2020-04-20

A *very* warm welcome to Blue Clover Devices, our new sponsor!

Lots of links this week. Let's get to 'em!

A short anecdote, written by the chief physician at a hospital in Massachusetts, of how the FBI and DHS are seizing shipments of PPE. Maybe I’m naïve/missing something, but this seems crazy.
A high level overview of SAP and the world of ERP software. “Implementing ERP isn’t just a purchasing decision: it’s committing to redoing how you handle operations. Installing the software is the easy part; adjusting the whole company’s workflow is the most of the work.”
Samuel Insull was a British-born businessman who, around the turn of the 20th century, switched the Chicago Edison Company (which later became Commonwealth Edison and had an exclusive franchise to the city) from flat rate to time of use metering. Profits and customers followed, and Insull’s advocacy of regulated monopoly grew his companies and, arguably, was influential to AT&T’s structure in the coming decades.

A very well produced video (36 minutes long) of a high end carbon fiber mountain bike being fabricated and assembled. A few notes were raised in The Prepared’s paid subscriber Slack about this (thanks, Russ): The interior walls of the frame are formed using poly bags & expanded polystyrene forms (as opposed to custom latex bladders), and the video doesn’t show either the forms or the bags being removed. If they aren’t removed during production, it would mean that in addition to some pretty slick cable routing, the frame tubes have plastic bags and styrofoam forms inside of them for the entire life of the bike. As someone who built custom bikes professionally in a previous life, this strikes me as a non-crazy (but notable) tradeoff.
GM/Ventec delivered the first ~54 ventilators, of 30,000.

A quick video of Jeff Koons’ big Play-Doh sculpture being assembled.
A well told history of the Mark XIV Torpedo (see also its Wikipedia page), an American anti-ship torpedo used by submarines in WWII. In 1942-1943, the Mark XIV was plagued with extremely poor performance, especially in conditions (e.g. a broadside attack) that were ostensibly ideal; troubleshooting the myriad underlying issues was difficult.
Rocket Lab is apparently planning to catch their Electron rockets’ first stages with helicopters as they fall back to Earth.

Photos of an Air Canada 777-300ER being converted from passenger to cargo (PPE transport, apparently) use. Related, an overview of the European Aviation Safety Agency’s guidelines for how to load cargo on a passenger jet with seats still installed.
Yeast has been in short supply in my neighborhood, but I was able to find some dark rye flour for a sourdough starter and baked my first loaf with it yesterday (I know, groan, whatever). In SF, someone portioned out his starter and taped it to telephone poles for others to adopt; check this Google Map for real time locations of his and other folks’ starters.
A totally mesmerizing POV video of a piece of luggage being routed through the Schiphol Airport automated conveyor system.

A fun, point by point comparison of the processing power inside the Apollo 11 guidance computers vs. commonly available USB-C chargers. For most applications, “the Anker PowerPort Atom PD 2 USB-C Wall Charger CPU is 563 times faster than the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer.”
A pretty detailed inspection report, done by Bose when users complained of issues with noise cancellation after a software update on their QC 35 headphones. Related, the mouth simulators they use during testing can be had on eBay for under $1k.
“SUVs were the second largest contributor to the increase in global carbon emissions from 2010 to 2018.”
The Wikipedia page for Units of textile measurement. Among many other terms: Denier is the mass in grams per 9000 meters of a fiber, which sounds arbitrary until you learn that a 9000 meter length of silk fiber has a mass of 1 gram. Hence, 500 denier cordura nylon is made from fibers that are 500x as massive per unit length as silk.

A quick, frenetic, playful video of a bunch of switches and buttons being pressed. The first ~19 seconds of this are a CNC controller; Russ points out that it appears to be an old Mitsubishi Meldas.
DJ Premier and RZA did a producer battle on Instagram Live, and it’s hacky and charming and basically just two middle aged dudes playing records and reminiscing. There’s a Spotfiy playlist that recaps it, but I recommend playing the battle video in a background tab and checking in on the comments from time to time - basically everyone from the 90s hip hip world tuned in. Totally fun.
Nora and I have been watching a lot of Li Ziqi videos on YouTube, which depict a young Sichuanese woman making traditional handicrafts & complex meals from scratch, including farming many of her raw ingredients. The first one we watched was mapo tofu; this bamboo sofa is also pretty cool.
Venkatesh is looking for estimates of the average number of unique products per household by region; the size of a household’s BOM, if you will. If you think you know how to answer this, please keep me on copy - I’m super curious about it.

Thanks as always to our recurring donors for supporting The Prepared. Thanks also to the following readers for sending links: Colin, Russ, Kevin, Reilly, Zak, Mark, Jacob, Richard, John, Eric, Kyle, Robert, George.

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