2017-11-14

Notes.
None!

Planning & Strategy.

• On The Prepared's podcast, a conversation with Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy (CW&T) about what it's like to run a small product studio.
• A decent explainer on licensing business models - ARM in particular.
• On Scientific Linux.

Making & Manufacturing.

• An old documentary on the making of the McDonnell Douglass MD-10.
• A well shot video of soy sauce being made traditionally in Japan. Note, Chinese soy sauce production predates Japanese shoyu by centuries.
• Me on TPR's assembly cell. Note, I am now officially getting one of these box folding jigs (thanks, Noah!.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• The MTA is rolling out iPhones to train conductors and telling them to use empathy towards passengers when trains are messed up.
• A SpaceX Merlin engine exploded during testing.

Distribution & Logistics.

• A video of a pretty wild remote control jet plane, running at up to 750 km/h.
• Instacart is cashing in on retailers' terror over the Amazon/Whole Foods acquisition. As someone who has personally used Instacart to shop at Whole Foods, I'm basically counting the days until Amazon either kicks them out of the stores or buys them up too. In other words, I can't tell whether this is Instacart clinging to table scraps or gearing up to become part of a *big* antitrust case.
• After a study on downtown congestion ("out of 2,656 traffic violations total, 1,723 citations were for ride-hailing vehicles") San Francisco is rolling out dedicated pickup and drop-off spots for Uber and Lyft.
• UPS is delivering packages by electric tricycle in downtown Pittsburgh.

Inspection & Testing.

• A video tour of the Arecibo telescope.
• A very thorough point-by-point case against Tesla. There's more here than I could possibly summarize, so I'll just leave this... suspicious Musk quote from a recent call: "And we are pushing robots to the limit in terms of the speed that they can operate at, and asking our suppliers to make robots go way faster, and they are shocked because nobody has ever asked them that question. It's like if you can see the robot move, it's too slow. We should be caring about air friction like things moving so fast. You should need a strobe light to see it."

Tangents.

• Bunnie Huang on Naomi "realsexycyborg" Wu.

Ocean Farm 1, the world's first offshore fish farm, arriving in Norway.