Notes.
This is slightly off-topic, but the NYTimes ran its first front page editorial since 1920 this week, on "the Gun Epidemic in America." I recommend it.
Pathfinding.
- Additive Industries licensed a bunch of EOS's DMLS patents.
- GE Ventures and Autodesk made a strategic investment in Optomec.
- Eric Paley on the risk of focusing on building a platform early on.
Building.
- From Al Dean, re: that history of splines from last week: the inventor of NURBS explains how that came to be.
- Airbus worked with The Living to design metal 3D printed lattice structures for the partition walls on A320s. This is cool.
- The folks at Triple Bottom Line are making progress on their carbon fiber & DMLS titanium road bike. I'm very jealous of this video, and really like the description of the process in this article.
- Two *great* pieces on those hoverboard things: A Planet Money episode, primarily about the Chinese IP system, with cameos from both Bunnie Huang and the guys at TomorrowLab; and a fairly thorough BuzzFeed article that's more about the manufacturing landscape in Shenzhen and its ability to spin up rapidly.
- Alexis Madrigal on Google Loon's progress.
- Nervous System on how they designed those New Balance shoes.
- To eliminate springback in stamped parts, clamp them.
Logistics.
- Amazon released a video about their new drone, which answers zero important questions about how it'll actually work.
- The NYC MTA is finally going to pilot open gangway subway cars.
- A good post from Flexport about the surplus of ocean shipping capacity.
- A short piece on the continued demand for small (< 8000 TEU) ships. Would be interesting to compare the distribution of ship sizes to the distribution of airplane sizes, especially as the Maersk Triple-E and the Airbus A380 have both pushed the bounds on the large end.
- That story about why the MTA hasn't installed countdown clocks yet (and why CBTC is taking so long to implement) is pretty good.
Evaluation.
- Dan Suo on the MIT+Princeton team's baseline object recognition algorithm for the upcoming Amazon Picking Challenge.
- iBeacon *really* hasn't taken off yet.
Stuff that doesn't fit into my dumb/arbitrary categories.
- Last week's This American Life has a piece on what it's like to be friends with someone whose career (in this case, Ta-Nehisi Coates) progresses differently than yours. It's really good.
- This article is a little irritating but worth checking out nonetheless: "Why can't we build a splash proof toilet?"
- Me, writing on the GrabCAD blog, about the current field of design optimization software.
- Just FYI, the Fargo TV show is *really* good.
And.
A thoughtful piece by Geoff Manaugh on the unborn cities of China.
Love, Spencer.
p.s. - We should be better friends. Send me a note - coffee's on me :)
