2015-12-13

Notes.

As most of you know, I've been thinking a lot about "generative design," and that sparked some thoughts on how to attribute authorship as one's CAD software takes increasing control over the form of an object. I've also been thinking about design documentation, and how freeform & lattice structures can and should be documented.

These thoughts crystallized a bit this week, and I wrote a thing about them.

Pathfinding.

• Dow and DuPont are going to merge and then split three ways by market sector.
• Moog (the aerospace manufacturer, not the synthesizer company) is going to buy a 70% stake in Linear Mold - one of the largest metal AM job shops in the country.
• An interesting tidbit: the astronauts on Skylab 4 went on strike (for one day) once.

Building.

• The lego.gizmodo.com blog (which is all about Lego) is pretty great. In particular, check out the "Everything you always wanted to know" post.
• Ingrid Burrington on how and why network architecture was built right alongside rail infrastructure.
• The first sodium ion rechargeable battery. Still unproven, but if they work, then it'll be pretty sweet because sodium is basically everywhere (while lithium is not).
• A Taiwanese research institute says they've developed a way of controlling hardness on metal AM parts, essentially (AFAICT) by varying the laser beam shape & intensity.
• Two photosets from me: One (with robots!) from my visit to the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technologies, and one (with a lot of manual machinery) from when Zach and I visited an antenna factory in Shenzhen.

Logistics.

• How to deter elephants: keep bees.
• Airbus and Snecma are working on counter-rotating open rotor airplane engines. The tradeoff here is interesting: the engines themselves are more efficient, but you need to put armor on the airplane to protect it in the off chance that a rotor breaks and flies towards the fuselage. If the armor weighs too much, it offsets the efficiency benefits of the engine.
• Tim Hwang spoke with KALW last week about the birth of The Infrastructure Observatory.

Evaluation.

• You know how people are always talking about how quickly things are changing these days? And how everything seems to be speeding up? This Economist article does a good job explaining just how spurious those claims actually are.
• Google says that they've proven that D-Wave's quantum annealer actually works for optimization problems (albeit in a pretty limited context). This is a big deal. Related, see this article about IBM's efforts to develop universal quantum computers, and the graphic in it that compares universal quantum to annealers.
• Non-celiac gluten sensitivity does not exist.
• The Robot Operating System (an open source OS) is eight years old. Last year, something like $150M worth of VC money was invested in startups developing on ROS.

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

• (Of course) There's an ATM on Antarctica.

And.

A teardown of a Macbook charger.