2015-12-20

Notes.

I just finished The Idea Factory (on Bell Labs - recommended!), and am just starting Uncommon Carriers (John McPhee's book about shipping & logistics). Yay books!

Pathfinding.

• A bunch of Silicon Valley superstars (including Elon Musk and YC's Jessica Livingston) started a big nonprofit to research artificial intelligence - and hopefully avoid killing all of us in the process.
• Autodesk is beginning to integrate embedded systems design (via Eagle CAD) into Fusion 360.
• Chinese Premier Li Keqiang wants Chinese ballpoint pen manufacturers to stop relying on European suppliers for the precision pall tips. This will be interesting to track.

Building.

• From Noah, an *amazing* video (both in content and absolutely insane production style) showing the investment casting process from start to finish. I also recommend browsing Suburban Tool's YouTube channel, as there are a bunch of great (and equally bizarre) things there.
• The game company Valve is building a gaming controller, and their manufacturing process (which was apparently set up by Flex) is *highly* automated. This video is *awesome.*
• Some details on Facebook's efforts to improve (and open source) server hardware.
• The Hyperloop companies are moving forward with testing. Kinda sad to read that one of them is basically assuming that their first installation will *not* be in the US.
• Bombardier's CSeries program (a highly efficient and quiet jet plane built to seat 160 passengers) isn't quite dead yet, but this article is basically a post mortem. Too bad, too - it sounds nice. (Thanks, Kane!)

Logistics.

• A pretty great post from the Fleport blog on why Dole owns its own shipping fleet. Also, onboard cranes - clever!
• A funny thing: If you break a large area up into a square grid, you have to make corrections for the curvature of the earth every once in a while. See also The Jefferson Grid on Instagram.
• It's probably obvious, but I'm really enjoying Dan's work on the Amazon Picking challenge. This post includes a really great analogy comparing robot simultaneous location and mapping systems to 15th century navigation techniques.

Evaluation.

• Randall Munroe, in The New Yorker, explains Einstein's relativity using only the thousand most commonly used words in the English language.
• I had never really thought about this, but skeuomorphism in sex toys (and the trend away from it) is kind of an interesting topic.
• So apparently (via Reddit) the analysis is "pretty haphazard," but still: greenhouse gas per calorie of many vegetables is pretty bad.

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

• I kind of want to start my pizza blog back up. It was fun to write.
• The Washington Post is finally going to start using singular "they."
• Man, I want this new Roomba.

And.

On Google's work to build a universal quantum computer.