2016-02-15

Notes.

My big thing this week was finally finishing a blog post on surface finish and what my EBM seatpost parts looked like after being processed by MicroTek. I'm proud of the whole thing, of course, but particularly pleased with my many modes of communication - from photography, to charts made in Paper, to a public Google Sheet. Not to brag or anything, but hey. It's kinda cool :)

Pathfinding.

• From Dan, a good piece on industrial espionage in the titanium dioxide (which is used to make things *really* white) industry.
• The MTA is going "to talk" to the L's NIMBY constituency.
• An MIT engineering professor joined NVBOTS, which is apparently working on an alternative to metal powder bed fusion.
• Did I mention that nTopology is hiring a systems architect? We are, and we're serious about it. Holler.

Building.

• The James Webb Telescope main mirror is fully assembled.
• Via Jordan, who launched Parabol this week, a really incredible video of an old axe factory. Note all of the belt driven equipment in the shop - and see the Wikipedia page for line shaft while you're at it.
• Kind of a clever idea: undersea data centers. Hard to service, but at least thermal management is easy.
• Yesterday, Alex made the first pull request on Gongkai AM - a template for new AM system user guides.

Logistics.

• Via Kane, "big ass trucks."

Evaluation.

• I finally got around to reading the retrospective on how the Zano project, which raised more than £2M on Kickstarter, imploded. It's *really* good.
• If you haven't read Nicola Twilley's piece on gravitational waves, you should. Also, see this.
• Boston's Infrastructure Observatory toured a combined heat and power plant owned by Harvard University.
• Via Gabe, GitHub's Incident Report from the outage a few weeks ago.

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

• Arthur Fischer, who invented the wallboard anchor and held more patents than Thomas Edison, died.
• If you haven't seen "Happy People," Werner Herzog's film about sable trappers who live in the Siberian taiga, it's streaming on Amazon Prime.

And.

My post on the texture of EBM parts and
aerospace grade surface finishing.