2021-01-11

Notes, 2021-01-11.

It should go without saying, but I oppose violent threats to democracy.

I’ll be working on The Prepared’s 2020-Q4 report for Members this week; I’ll also be quashing loose ends from my plan for December, attempting to dig myself out of an email hole, and trying generally to maintain a sense of calm.

-Spencer Wright

The most clicked link from last week's issue (~13% of opens) was an apparently legal homemade "hail cannon" that's been bothering neighbors in NJ.

Planning & Strategy.

• Site Selection is the magazine of corporate expansion and area economic development - in other words, the magazine devoted to helping corporations select new sites to expand their operations to. Recent headlines include Kansas: The Biggest Economic Engine You Haven’t Heard Of, Mississippi: Hello World, We’re Mississippi, and an intelligence report on Long Island (where I grew up) that brags about it as “an international hub for the pharma industry and has thriving tech, beverage and manufacturing segments.”
• Another good article on the Avro Arrow, the impressive Canadian fighter jet that cost the equivalent of $7.5B USD in today’s dollars and was cancelled after just a handful of units were built. The first Arrow was unveiled the same day that Sputnik launched, and “within hours of the Arrow’s cancellation” the head of NASA’s Space Task Group reached out to Avro’s chief of technical design “with the offer of bringing former Arrow engineers to NASA to work on the fledgling space program.” Thirty-two of them eventually took job offers, with many becoming totally critical to what would become the Apollo program. “By cancelling the Arrow program when he did, Deifenbaken inadvertently gave the American space program its most fortuitous break since when Wernher von Braun found and surrendered to American troops after the Second World War.”
• From last summer, a piece on BP’s climate goals and diversification into renewable projects. Meanwhile, “for [Exxon and Mobil], rushing to renewables - where they have no competitive advantage and see smaller returns in a more regulated industry - is not the answer.”
• It has of course been covered elsewhere, but the National Association of Manufacturers’ statement on last week’s riot, Trump, and the 25th amendment is more strongly worded and than you’d think.

Making & Manufacturing.

• Four good videos showing how progressive stamping works and how progressive dies are designed.
• A terrible quality but engaging old episode of The Woodwright’s Shop, which focuses on rustic workbenches. I especially like the “log on legs,” which feels like it’d be equally useful in a basement and in a backyard.
• Beck Fastener Group is selling wooden nails which are compatible with pneumatic nail guns and which, when installed, have the effect of welding the nail to the wood surrounding it. The nails are apparently also possible to install by hand, though that does not produce the welding effect. Note that the nails cost about $0.15/ea, which is something around 10x what conventional nails for framing guns run. Related: See this video on linear friction welding of wood, and this article on how radio frequency can be used as a method of speeding up cure times on traditional wood glues.
• A fairly good corporate history video from ASML, the Philips spinoff that makes the photolithography equipment used to make, like, all of the microchips everywhere.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• A good, short twitter thread on snow removal operations in Montreal, QC. “The city spends more than any other in the world on picking up snow and putting down salt on its 10,000 km of roads: in 2019–20, its snow removal budget hit $166.4 million...Plowing snow is a 1,000-person & 1,000-truck project; removing it takes another 3,000 people & 2,200 trucks.”

Distribution & Logistics.

• A detailed and technical set of notes on the supply chains of the Phizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
• A *very* intriguing in-browser traffic simulator which allows you to play with input variables and move obstacles around a variety of highway scenarios (onramp, offramp, roundabout, construction etc).
• A quick video of a drop seeder, a simple tool that quickly distributes seeds into a flat of seed pots.

Inspection, Testing & Analysis.

• A nerdy overview of how manufacturers of bath and facial tissue (i.e. TP and Kleenex) measure and optimize both strength and softness. One new-to-me term in this piece: The concept of “away-from-home” grades of tissue products, which of course are sold at lower price points and therefore are engineered for very high production rates.
• NASA Goddard’s complete radiation test data, which contains radiation characterization tests on ~1600 electronic components.
• Something I had never thought about: How insects might muck up the cameras and LIDAR scanners that auto companies are using to sense driving conditions.

Tangents.

• The Members’ reading group will wrap up our discussion of The Perfectionists (which has been very popular) tomorrow; we’ll be starting a new book shortly. I’m also reading Neighborhood Defenders, and am hoping to spend time this week with three books I got via The Prepared’s Members’ holiday book exchange.
• The first ever recorded human death by robot was on 1979-01-25, when Robert Williams was killed in Ford’s Flat Rock, MI casting plant.

Photos of how Trumpf, Zeiss, and ASML create extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment for chip fabs.