Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.
-Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Manufacturing guy-at-large.
Logo
I remember wanting my logo *so* *much.*
Throughout its development, I worked with Grady Klein, who was a great collaborator and communicator.
When I was younger
I built this frame in 2008. It was the first belt drive bike I built, and hence it was an experiment that I financed on my nonexistent R&D budget. I probably spent $2500 on it, plus something like 40 hours of build time. But that paled in comparison to the time I spent *thinking* about it, which was likely in the 80 hour range. I also developed the graphic design myself, teaching myself Illustrator in the process - add another 20-30 hours there.
I like the bike. It was a pain in the ass, a challenge. I tested out a bunch of new things on it - the S&S seatstay coupling, a new waterjet head tube badge, a new (fancy) paint job with painted-on graphics. I think it came out great, though paint isn't exactly notable for its durability, and now the frame - despite being woefully underused - is chipped and scratched in all manner of places.
Regardless, I love it. I don't know what I thought I was doing, but I fucking took this bike on, and I'm proud of myself that the project being a bit over my head - and over my budget - didn't stop me.
Sloane
Mia Sara blew my mind.
Innovators Patent Agreement
From Twitter's Blog (emphasis mine):
The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.
This is a significant departure from the current state of affairs in the industry. Typically, engineers and designers sign an agreement with their company that irrevocably gives that company any patents filed related to the employee’s work. The company then has control over the patents and can use them however they want, which may include selling them to others who can also use them however they want. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon.
Bezos
From the Amazon Shareholder Letter, 1998:
During our hiring meetings, we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision:
Will you admire this person?
If you think about the people you’ve admired in your life, they are probably people you’ve been able to learn from or take an example from. For myself, I’ve always tried hard to work only with people I admire, and I encourage folks here to be just as demanding. Life is definitely too short to do otherwise.
Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering?
We want to fight entropy. The bar has to continuously go up. I ask people to visualize the company 5 years from now. At that point, each of us should look around and say, “The standards are so high now -- boy, I’m glad I got in when I did!”
Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?
Many people have unique skills, interests, and perspectives that enrich the work environment for all of us. It’s often something that’s not even related to their jobs. One person here is a National Spelling Bee champion (1978, I believe). I suspect it doesn’t help her in her everyday work, but it does make working here more fun if you can occasionally snag her in the hall with a quick challenge: “onomatopoeia!”
The damage done by tornadoes
4D Printing & Self Assembly
Skylar Tibbits is awesome.
From the video notes:
This project investigates chiral self-assembly with many parts in order to explore the aggregate behavior of simultaneous assembly and self-selection. 240 pieces are agitated to self-assemble closed molecular structures. The continual process shows the various stages of assembly from independent parts to fully assembled structures.
This work points towards a future of both tangible educational tools for scientific phenomena as well as new possibilities for industrial-scale assembly.
Skylar Tibbits has some pretty awesome stuff on Vimeo. This one is beautiful:
Here he explains his work at the MIT Self Assembly lab, and shows a few other cool projects:
Awesome robots
These things self-assemble into different shapes. Pretty awesome.
Chris
I know it's hard to tell, but this is Chris, engraving some parts on my old pantograph in early 2010.
I like dark photos :)
The Character of Prediction Errors
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, pp.159-160.
Like many biological variables, life expectancy is from Mediocristan, that is, it is subjected to mild randomness. It is not scalable, since the older we get, the less likely we are to live. In a developed country a newborn female is expected to die at around 79, according to insurance tables. When she reaches her 79th birthday, her life expectancy, assuming that she is in typical health, is another 10 years. At the age of 90, she should have another 4.7 years to go. At the age of 100, 2.5 years. At the age of 119, if she miraculously lives that long, she should have about nine months left. As she lives beyond the expected date of death, the number of additional years to go decreases. This illustrates the major property of random variables related to the bell curve. The conditional expectation of additional life drops as a person gets older.
