2019-07-01

Planning & Strategy.

• Ben Thompson on Jony Ive's departure from Apple.
• Chris Denney (who is a key part of The Public Radio's manufacturing team) on how to work with contract manufacturers on the first run of a PCBA design. "Actually, humans build things."
• A surprisingly compelling video of how Prusa got to the top of the desktop 3D printer world.

Making & Manufacturing.

• A totally awesome multi-video Instagram post of how to set up a large forging on an old King vertical turret lathe. Chris is a fun follow, and a bunch of his replies to the comments on this post are great. Note that the first operation (which leaves the OD that he fixtures to) was done "in order to part off a 1" x 1" test ring that is required by the customer for destructive and non-destructive testing. We give them the test ring first and wait until the test results come back before doing any further machining on the part. The bonus of that is that I get extra material on the length that I can use to hold the part. It also allows me to turn the entire OD in the first (second I guess) setup and not have to have a 'blend' line on the OD surface when it gets flipped over."
• A simultaneously cool and horrifyingly sterile video of a highly automated lamb processing plant, i.e. robotic butcher line.
• A visit to the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games, replete with an interesting history of that industry. "The main producers of Soviet arcade machines were military factories, because they had funds and the skills to produce them, usually using leftover parts from real weapons, electronics and redundant pieces of industrial equipment. The view of the Government at the time was that the machines were very expensive: the cost of one arcade machine nearly equalled the cost of half of a Soviet car. The State decided not to establish companies and factories specializing in the manufacture of arcade games. Therefore, mass production of arcade machines in the Soviet Union was never really established."
• A decidedly nifty concept for beer cans that screw together end-to-end (making six-pack rings obsolete). I've got to imagine that [the quantity of additional aluminum used in this design] x [the number of cans that are *not* properly recycled] x [the environmental impact of aluminum smelting] is net worse for the environment than six-pack rings, but I do like the idea that secondary product packaging could be eliminated altogether.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• How modern airplanes stop: Spoilers automatically deploy to kill lift and induce downward force; wheel brakes automatically activate; the engine *speeds up* and reverse thrusters activate to push air forward.

Distribution & Logistics.

• A nice, quick visual guide to incoterms.
• Amazon now carries 47% of its own shipments itself - more than any other carrier. "In a statement to Axios, Amazon said, 'The numbers are not an accurate representation of how Amazon shipments are shared between Amazon and our carrier partners.'" Which is curious.
• From the Department of Death-By-GPS: Google Maps sent over a hundred people (who were on their way to the Denver Airport) down a dirt road detour. They followed one another like lemmings and got stuck in the mud in an empty field.
• The Italian mafia is using old (and invalid) Lira as a parallel currency to the Euro.

Inspection, Testing & Analysis.

• A Twitter thread mini-bio of Poppy Northcutt, the first female engineer to work in Mission Control at the NASA Johnson Space Center.
• A 13-year-old from Calgary, Alberta published a paper showing how hand dryers can be particularly damaging to kids' ears (which are usually positioned lower than adults' ears would be).
• "The 66 Countries Where Annual Average Electricity Consumption Per Person Is Less Than 1 Bitcoin Transaction."
• A blog post reverse-engineering the geometrical design of the new Mac Pro "cheese grater" grille.

Tangents.

• Samsung says that Apple failed to meet purchase quotas for OLED displays, and is asking for compensation for the shortfall.
• GPS outages could cost up to $1B per day.

A comprehensive look at the business of honeybees-for-hire.