2016-12-11

Notes.

I finished The Passage of Power (the fourth of Robert Caro's LBJ books) last week. It - the whole series - is incredible, and the audio versions are well produced and totally addictive.

Planning & Strategy.

• The USGS map locator & downloader. I grew up with USGS topo maps, and still love them.
• Kickstarter's tech predictions for 2017.
• Pebble was acquired by Fitbit and is essentially shutting down; backers who haven't received their awards yet will be refunded.

Making & Manufacturing.

• An excellent multi-part tour of the CF Martin guitar factory. Strongly recommended.
• An excellent Instagram account of a forging shop making big parts.
• An analysis of the supply chain of Donald Trump's necktie manufacturing operation.
• Ames Lab & ORNL are working on industrializing metal powder production, and its effect on metal AM.
• A pretty rad jumping robot.
• Foxconn is apparently looking into a US operation, possibly in collaboration with SoftBank. Note that the other thing Foxconn has been working on is replacing humans (which even in China are getting expensive) with robots.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• A very good video of the machinists who keep the New York Times' printing operation running.
• On the revitalization of Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal. Related, the Wikipedia page for the Lockheed Constellation.

Distribution & Logistics.

• I blasted through (Nike cofounder) Phil Knight's memoir during a day of driving this week; his descriptions of international trade are interesting and incredibly straightforward.
• Underground and above NYC with an (apparently famous) urban explorer.
• FedEx's chairman is, understandably, *not* a fan of the trade wars that Trump has threatened.
• Comma.ai is moving open source; they apparently want to be the Android of self driving car OSs. George Hotz seems... a bit dismissive, to say the least.
• Paris, responding to air pollution, cut half of its cars from the road multiple days in a row. Meanwhile, Boston is going to start rolling out dynamic pricing for streetside parking.

Inspection & Testing.

• The US Forest Service's Forest Products Laboratory "will identify a maximum of five wood samples per household or business per calendar year as a free public service to U.S. citizens." Pretty rad.
• SpaceX made a *very* small update to their analysis of the "September 1 anomaly" in which a Falcon 9 exploded on the launch pad. TLDR: They're still working on it, and the next launch will be in January.

Tangents.

• Airplane fornication.
• A dinosaur tail was found in Myanmar, with feathers intact.
• A biopic of George Boole. Not the best movie I've ever seen, but worth having on in the background while you work on extracurricular stuff.
• Everything we currently know about tubes (on Clickhole).

Credit to Noah, Dylan, Tarik, Ryan, Brendan, Samson, Jordan, Russ, Matt, and Dan for sending links this week. If you see something, send something :)

And.

The Wikipedia page for Ground effect vehicles. These things flew (kinda)!