With human projects and ventures we have another story. These are often scalable...With scalable variables, the ones from Extremistan, you will witness the exact opposite effect. Let's say a project is expected to terminate in 79 days, the same expectation in days as the newborn female has in years. On the 79th day, if the project is not finished, it will be expected to take another 25 days to complete. But on the 90th day, if the project is still not completed, it should have about 58 days to go. On the 100th, it should have 89 days to go. On the 119th, it should have an extra 149 days. On day 600, if the project is not done, you will be expected to need an extra 1,590 days. As you see, the longer you wait, the longer you will be expected to wait.
Let's say you are a refugee waiting for the return to your homeland. Each day that passes you are getting farther from, not closer to, the day of triumphal return. The same applies to the completion date of your next opera house. If it was expected to take two years, and three years later you are asking questions, do not expect the project to be completed any time soon. If wars last on average six months, and your conflict has been going on for two years, expect another few years of problems.
I enjoy Taleb's writing, but I often find his citations opaque. AFAICT, this is the only citation for the passage above:
If anyone can explain exactly what he's saying here, I hope they chime in - but, again, AFAICT, Taleb hasn't actually taken a survey of late projects to determine the numbers he quotes above. Again, I'd love to know if I'm mistaken here, and regardless I find his argument fascinating and compelling.
Aaron Dignan on The worst game ever.
Aaron Dignan, quoted by smartplanet earlier this year:
Imagine playing a game where you only get feedback once a year in an annual review? It would be the worst game ever. And yet, that’s the game we play at work.
My last job prioritized production over team feedback. It was, of course, not by design, and nobody would have actually articulated anything to that point, but looking back I regret not speaking up. But the nature of the company was that projects were sold before the infrastructure to deliver them was in place, and the result was that we were - at least during my time there - always behind schedule. Efforts were made to emphasize team building and open communication, but when projects are late by as much time as they were originally projected to be completed in, it's difficult to put much energy into anything but hurrying the hell up.
In the end, I was complicit in these tendencies as well. I can distinctly recall the spacey way in which I would listen to my reports talk about their families; I absorbed as much as I needed in order to ask a question from time to time, but I wouldn't say I put a ton of effort into *really* hearing them. I was careful to provide positive feedback when warranted (and negative feedback when necessary), but our product's long term prospects were too hazy - and my own feelings about the company were too conflicted - for me to really engage in the discussions that I'm sure mattered most.
Parts
I took these photos in 2009, and meant to do something with them for a long time.
The seat lug remains unused, though I'd like to change that. The stem went on Ian's bike. The hand vise is actually very handy, though career shifts mean that I don't use it often anymore.
A good afternoon's work
This. Was fun.
Happy Friday, everyone.
What "honey" means
;)
Angela Ahrendts
From Fast Company's recap of their pre-Apple interviews with Apple's new consumer experience chief. Emphasis is mine.
On brand culture:
Everything we’ve done is counterintuitive to traditional selling organizations, with their traditional training. My dad used to always say that he could teach anything but he couldn’t teach how to feel. That’s the hardest part when you have 11,000 people: How do you teach them to feel how we feel? When I first started, we had no training programs--none of that. We had to put in world-class sales and service training programs. The thing is, I don’t want to be sold to when I walk into a store. I want to be welcomed. The job is to be a brilliant brand ambassador. Everybody is welcome. Don’t be judgmental whatsoever. Look them in the eyes. Welcome them. ‘How are you?’ Don’t sell! NO! Because that is a turnoff. So how do you hire all these amazing people and put them in a world-class retail setting and then say, ‘But you’re not allowed to sell’?! How do you put this whole digital team together and say, ‘But we are not doing any direct marketing to sell to you!’? The digital guys look at you like you’re nuts. But no, no, no, no, no. What we have wanted to do is build an amazing brand experience and an amazing way that people can engage with the brand. Then it will naturally happen. And then I don’t care where they buy. I only care that they buy the brand.
