2021-07-19

Notes, 2021-07-19.

Pandemic isolation has taught me that my drive to make things is inextricably social. I have tried many times over the past months to find a project that would transport me into the joyous flow state of experimentation and creation - but only managed to make colossal messes alone in my apartment before losing all interest.

Radio is a technology that connects us across distance, so there is some irony to the fact that tinkering with crystal radios is the hobby that is bringing me back into face to face interaction. With hand built coils of magnet wires and shards of crystal, I can tap into the vast invisible oscillations of the electromagnetic spectrum. Now that I am fully vaccinated, I am planning radio hacking sessions with friends exploring coil design, radio telescopes, and DIY diodes. If we go into another lockdown, maybe we can communicate with our staticky homebrew builds.

-Hillary Predko

The most clicked link from last week's issue (~11% of opens) was a photo roundup of naval ship cats in tiny hammocks.

In The Prepared's Members' Slack, plans for local meetups are starting to percolate. The snappily named MMOTBACOTP (monthly meeting of the Bay Area chapter of The Prepared) wrapped up their second hangout this past weekend; I'll be hosting some outdoor gatherings in Toronto and Montreal in the coming months; there will be a NYC Members' hangout at The Prepared's shop on 2021-07-30; and Seattle Members will be meeting up the last week in August.

Planning & Strategy.

• The Giant Mine, a decommissioned gold mine outside of Yellowknife in Canada’s arctic, produced 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide as a byproduct in its 50 years of operation. The plan for remediation looks 50 years into the future and involves freezing the lethal dust in a block of permafrost and storing it underground. This report argues sites like the Giant Mine need planning and funding for perpetual care and the chilling reality is that full remediation is beyond current scientific knowledge, technologies, and available resources. After an extensive literature review, the author concludes that the only thing that papers about toxic waste agree upon is the fact we have a big problem on our hands.
• In 2019-03-04 I covered QuadrigaCX, a crypto exchange that became insolvent after its founder’s sudden death. A new podcast series untangles the bizarre series of events and shady strategies behind the exchange, relying on the years of investigative work by customers who lost considerable amounts of money.
• Big Oil companies are turning to influencer marketing to clean up their image.

Making & Manufacturing.

• Canada Goose has announced they will phase out all new fur in their parkas by the end of 2022. Their press release vaguely gestures toward sustainability as the primary factor in this decision. However, it isn’t clear cut whether fur or faux-fur has a lower environmental impact, particularly with animals that are trapped in the wild. Trapping associations point out that the coyote population that supplies Canada Goose will continue to be culled by local governments, and the reduced market for their fur means an increased financial burden on taxpayers. This move also increases the demand for petrochemical derived faux-fur. With inconclusive evidence to support the sustainability of faux-fur, it’s likely that pressure from animal rights activists influenced this decision more than Canada Goose’s PR department would like to disclose publicly.
• In 2020-08-03, I shared these parametric template makers for boxes, bags, and polyhedra. This is a similar set of tools, focused on templates for dimensional material rather than paper.
• This paper outlines four kinds of counterfeiting: knockoffs, reverse engineered counterfeits, nonconforming goods that make it to market, and goods produced by suppliers on third shifts. Third shift or ghost shift products are produced by contractors who fill their customers' orders during the two day shifts and run an overnight shift producing the same product for the grey market. In 1999, New Balance terminated work with a Guangdong based contractor, who then refused to return tooling and other IP and continued to manufacture nearly identical shoes. Years of litigation ensued, but knockoffs have posed more long standing issues for the brand.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• This map tracks low-carbon hydrogen plants coming online around the world. Hydrogen can be used as fuel or for energy storage, so increasing commercial production is a valuable step in decarbonizing economies. However, only 28% of the projects listed are operational and there aren’t any tools for exploring production capacity. Of the projects that are in progress, completion dates are as far out as 2040.
• Thomassons are “architectural objects around the city which though maintained served no apparent purpose, aesthetic or otherwise.” Some of the best examples are shared by Japanese Instagram users.

Distribution & Logistics.

• I have had the North Korean CNC song (shared by David Cranor in 2021-05-31) stuck in my head for weeks. As the tune rattled around, I kept wondering why a military dictatorship was so invested in CNC tools. It turns out that military applications are likely central. Nonproliferation experts use DPRK propaganda photos from factory tours to speculate on the true uses of their fleet of CNC machines, which are a fundamental technological driver for developing a centrifuge program to support nuclear development. By analyzing photos from factories, these experts are trying to understand the military logistics and technological base of North Korea. While it is impossible to determine if the machines and materials in factory photos are irrefutably involved in manufacturing centrifuges, they conclude that North Korea is less dependent on foreign sources of support for its uranium enrichment program than it has been in the past.
  
  In 2013, North Korean CNC manufacturer Ryonha Machinery was placed on the UN’s sanctions list for involvement in weapons production. The precision of domestic machines can’t be verified but 2016 state media photos depicted a factory using Swiss built ABB CNC machines, acquired by circumventing sanctions. Contemporary analysis shows rapid progress in North Korea's weapons program, which is likely supported by CNC capabilities.

Inspection, Testing & Analysis.

• This project monitors sourdough starter health and provides a readout on an e-ink display.
• In the late 1980s, the speed of Japan’s Shinkansen train was limited by noise regulations. Displaced air was generating loud tunnel booms, disrupting neighboring communities that called for strict limits to noise levels. The general manager of the Shinkansen technical development department, Dr. Eiji Nakatsu, is a bird watcher. His approach to improving performance and cutting down on noise was inspired by successful strategies he had observed birding.
  
  Owls fly silently thanks to serration feathers, which break up air vortices and therefore reduce noise. Dr. Nakatsu's team analyzed the feather structure in wind tunnel experiments employing a taxidermied owl. Similar serrations were painstakingly translated to the trains’ redesigned pantograph, the structure that connects the train to the overhead electrical wires. His team was also intrigued by kingfishers, birds that dive from low resistance air to high resistance water without a splash. The redesigned nose of the Shinkansen, which greatly limits air displacement, was perfected through large-scale tests and analysis and resulted in a shape that is nearly identical to a kingfisher's beak. The new 500-series Shinkansen successfully applied biomimicry to reduce air pressure by 30%, eliminating the tunnel boom. These changes also cut electricity use by 15%, and speeds increased by 10%.
• The Materials Project is an open access database of material properties with tools for automated screening. The project aims to accelerate the loop of materials design, synthesis, and characterization and quickly identify likely materials for challenging applications like battery chemistry, photovoltaics, or data storage.

Tangents.

• Dead Start Up Toys offers miniature recreations of some of the most iconic product flops of the 2010s.
• In Finland, about 4,000 reindeer are killed annually by vehicles. Herders began painting the animals' antlers with retroreflective coatings which look stunning but unfortunately haven’t reduced road deaths.

‘24h Sunrise/Sunset’ displays beautiful views from unsecured CCTV cameras.