Notes.

Hi folks, Sam here, long time reader, first time editor.

Supply Chain.

• Commentary on issues facing a hot rolled steel tubing fabricator in Texas from the perspective of its Boston private equity owner.

Making & Manufacturing.

• A teardown of the 100kWh Tesla Battery Pack.
• Boeing has designed a new spacesuit.
• If you're in lower Manhattan and need a book bound, check out The Last Bookbinder on the Lower East Side. He's got great reviews on Yelp too.
• After watching the video of an manual outdoor ring forging operation in China from from the 12/19/2016 edition of The Prepared, I found this video of an automated version from Sweden.
• And then I found a brand new video from the same Chinese forging firm using a rolling machine!

Physics.

• I've been thinking a lot about inverted pendulums this week and stumbled on sone interesting ones.
• The Kapitza Pendulum is a stable inverted pendulum due to a vertically oscillating pivot point.
• The Furuta Pendulum has a pivot point mounted on a rotating wheel.
• The ACIN group out of Vienna has built a dynamically balanced double and triple(!) pendulum on a cart.
• And here's an inverted pendulum with two degrees of freedom balanced by two reaction wheels.

Strategy.

• I'm halfway through The Last Days of Night, a historical novel about the Edison / Westinghouse battle, Nikola Tesla, and the origins of the modern law firm. Highly recommended.

Inspection & Testing.

• A great teardown and analysis of the 45 year old 8008 microprocessor.

Tangents.

• A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning - An application of graph theory to meaning.

And.

The first images from the GOES-16 Weather Satilite