2017-05-30

Notes.
Hey Boston! Let's get drinks on Monday 2017.06.05 (my birthday!) after The Digital Factory. Details coming, but it'll be near-ish MIT and circa 1900h. If you're in Boston and available then, let me know!

Planning & Strategy.

• A strong argument in favor of US involvement in the One Belt, One Road summit - which, thankfully, we did attend.
• StartupNY is a NY State program that provides tax incentives to companies who operate on or near college campuses in NY. It's not exactly Canada's SRED, but pretty cool nonetheless.
• Bre Pettis bought Other Machine. Othermill is a great product, and I'm excited to see how they develop as a business.

Making & Manufacturing.

• Kickstarter launched Hardware Studio, a collaboration with Avnet and Dragon Innovation to help hardware projects.
• How ping pong balls are made.
• A remarkably thorough and readable design guide for metal additive manufacturing, complete with a whole suite of case studies.
• Betatype, who engineer metal printed metamaterials, got a Renishaw AM250 and installed it in East London. Urban manufacturing FTW!
• A video tour of Haas's Oxnard, CA factory.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• Lots of news from the NYC MTA, and regrettably little of it had to do with the boring stuff (maintenance). This worries me, though I'm curious to see what happens with Cuomo's MTA Genius Challenge.

Distribution & Logistics.

• On Zara's remarkably fast and well-coordinated supply chain. I would *love* to know how their overall efficiency compares to traditional, waterfall-style operations.
• A good piece on Amtrak's business model and strategic difficulties. Namely: Amtrak rents most of its track, and passenger rail isn't as profitable as freight, so its landlords often delay Amtrak trains in order to keep others on time.
• A pretty good idea: "Baby on board" buttons for pregnant women to get subway riders to give them seats.

Inspection & Testing.

• A collection of near-realtime astronomical observation resources - places on the internet where you can observe the earth and the solar system around us.

Tangents.

• A tumblr of science fiction user interfaces.
• A nice piece about the guys who re-released the MTA's standards manual, and have built a healthy little business out of it.

Thanks as always to our recurring donors for supporting The Prepared. Credit also to Julien, Chris, Eric, and Dan for sending links.
On the mess that is CRT recycling: "Years after most Americans switched to flat-screens, we're just now beginning to deal with the long-term ramifications of sustainably disposing of old cathode-ray televisions and computer monitors."