2019-11-04

Planning & Strategy.

• The Khan Academy version of Disney's theme park design course.
• A good profile of Moltex, a UK startup building a molten salt nuclear reactor, with a good dose of context on the entire so-called Generation IV nuclear industry as well.
• The most recent issue of Spatial Awareness, a newsletter about mapping.

Making & Manufacturing.

• A *very* rad overview of a little company, BPS.space, making thrust vectored model rockets. Think Estes rockets, but with gimbaling motors that actively steer and a microcontroller that tracks vehicle dynamics, logs data, and triggers state changes. They're also working on vertical landing. The energy in this blog post is palpable, and infectious.
• A good video overview of the engineering behind o-rings.
• On the remarkably smooth rollout of Tesla's China operation. "Sometime in late 2019, the first Chinese-made Tesla Model 3 destined for customers will roll off an assembly line at Tesla Inc.’s new Shanghai Gigafactory. When that happens, it’ll be a rare case in which Elon Musk, the company’s famously scattered chief executive officer, has managed to hit one of his famously ambitious deadlines."
• Flowdrill is a company that makes friction drills and cold forming taps - tools that create through and tapped holes in thin walled metal parts with no chips. The holes in this video look great, and I'd love to see how friction drilling works in steel bicycle tubing where wall thicknesses often go as thin as .4 mm.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• Made In Space is putting a mini plastic recycling "facility" on the ISS, to complement the "AMF" printer that's already in service there. As a non-chemist I'm a little unclear on the chemistry here, but the system "takes in plastic bags, bubble wrap, or old used 3D prints" and reprocesses it into new filament. I reached out to MIS to clarify, and they tell me that it "can handle a variety of polymer blends" and that "for the most part, anything that AMF can print with, Recycler can process." This presumably includes ABS, HDPE, PEI/PC (all of which are listed in the AMF's user guide), and also includes a sugarcane based polyethylene made by Braskem. Related: Bagasse is "the dry pulpy fibrous residue that remains after sugarcane or sorghum stalks are crushed to extract their juice. It is used as a biofuel for the production of heat, energy, and electricity, and in the manufacture of pulp and building materials."

Distribution & Logistics.

• In 1930, the Indiana Bell building - an 8-story steel and brick building that was 27 years old at the time - was moved 16 meters to the south, rotated 90 degrees, and then moved 30 meters to the west. "A movable wooden sidewalk allowed employees and the public to enter and leave the building at any time while the move was in progress. The company did not lose a single day of work nor interrupt their service during the entire period."
• The Engineered Materials Arrestor System (EMAS) is a bed of material ("crushable cellular cement blocks") that's installed on the ends of short runways. If an airplane drives off of the end of the runway, its wheels plow into the EMAS and crush it - absorbing and dissipating energy and slowing the airplane to a stop. This video is terrible in quality but shows EMAS pretty well.

Inspection, Testing & Analysis.

• A highly compelling blog post on the myriad (and often exogenous) technological innovations that enable free solo mountain climbing - an activity that might naively be seen as "untethered from machines." Come for the ways that innovations in synthetic fibers, cam anchors, and climbing harnesses enable today's climbers to train *way* more than their predecessors; stay for the thought provoking discussion of how cheap air travel and digital communication allow for crucial knowledge transfer across the field.
• Climate Neutral is a company that offers certification for companies that produce physical products.
• An exploration into AmazonBasics' predictably opaque battery supply chain. "When the entirety of a battery’s emissions are added up — including sourcing, production, and shipping — its greenhouse gas emissions are 30 times that of the average coal-fired power plant, per watt-hour."
• A good piece on the effect that wind wakes have on wind turbine farms. The photo at the top of the article is illustrative of the problem, in which one turbine blocks its downwind neighbor's wind.

Tangents.

• Craig Mod on walk-n-talks, a strategically planned vacation (ish) that optimizes for thoughts.
• The Nazca Lines are a group of large, geometric designs carved into the soil in the Nazca desert in Peru, created roughly 2000 years ago.

Mapping 9.5 million links in the US food supply chain.