2015-03-08

Notes.

A followup to in-person conversations I've had about the "Pathing" section: It's supposed to be about the decision making process, in particular what you decide to work on - and how you make that decision. That said, my categorization is worth exactly what you pay for it ;)

Also, I've been having somewhat higher open & click rates when I send this out on a Sunday, and for the time being I think that's a good thing and should be continued.

And next week,I'm on a panel discussion about launching a hardware startup at the Design for Manufacturing Summit. It's in DUMBO on Thursday the 19th - if you're in town, you should use my discount code & come!

Pathing.

• This article predates the recent FCC decision, but it gives some compelling reasons for why net neutrality is actually really hard to implement.
• We eat more vegetables at restaurants, and more fruit at home.
• The way we as a society pay for recycling is crazy.
• T-Mobile is planning an LTE network in the unregulated wifi range.

Building.

• This is cool and nerdy: ProMicron, a German company, makes toolholders for CNC machines (and friction stir welders!) that sense force and allow the machine controller to adjust speeds/feeds in response.
• GE Oil & Gas is apparently using a hybrid metal laser sintering & CNC machining center made by Matsuura to make some Masoneilan valve bodies. This is *very* surprising to me; my guess is that it's a really limited pilot program.
• NYC makes up to $12M per year by selling methane from Freshkills park.
• Just a great video of ironworking & blacksmithing machines.
• Alibaba is expanding its cloud services business, Aliyun, to the US - competing directly with Amazon's AWS.

Logistics.

• The New York Infrastructure Observatory is planning on visiting the Ports of New York and New Jersey. You should come.
• The largest shipping terminal in the Ports of New York and New Jersey is Global Container Terminals Bayonne, which has some pretty good videos (the third one in particular). Fun fact: Global Container Terminals is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.
• I hate linking to paywalls but this WSJ article about how labor disputes (and the planned expansion of the Panama Canal) is shifting shipping traffic to the East Coast is worth your time.
• Two good acronyms to know: RMG, for rail mounted gantry; and RTG, for rubber tyred gantry. Compare both of these to container cranes.

Evaluation.

• Google is making advances on error correction in quantum computing.
• Articles about how Google is going to start ranking sites by truthiness disturb me. Mostly because they imply that we have methods to determine the truth other than popular opinion - which I'm pretty sure is a myth.

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

• Tug of war injuries can be *really* brutal. <- No joke.

And.

Vessel Finder is an impressively good (if a bit visually cluttered)
real-time map of, like, all of the ships.