2019-05-13

Planning & Strategy.

• Me, writing about my accidental career as a marketer.
• An interesting essay on politics, corporations, and organizational structures. Contemporary western corporations are organized from the top down - exactly the opposite of our political system. In socialist Yugoslavia under Tito, the state was organized top-down but workplaces were bottom-up. "So there were two societies with key spheres of human activity (work and social) organized according to the exactly opposite principles...This is where more technocratic political capitalism of the Chinese or Singaporean variety comes to mind. What it tells you is that essentially the same efficient and dictatorial way in which the production of cell phones is organized ought to be extended to the political sphere. It argues that the two spheres are essentially the same. In both efficiency is reached by clear goal-directed activities which are technical in nature and which should not be subject to the constant approval by workers or citizens."
• I want to make a Longbet about

Making & Manufacturing.

• On the nTopology blog, Blake Courter gives an overview of lightweighting with lattices & implicit models.
• Using multiple types of soluble printing filament to end up with a complex concrete part.
• Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory say they have a fully recyclable plastic, PDK, "that, like a Lego playset, can be disassembled into its constituent parts at the molecular level, and then reassembled into a different shape, texture, and color again and again without loss of performance or quality."
• A thermal lance "is a tool that heats and melts steel in the presence of pressurized oxygen to create the very high temperatures required for cutting. It consists of a long steel tube packed with alloy steel rods, sometimes mixed with aluminum rods to increase the heat output. One end of the tube is placed in a holder and oxygen is fed through the tube."

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• An utter takedown of AirPods as a pseudo-luxury product that provides poor sound quality for a short amount of time and is then impossible to reuse or recycle. "AirPods were destined to become e-waste from the moment they were manufactured. And AirPods become e-waste after just eighteen months, when the irreplaceable lithium ion battery dies."
• Noah breaks down just how hard it is to dispose of sawdust. "At the very small scale, managing waste streams is one of the biggest challenges I face in my small manufacturing operation....All of this is to say: a) recycling is not an easy problem; b) trash is the hardest problem for many small biz; and c) anyone in greater Pittsburgh want large-but-not-truly-industrial scale quantities of sawdust??"
• The MTA's page on silica dust monitoring for the Canarsie Tunnel (L train) non-shutdown.

Distribution & Logistics.

• A correction to last week's link to Royal Mail's Heathrow DC video: The video is here.
• A very thorough accounting of where an entire day's worth of food came from.
• From Low-Tech Magazine (note, I love the tagline "doubts on progress and technology"), a comprehensive evaluation of different types of trolley canal boats: boats that are powered by overhead wires, or pulled by electric mules, or drag themselves over a chain, etc.
• Paris had a pneumatic clock system for about 46 years; it was powered by a central transmitting station that produced pulses each minute for about twenty seconds.
• A simultaneously chilly and cheerful video explanation of how Titan missiles were launched.
• Amazon says they'll reduce Prime shipping from two days to one; the industry reels.

Inspection, Testing & Analysis.

• A correction to the fascinating article on old Medtronic insulin pumps: The security flaw doesn't allow users to load their own software onto the pump, but allows external devices to communicate with the pump. This allows closed-loop control software to receive data from and send insulin dose requests to the pump.
• A database of dimensioned drawings.
• When bicycle lanes are painted onto roadways, drivers pass *closer* to cyclists.

Tangents.

• Your domain-specific skills are probably *not* the biggest/hardest/most important part of your job. "In your career as a data scientist, you will not only need to manage significant technical complexity and communicate the findings of various analytical projects clearly and effectively. You will also need to manage the relationships and politics that surround those analytical projects - which is often no easy task, especially for counting."

A good, practical guide to product testing requirements and methods.