Hi all, happy Thursday.  It’s been a couple weeks as I’ve been doing some traveling and moving.  So without further delay, here are some of the links I’ve found to be most interesting since last time.
 

Hurricane Harvey

⛈🌊 Evacuations of large cities are not realistic / sustainable plans to avoid storms than humans are constantly making worse.  Referring to floods in terms of 100 or 500-year events is extremely misleading, as seen in Exhibit A: Harvey is the Houston’s third “500-year” flood in the past three years.

 

Automotive Industry

🚖🏰 Waymo's Castle base for training / simulating self-driving cars.

🤔 Winner takes all effects in autonomous cars, and implications on how proprietary vs. open-source autonomous software becomes. (Related Econtalk podcast with the author, Benedict Evans.


🏎 McLaren’s design chief on auto design.


Manufacturing

🛠⚡️Why electricity took so long to make manufacturing more productive.  Artificial intelligence allows for 'cognification' of future devices as the power grid enabled 'electrification', so it will be interesting to see if the same productivity paradox applies.


🔩🏗An explanation of how iron / carbon percentages and cooling rates account for the differences in properties of various grades of steel.


📃💡Flexible electronics now allow lights and toys to be made from paper.

Cool Patterns

🌀 Cool ferrofluid patterns.


🦑 A nearly invisible wild translucent cockatoo squid.


💥Laser Cut Wooden Sculptures.