Notes.
New stuff! Ask The Prepared. Send in your questions and we'll answer them (or find one of you can) in an upcoming issue of the newsletter or the podcast. Heck yeah!

Two updates from me: One on my own 2017 GitHub commit history, and one on the inventory management dashboard I built using Tulip, Python, and Google Sheets.

GE Additive (which has a new CEO) increased its stake in Arcam to 95%, buying out (among others) activist investor Elliott Management. Elliott, astute readers will recall, is the same hedge fund that spurred turmoil at Alcoa/Arconic over the past few years. The story there is fascinating, starting (for me, for obscure romantic reasons) with Alcoa's office in Lever House and ending with a great (if less profitable than Warren Buffett's PCC), vertically integrated, 20th century industrial conglomerate splitting and then replacing its CEO with the executive who oversaw GE Appliances' sale to Haier.
On Boston's susceptibility to sea-level rise. "By the end of the 21st century, climate models indicate that the Boston area will experience 3 feet of sea-level rise, enough to place roughly $80 billion in city real estate and infrastructure within the federally designated floodplain. Blackmon expects that Boston will endure $1.4 billion in flood-related damages every year, a budget-busting scenario that would effectively require the abandonment of some waterfront areas."

A pretty great use for lasers: Cleaning wafer cookie residue off of industrial sized waffle irons. Clever.
A horrifying, fascinating deep dive into the NYC commercial (privately operated, rather than DSNY) trash collection industry. Highly recommended. "Rushing makes the job more dangerous, and most everyone has to rush in order to finish hundreds of stops — sometimes more than 1,000 — in a night, covering a route that could easily be 85 miles. As most any private sanitation worker in New York City will tell you, the routes are often too long to finish within the 11-hour driving limit set by federal Department of Transportation regulations. As a result, many garbage truck drivers routinely drive far more than the 11-hour limit, hardly getting any time to rest before they must return to the wheel."
Alec Baldwin talks to some trash experts.

Rocket Lab successfully launched its first Electron rocket into orbit. The Electron is, compared to other rockets, tiny; it would be only the second smallest on this chart. Related, I recommend following Launcher (an NYC based company building small rockets) on either Twitter or Instagram; their first hot fire was just a few weeks ago.
Meanwhile, the classified military satellite that SpaceX launched a few weeks ago appears to be missing; the issue seems to be with a Northrop Grumman supplied payload adapter.
After beating Uber out of China and investing in Ofo (which cannibalized a large number of its short distance rides), Didi Chuxing is launching its own bike share platform. Meanwhile, in NYC, dockless bike startup Social Bicycles rebranded as Jump and raised $10 MM.
There are essentially two words for tea (or cha) in the world, and the difference stems from whether the drink was originally imported by land or by sea.
Molasses in the hull of the tanker Zefryos began to ferment while it was at sea, and increased levels of CO2 caused a seaman to pass out; he was later rescued by the fire department. "'It was extremely difficult with the molasses product in there,' Port of Houston Fire Chief William Buck told KTRK. 'Very sticky. And crews had to be decontaminated after we removed him. The patient had to be decontaminated.'"

Alex Roy's thorough, positive, and critical review of a real production Tesla Model 3. "The Model 3 was clearly designed for Level 4 at the expense of Autopilot, a problem that will only loom larger the longer it takes Tesla to get to full self-driving."
A thorough description of why the processors that Raspberry Pi uses aren't susceptible to Meltdown or Spectre.
Portland's police & elected officials staked out the position that citizens give up their right to privacy when they put their trash outside; Willamette Week gave them some of their own medicine.

"The Leidenfrost effect is a physical phenomenon in which a liquid, in near contact with a mass significantly hotter than the liquid's boiling point, produces an insulating vapor layer keeping that liquid from boiling rapidly."
Ben Thompson's nuanced perspective on net neutrality.
Prospect Park is finally car-free.

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2018-01-22

Private trash collection, cleaning waffle irons with lasers, and a visit to a pencil factory.