2015-12-06

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.