2017-11-06

Notes.
This past weekend I put about 150 Public Radios in the mail, bringing our Kickstarter fulfillment essentially to a close (note: you might not expect it, but a decent number of Kickstarter backers never tell you where to send their rewards). This milestone was four days late - which on one hand I'm proud of, but  on the other late is indeed late.

The fun thing now is that we get to set up a continuous system that'll process orders on a daily basis. More soon :)

Planning & Strategy.

• A good, quick video on how the Netherlands keeps water out.
• Jeff Bezos' regret minimization framework.
• A good check-in on the state of trace autorouting, aka optimization for EDA.
• A short post on how the Chinese government's push to reduce pollution is affecting small manufacturers.

Making & Manufacturing.

• Tesla held an earnings call last week; it was mostly bad news. There's a good real-time recap here, and additional details here. This piece also has some rather lurid details about how Tesla's suppliers see them: as indecisive, immature (in terms of process if not emotionally), and with a tendency towards risk-prone timelines.
• From the last link above, a term I didn't know: Body in white, which refers to "the stage in automobile manufacturing in which a car body's sheet metal components have been welded together."
• How balloons are made.
• A video of end mills being ground in a nice little manufacturing cell.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• One Bitcoin transaction now consumes as much electricity as the average US household does in a week. Note that $20 bills cost $0.105 to create and stay in circulation for 7.7 years, and my more-or-less-average household uses $10-20/week in electricity.

Distribution & Logistics.

• Got questions about the future of transportation for Reilly Brennan? Shoot 'em over and we'll use them to guide our interview with him (upcoming on The Prepared's podcast) later this week :)
• A well done video showing how air traffic at Gatwick Airport was disrupted by a drone earlier this summer.
• The sunsheild for the James Webb Space Telescope, which folds up (like the main mirror) during transport, was unfolded and fully tensioned for the first time.
• Street signs that belie bad street design.

Inspection & Testing.

• CERN says that protons and antiprotons have exactly the same (but opposite) magnetic properties, which means that the universe... shouldn't exist.
• iFixit's (very good, as always) iPhone X teardown.

Tangents.

• On Experiments in Art and Technology, which was set up by the artist Robert Rauschenberg and a Bell Labs employee named Billy Kluver.

A collection of late 19th century Japanese fireworks catalogs.