy custom EBM machine) a jet engine bearing housing that's 1.5m in diameter and .5m thick.
• Read the whole NYer profile on Jony Ive, if you're interested - it's long. This part about how Apple tells their contract manufacturers the toolpaths they want them to use was the most interesting part to me.

Logistics.

• The FAA released preliminary rules around drones. TL;DR: you can't fly them over people, and a human operator needs to be within eyesight of them while they're flying.
• Waze is partnering with the city of Boston to share congestion data.
• Remember how I linked to the Wikipedia page for visible light communication last week? Well here's a fun idea about how it could be used to get super high definition video to your TV.
• A good primer on how to select a 3PL, by Adam @ Brilliant Bikes.
• NYC sidewalk food carts as a distributed emergency response team.

Evaluation.

• Bulletproof coffee is bullshit (of course).
• Radiolab's new story about the incredible scale at which Facebook's "Trust Engineers" are learning about how people interact.
• The largest organization of public defenders is building a database to track the accountability of police officers.

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

• Oliver Sacks has terminal cancer.
• You know the Gulf Stream - the North Atlantic warm water current that comes up the East Coast from the Caribbean? Well the North Pacific's version of the same is called the Kuroshio Current.
• Something seems wrong about the idea that property developers are purchasing the rights to street addresses they don't actually occupy.
• Expats are leaving China twice as fast as they're moving there.

And.

Whiteboard clock robot.