2015-12-27

Notes.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Pathfinding.

• A good article in Quartz about how hard it is to create a new Chinese font.
• The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac) is about to start testing their C919. The C919 is a narrow-body twin-engine plane, and is slightly larger than those Bombardier CSeries planes (which Comac is apparently collaborating with Bombardier on) that I linked to last week.
• Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk's biographer) wrote an article about the lone hacker who's "taking on Google and Tesla by himself." My reaction is that he doesn't seem to be particularly serious - which is fine, but it means that he'll never really affect the way the world works.

Building.

• SpaceX launched, and then landed, their Falcon 9 rocket. Worth reading Musk's "background" blog post, and maybe going back to Wait But Why's article on SpaceX if you didn't read it when it came out.
• From Alex, a compilation video showing some of the pretty cool shit (mostly to do with industrial robotics & 3D printing of some sort) going on at ETH Zurich.
• There was a while circa 2011 when I *really* wanted to buy myself some rotary broaches. In this video, Tom Lipton tests some.

Logistics.

• Amazon is apparently in talks to lease a bunch of Boeing 767s, which they'd use to launch their own logistics business.
• An article from this Spring about the opening of the Croton Water Plant, which now supplies up to 290 million gallons of water to NYC daily.

Evaluation.

• New York Magazine on a couple of new - and architecturally interesting - NYC sanitation buildings in Tribeca.
• A pretty good video explaining the Charpy impact test, which measures the amount of energy a piece of material absorbs during fracture.

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

• Via Kane, a pretty funny piece about how the Stormtrooper uniform ended up being white.

And.

A pretty nice plastics identification flow chart.