On desegregating digital from brick-and-mortar:
Traditionally, wholesale is wholesale. Digital people are incentivized to drive digital. And store managers are interested in the store. We blew that all up. I said, No, no, no, store manager in Detroit: You’re responsible for digital too. You’re telling me nobody in Detroit is shopping online? Wrong! Now London, for instance, every week has to report their online traffic and their offline traffic and what was their crossover. I hired a chief customer officer who came from Lloyds who built us a huge insights and analytics department. We put in traffic counters in all the stores, because I could get traffic online but I couldn’t get traffic offline and so I couldn’t get any crossover behaviors. We’ve got ten thousand iPads out there in the stores. And we’ve built this clienteling app. So if you buy in Hong Kong or if you went and bought online or even if you are just window-shopping and have stuff in your basket--we’ll know. Offline stores will be able to see all your behavior online. We are blurring the physical and digital, and it’s not just the retail experience. It is the service.
Fucking Fall.
From Secret Forts' conversation with Mikael Kennedy:
1) It’s fucking fall, it’s the best time of year. Period. Nothing makes me happier then the cold air starting to roll in and being able to dig all my warm clothes out of the back of my closet. I happened to be in Vermont last week shooting a music video for my wife just as the colors changed, it was stunning, I grew up there so I’ve seen it my whole life but it never ceases to amaze me. I got myself intentionally lost trying to cross as many mountains as I could on the way home without looking at a map, good times.
Rack Ends: Current design
I'll be writing more about how I'm going about procuring my stainless steel rack ends later, but I wanted to give an idea of the sorts of design files one needs to supply machine shops with in order to get quotes. A dimensioned (and toleranced!) PDF is always key:
N.B., my drawing template is pretty lame right now. Not having standard tolerances listed is a total no-no, but most manufacturers assume +/- .005" on any distance and +/- 1 degree angular - so I should be okay. I really just need to spend a morning setting up a new template, but that's fairly low on my priority list right now. Anyway... do as I say, not as I do.
I also usually include a STP file, but as a rule that's *only* for reference. I suppose that if you had a particularly strong relationship with a supplier and were sourcing a part with *only* standard tolerances, skipping the PDF would be okay... but that's a rare scenario.
Aaaand, thanks to my friends on Twitter, you can see the part in 3D here:
BK1008 Rack End from SpencerWright on Sketchfab.
More time reading
I heard this quote on yesterday's Marketplace (which - let's be honest - is totally underrated). The topic of conversation was (unsurprisingly) the debate surrounding the government shutdown, and Kai noted a conversation that he had with Lisa Goldenberg, COO of Delaware Steel, who was quoted:
I was on the phone with several presidents [of other steel companies] just this morning and everyone is saying they're spending more time reading and trying to figure out what's going on than actually transacting [business].
And I'm thinking: If you're lucky enough to run a company and *not* spend most of your time figuring out what's going on, kudos to you. But what portion of midsize manufacturers are really doing that? And as ideas and business models continue to turn over at an increasingly rapid pace (citation needed), how long will the companies whose C-Suites *don't* spend most of their time paying attention to trends be able to stay around?
My feeling: If you're on your game, you're constantly struggling to stay ahead. It's okay if that's not you - but it's important to be honest with yourself about the consequences.
Notes on a Square-shaped career
A jack, and his trades, on a quest for some type of mastery.
In the interest of self-congratulation, and because (who knows?) maybe it’s better to mix some parody into one’s résumé:
Things I have done in the past, and will do again if you pay me.
Worked in subzero conditions for days on end.
You know how they say some things build character? Well, being cold is miserable, but I always remember it fondly.
Demolished a load bearing wall.
This shit is tricky. You gotta build a temporary wall to keep the load supported, and then you get out your sledgehammer and knock the old wall out. Extra points if you actually *lift* the load up beforehand, using a bottle jack or similar.
Organized my music collection with a shell script.
