The California State Senate's Transportation and Housing Committee blocked Senate Bill 827, which would force CA cities to allow denser housing development near transportation hubs.
Amazon's median salary last year was $28,446. In this year's shareholders' letter, "Bezos said Amazon directly created more than 130,000 jobs in 2017, not including people the company absorbed from acquired companies such as Whole Foods. That means Amazon brought on board more people in one year than the entire workforce of Google parent company Alphabet Inc., which said it had more than 80,000 employees at the end of last year."
BuzzFeed published a long profile on Kickstarter's Perry Chen, who returned to the company last year to be its interim, and then permanent, CEO. There's definitely a lot of feels here.

A simple, clever machine for making wooden balls. There's a pretty neat math problem in making sure the holesaw has positive movement against the dowel at all times :)
Researchers in Spain created a method of growing graphene nanoribbons 1 nm wide with nanopores built right in, allowing them to create parts that have the same band gap as silicon. Note, 5 nm scale silicon devices are still yet to be commercialized.
Tesla shut down the Model 3 line temporarily and announced plans to run it 24/7.
An essay on the "model line" approach to lean transformation, in which a single production line is switched over to lean as an experiment for the rest of the organization to eventually follow. Note in the bottom that the author, a legit scholar on TPS and lean manufacturing, offers to work on Tesla's production line for free if he can write about it. See also this concise pro/con on the model line approach.
Robots assembling Ikea furniture.
GE's Arcam is announcing a new, larger EBM machine that seems to be promoting titanium aluminide specifically. Astute readers will recall that TiAl is an intermetallic (a metal with ceramic-like properties), which makes it particularly well suited to hot stage use in rotating equipment (like jet engine and turbine blades, where its low ductility prevents parts from elongating over time). Prior to the Arcam acquisition, GE's Avio Aero had put a lot of work into developing TiAl EBM printing, allowing them to be a big user of Arcam machines.

A century-old BRT power station in Gowanus is being restored, renovated, and repurposed as an art/manufacturing space called Powerhouse.

UPS is deploying 50 plug-in electric trucks for testing. They have roughly 35,000 similarly capable diesel/gas vehicles in their fleet.
Import tariffs: A pretty good way to get back at eBay scammers.
A good analysis of Uber/Lyft's effect on taxi rides in NYC. As I noted on twitter, I'm very curious how much of what looks like expansion is actually cannibalization of the grey market (black cars/gypsy cabs) in outer boroughs.

The FAA has announced that they plan to issue a safety directive mandating that certain CFM56-7B turbofan engines' fan blades be inspected ultrasonically after a certain number of trips. This is in response to the Southwest 737 which had a fan blade break (and whose engine cowling subsequently fell off) last week. The WSJ's coverage on this is good: "After a 2016 incident on a Southwest jet, CFM urged operators to conduct ultrasound inspections on certain Boeing 737 engines to guard against fan blades breaking off due to metal fatigue. Later the FAA proposed such checks—with some to be completed with six months—but the final mandatory version of that directive wasn’t issued before Tuesday’s accident. One person familiar with the details said the FAA had been within weeks of making it mandatory." The NTSB chairman's press briefing is also remarkably watchable.
Why electricity has a sound - poor/degraded insulation & air ionization. The last note about forensic analysis is pretty interesting too.
(Rocket) payload fairings of the world, ranked by how many whales could fit end-to-end inside of them.

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2018-04-23

Fan blades, model lines, and a visit to an optical glass factory.