2016-03-13

Notes.

I spent a bunch of time this weekend reengineering The Public Radio. Also I gave a lecture at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture last week, which now I'm really wishing I had a recording of :/

Pathfinding.

• Via Joh, a *really* good blog post on the value of saying "no" to product feature requests.
• Faraday Future promised to secure $75M worth of bonds to secure the $215M tax abatement deal for their planned Nevada plant.
• Lei Jun says that "Xiaomi is not ruling out an IPO."
• In order to better handle high mix assembly, Mercedes is reducing the number of robots on their S-Class line.

Building.

• A pretty detailed piece on Andy Rubin and Playground, his new incubator/accelerator/hardware playground.
• Semantic Versioning is a nomenclature for product revision numbers.
• ARPA-E is funding some pretty clever personal climate control systems.
• Develop3D on Canary's product development process.

Logistics.

• Via Zach: A team from Fermilab is working on an antimatter based space propulsion system that could travel at 40% of the speed of light.
• Wärtsilä, the ship engine manufacturer, cheated on some fuel consumption tests (via Noah).
• All the ways the Oracle America's Cup team modified their boat in order to beat the Emirates New Zealand team (via Matt).
• One of Google's cars caused an accident.
• My friend Adam has a fun request: He's working on school management software, and is looking for logistics engineers to talk to and work with. The parallels between warehouse optimization and class scheduling had never occurred to me, but it makes sense. If you've got experience with either one, give him a holler.

Evaluation.

• Ego depletion, a 20 year old concept that has been cited thousands of time in the psychology literature, probably doesn't exist.
• A history of Arduino.
• The politics of pork industrialization in China.
• An evaluation of recycled DMLS powder feedstock.
• Stryker received FDA 510(k) approval for their 3D printed spinal implants.
• Dragon Innovation on quality plans.
• Simpson's Paradox is when "a trend appears in different groups of data but disappears or reverses when these groups are combined."

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

• Nicola Twilley on Limor Fried (aka Lady Ada).
• From the annals of computer graphics history: The Utah teapot.
• AlphaGo is beating Lee Se-dol, the world Go champion 3-1.
• The Trump companies owe $27,536.56 in unpaid fines to New York City.

And.

Jeff Bezos finally (and somewhat awkwardly) let
reporters into Blue Origin.