Most practical use of my years on Linux. I had all these old Napster-era files on my hard drive and had (obsessively) named them all in a particular naming sequence (“Artist Name — Album Name — Track Number — Track Name”, if you must know). But a lot of them were just in the root of my “Music” directory, and I wanted them to be sorted into a directory structure that only halfway existed. So I wrote this script that identified all of the relevant fields in the filename and searched to see if the necessary file path existed, and then created it if it didn’t and moved the files into the right path. I was an amateur and spent like a weekend on the script. It executed (and probably sorted through a couple dozen gigabytes of music) in like five seconds.
(Shamelessly) done my own photography.
Hey, I’ve got nothing but love for your selfies. I spent *years* with a tripod and a remote trigger. About the best investment I ever made was a muslin backdrop, and I’ll curate & color correct the *hell* out of some soft-focus product shots.
Been to China.
Incredibly (and to no particular credit to myself), this is maybe my most marketable achievement in the past three years. I visited like ten factories while I was there, and was wooed by some number of dozens of potential suppliers of machined/extruded/moulded parts. I was apparently also charming enough to get a local girl to show me around working-class Pudong (in a non-romantic way). I was out of my element, and accidentally brilliant.
Spliced both three-strand twist *and* double braid rope.
Three strand is easy once you get the hang of it. Double braid rope comes in all varieties, and you really need to know what you’re working with to get it right.
Vetted SMT assembly shops.
Not that I knew the first thing about how SMT is done. But supplier vetting is more about understanding the people you’re talking to than it is about understanding the processes they’re performing.
Finished The Power Broker.
You want commitment? You got it.
Attended Edward Tufte’s one-day course.
Edward Tufte has a vanity gallery in Chelsea, and he seems pretty good at getting a couple dozen suckers to plunk down $380 to listen to him rap about information design for a few hours. Which, if you count my ability to gush about John Snow and claim expertise on the ways in which PowerPoint distorts intellectual discourse… Well, let’s just say it was money well spent.
Attended The Landmark Forum.
You have no idea how many things occur to me that.
Unlocked basically all the privacy settings on my Facebook page.
If you’re scared of hiring me because — gasp — there are pictures on the internet of me drinking beer with friends, well, move right along.
Had a letter to the editor published.
And let me tell you, there are some key phrases I wish I had reworded beforehand.
Been the president of a nonprofit.
You gotta watch out — speak up at the first meeting, and they just might call on you.
Derived the syntactical structure of sentences like “The man that the girl that is nice met is cool.”
If you don’t think that’s grammatical, well, check this out.
Made coq au vin.
Though I must say, chicken bones in my stew is a little weird.
Been at the helm, at the start of a race, in a 38' sailboat, when we crashed into the committee boat.
They were parked; we were probably doing 7-8 knots. Not my brightest moment. Everyone was okay, and after that was clear I accepted my lapse in judgment and got back at the helm.
Told a supplier that we were working on developing in-house capabilities in his field.
I had no idea how to splice rubber extrusion, but I pitched the idea to my bosses and eventually we figured it out. The supplier was really cool about it, too — we paid him a retainer and he taught us what he knew (which wasn’t very much) about the process. Rubber transfer moulding is really simple, but — even with our supplier’s support and advice — we struggled with the details for months. I still don’t understand precisely what is happening chemically as rubber cures, but in the end I guess that wasn’t really relevant.
Fired a subcontractor.
Guy was an asshole. I made a key mistake, though, and didn’t limit my list of reasons to “you’re an asshole.” If you’ve got that card, play it — and leave the rest to yourself.
Let my boss convince me to let an employee go.
This was a huge mistake. Ultimately he was right, but his lack of trust in my judgment was a harbinger of bad things to come.
Spent way too long sharpening a chisel.
But man, sharpening stuff on a Japanese style waterstone is so cool.
Stayed at home and written silly things for the internet.
:)
With apologies to Mike Arauz and his excellent post, Square-shaped is the new T-shaped.