2015-03-29

Notes.

Man, long week. Fun, but exhausting.

I was super lucky to have some of my closest friends & family help me + Zach out on Saturday. We had a pretty fun Public Radio Maker Kit assembly line, and got a ton of work done. Photos here.

I also rediscovered an old list of values to apply to the work I do, which is actually pretty concise & prescient. Well done, 2013 me.

Pathfinding.

• A somewhat sad, somewhat hopeful short video about what's going on at Eastman Business Park (formerly Kodak Park) these days.
• Amazon is holding a competition for shelf-picking robots.
• Salami slicing refers to a series of many small actions, often performed by clandestine means, that as an accumulated whole produces a much larger action or result that would be difficult or unlawful to perform all at once.

Building.

• A pretty good explainer on how, exactly, China used as much concrete in the past three years as the US did in the entire 20th century.
• The president of Russian Railways is proposing a road across Russia and (apparently) into Alaska. It would be a long road.
• I know of Festo from their pneumatics & automation business, but they make some seriously cool animal-like robots.

Logistics.

• Disney is such an interesting company - I really want to take a field trip to try and reckon with the Magicband. Let me know (seriously) if you want to come.
• I transfer from the G to the A/C every day at Hoyt-Schermerhorn, and I always wonder what those two extra tracks are for. Well apparently they were built to accommodate a never-built subway that would connect over to the 2nd Avenue line in lower Manhattan. That, plus other never-built and partially completed NYC subway projects, in this map.
• Also, an animated GIF showing NYC's subway map, with lines appearing in the order that they were built.
• Heat and sound are magnetic, which means that you can (theoretically) direct their motion with magnets.

Evaluation.

• This week Kraft merged with Heinz, which itself is owned by the Brazilian private equity firm 3G Capital (which controls both Burger King and Anheuser-Bush InBev, and is run by Jorge Paulo Lemann) and Berkshire Hathaway (run by Warren Buffett). Lemann is every bit as interesting as Buffett, and I must say that his pragmatism is appealing.

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

• What would happen if an 800 megaton nuclear weapon detonated above midtown Manhattan.

And.

A history of architectural scale figures.