The Prepared.

Notes.

Wayfinding & Strategy.

• Tesla's new Master Plan. You should probably read this.
• How Charles Kao, by asking what was possible (as opposed to what had been done previously), beat Bell Labs and ultimately developed the whole field of fiberoptics.
• The Lowline got its first official approval from the NYCEDC.
• The FDA released new guidelines for nutrition labels, and stuck with Helvetica despite widespread opposition. Why? So that small producers don't need to buy new font packs.
• Bunnie Huang is suing the US Government to challenge section 1201 of the DMCA.
• ARM was acquired by SoftBank.

Making & Manufacturing.

• A nice, short video of Dyson manufacturing & testing their new autonomous vacuums. I *want* one of these robots.
• A new kind of mirror for cubesats, constructed of carbon nanotubes and epoxy resin.
• A great conversation with Dave Rauchwerk about CHIP, the $9 computer.
• A quick shout-out to Manufacturing Porn, which I've been following for a couple of months and have found at least a couple of links from. Good shit!

Distribution & Logistics.

• The Strategic National Stockpile warehouse stores supplies for all sorts of emergency situations.
• SpaceX is requesting two additional rocket landing pads in Orlando. I hadn't even thought of this - that the Falcon Heavy, with its three separate boosters, will need three landing pads available.
• The head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration essentially said that it's okay for autonomous vehicles to be imperfect - as long as they're better than humans are.

Inspection & Testing.

• Lucas emailed me this week to ask if I had any go-to tomes on quality/metrology, and I came up blank. Know one? Holler.
• Ben Wellington found a $791MM error in the NYC budget.

Tangents.

• I reread Wallace Stevens' 1954 poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" this week, and continue to *really* enjoy it. There's something great about the way he takes an abstract approach to such a weird combination of concrete things.
• Anil Dash on NYC's tech ecosystem as a place that's concerned with things other than *just* tech.
• I listened to a bunch of Malcolm Gladwell's new podcast this week, which I enjoyed. I'd recommend starting with The Big Man Can't Shoot, which ends up being about how Wilt Chamberlain was too concerned with what people thought of him.

And.