2015-04-05

Notes.

Oh, not much. I went to the first wedding of the season last night, and have been scheming on some more metal 3D printing. I think I might start going on bike rides again, which is nice. That's about all.

Pathfinding.

• Inventor 2016 will be able to read any CAD file format - including Solidworks.
• Eric Schmidt says that Google Glass is still a thing.
• A very good summary of the state of MTA capital programs funding & overruns. New York City's subway projects tend to cost $1-4B per kilometer, while the rest of the world pays an order of magnitude less. Moreover, NYC politicians (dating back to Robert Moses, who you *really* should know more about) tend to (intentionally?) underestimate the cost of these projects, with the result being that the public can't trust anything they say.

Building.

• This is a pretty cool bike hub.
• A series of GIFs showing the Eames "Shell Chair" being made.
• Some guys figured out how to put out fire with sound. Basically, the compression waves of low-frequency tones vibrate the air enough to separate oxygen from the fuel source. An important limitation: the sound doesn't reduce the temperature of the fuel source, so it's likely to reignite.
• Some decent video of *highly* automated CNC milling.
• The Left Coast Lifter is one of the biggest floating cranes in the world. It was built specifically for the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, and is now working on the new Tappan Zee Bridge.

Logistics.

• NASA is sending two people to space for a full year, partly to better understand what the effects of the 500+ day trip to Mars would be.
• Quantum entanglement happened.
• Costa Rica has powered itself exclusively off of renewables for the past 75 days.

Evaluation.

• A long story about Lonni Sue Johnson, whose hippocampus was destroyed by viral encephalitis. She now has a memory span of about five minutes and is one of the most studied living amnesiacs.
• Big, late-stage VC funding rounds have become *way* more common, while IPOs have slowed. So it's likely that either there will be a bunch of big exits soon, or a bunch of big busts.

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

• After last week's issue came out, Kane sent me a note about an error I had made. It was on the nuclear-weapon-over-midtown article, and he correctly noted that the description was of a 800 *kilotons,* not megatons. He also mentioned Tsar Bomba, which was the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, and is actually really interesting.
• For some reason Amazon Home Services offers goat grazing, though apparently not in lower Manhattan.
• Qingming Festival, or Tomb Sweeping Day, is a holiday in Taiwan and China that occurs in early April. Its origin includes a story about a guy who makes stew from a piece of his own thigh.

And.

Bertha, the 4-million-pound Hitachi tunnel drilling machine that's
been stuck underneath Seattle for more than a year, was finally rescued.
See also: WSDOT's very good Flickr page.