2015-09-12

Notes.

I wrote a thing yesterday about the extent to which I'm an engineer. Here it is.

Pathfinding.

• I know a venture backed startup making crazy furniture in NYC, and they're looking for a COO type to help scale production overseas. If you or someone you know fits that description, send me a note!
• Okuma, the CNC machine tool manufacturer, has an app store. There are a pretty wide range of apps on it, most of which are developed by third parties and run on the HMIs of Okuma machines. Pretty cool.
• Michelin is making a big investment in metal AM.
• If you haven't watched Biden on Colbert, you really should.

Building.

• A funny old video documentary (terrible quality, but who cares) on the Marshmallow Fluff factory.
• Another potential (quixotic?) use for graphene: If you laminate it with perovskite, you can make really efficient solar cells.

Logistics.

• The Infrastructure Observatory's notes from our trip to Amazon's Delaware fulfillment center ended up on Hackernews last week, and a really great discussion (including comments by a few Amazon FC employees) ensued.
• An attorney in Connecticut got the FAA to approve a little motorized paper airplane for a commercial drone license. <= This article is a bit overblown but it is an interesting distinction.
• Darius McCollum is a NYC resident who's been repeatedly arrested for trying to steal (etc) subway trains. "As of 2010, he had spent more than a third of his life in jail for transit-related offenses."
• Kane sent along this interesting article on those weird scooter/skateboard things that all the same underlying device but sold under a bunch of different brand names. Two notes on this: 1) Skip the video and read the article instead, and 2) I really like reading articles like this through the lens of "what is the Chinese approach to IP getting right?"
• I really wish we had pneumatic trash in NYC.
• That long Fivethirtyeight article from a few weeks ago on Uber & public transit is good.

Evaluation.

• I just want to take a moment to try to spread the idea of imageability. It comes from an urban planner named Kevin Lynch, and I think it's a really useful term. Essentially, an imageable system is one that can be relatively easily understood by a perceptive observer.
• A court in Washington State ruled that a Kickstarter campaign creator needs to pay restitutions to its backers for "crowdfunding theft." I feel ambivalent about this.
• What the shock waves from supersonic planes look like.
• "There’s a strong case that field corn, used as a grain, is the single most important food crop on the planet."

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

• My photos from The Public Radio's trip to the Shenzhen electronics malls.
• The etymology of "ampersand" is actually really weird.
• Indian stepwells are *really* cool. (thanks, Jordan :)
• The history of the Brooklyn Naval Yards. I've been spending a lot of time here lately, and have some hopes about the place.

And.

Big ships seen from above.
(thanks again to Kane :)