Manufacturing guy-at-large.

In the jar

Added on by Spencer Wright.

When we started The Public Radio, we planned on making it look sleek and functional. My design aesthetic tends towards midcentury modern, and brushed aluminum is kind of the standard bearer for that class of objects. But after an hour or two of talking, we realized that the type of customer that we wanted to appeal to would probably never pay the kind of pricetag we'd need to charge for the product we wanted to build.

Plus: If cuteness allows you to be effective, maybe you should get over yourself and just do it.

So it's a radio in a Mason jar. It's cute, and it allowed us to iterate quickly and inexpensively.

A few months ago, I put an MVP together (an iPod + a simple amp) and threw it in a jar with a speaker. Since then, The Public Radio has been mostly an idea, or at best a breadboarded, hacked-together mess of wire. While cool to the two of us, it hasn't been much to look at - iPhone headphones and all.

Over the past few weeks, I've gotten the lid design & potentiometer figured out. Meanwhile, each of us has been learning about register addresses & trying to strip our firmware of everything unnecessary. So yesterday, after much ado, we finally wired up the switch and speaker to the rest of the ratsnest and got the thing mocked up.

Quickly, then, the goal was to get it into the jar right away. So a bit of protoboard and a little more fiddling, and we were able to squeeze it in.

To backtrack a bit: It's worth noting that our current state - an Arduino Pro Mini and a couple of Sparkfun breakout boards - is a step backwards from where we were a few months ago. If you'll recall, there was a time that we were putting discrete components on our own PCB. But we had a few issues with our circuit design, and regardless we realized that we had aimed too high on our MVP. So we went back to off-the-shelf components and protoboard, with the intention of doing some basic product validation. Which I dare say we're getting close to.

The next step here is to make a few more of these things and start showing them off. I made some revisions to the lid the other day, and Zach has already ordered a new custom PCB (basically a breakout board with a few screw terminals on it) that'll replace the protoboard here.

We'll have three of these, plus a few more speakers & pots, in the next week or so. In the meantime we've been scheming about the next steps: having the lids die cut out of brushed stainless steel; getting rid of the Arduino and building the radio out of a ATtiny + the Si4702 + a class-D amp; world domination, etc. 

It's hard not to get ahead of yourself sometimes, but I prefer to keep my mind at a point where I'm aware of which questions to ask just before I need to ask them :)

More Kahneman

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Again, from "Thinking, Fast and Slow." Again, emphasis mine.

Reciprocal links are common in the associative network. For example, being amused tends to make you smile, and smiling tends to make you feel amused. Go ahead and take a pencil, and hold it between your teeth for a few seconds with the eraser pointing to your right and the point to the left. Now hold the pencil so the point is aimed straight in front of you, by pursing your lips around the eraser end. You were probably unaware that one of these actions forced your face into a frown and the other into a smile. College students were asked to rate the humor of cartoons from Gary Larson's The Far Side while holding a pencil in their mouth. Those who were "smiling" (without any awareness of doing so) found the cartoons funnier than did those who were "frowning." In another experiment, people whose face was shaped into a frown (by squeezing their eyebrows together) reported an enhanced emotional response to upsetting pictures - starving children, people arguing, maimed accident victims.

Simple, common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings. In one demonstration, people were asked to listen to messages through new headphones. They were told that the purpose of the experiment was to test the quality of the audio equipment and were instructed to move their heads repeatedly to check for any distortions of sound. Half the participants were told to nod their head up and down while others were told to shake it side to side. The messages they heard were radio editorials. Those who nodded (a yes gesture) tended to accept the message they heard, but those who shook their head tended to reject it. Again, there was no awareness, just a habitual connection between attitude of rejection or acceptance and its common physical expression. You can see why the common admonition "act calm and kind regardless of how you feel" is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind. 

These are lessons that I should fully integrate into my everyday life. All the time I find myself scrunching my eyebrows and pursing my lips, and I'm sure it effects my overall mood. I imagine that I seem to see my work as a curse to be endured, whereas I truly enjoy and relish it... Kahneman leaves me somewhat unsure, though at least he gives a clear remedy.

=> :-)

Kahneman

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From "Thinking, Fast and Slow." Emphasis mine.

If you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to pronounce. Participants in an experiment were asked to evaluate the prospects of fictitious Turkish companies on the basis of reports from two brokerage firms. For each stock, one of the reports came from an easily pronounced name (e.g., Artan) and the other report came from a firm with an unfortunate name (e.g., Taahhut). The reports sometimes disagreed. The best procedure for the observers would have been to average the two reports, but this is not what they did. They gave much more weight to the report from Artan than to the report from Taahhut. Remember that System 2 is lazy and that mental effort is aversive. If possible, the recipients of your message want to stay away from anything that reminds them of effort, including a source with a complicated name.

Old & New

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Christy and I have been making progress on the wallet :)

Center front is the latest version. On the right is one we made a few weeks back, but which needed a few modifications. In the back is the original version, which I made completely by hand in 2010 (it's been in my pocket for most of the time since then).

Throughout, the parts are vegetable tanned tooling leather. On the two new ones, we had the parts laser cut - but I'm not sure we'll be doing this for the production version.

We'll be finding suppliers of whole sides in the next few weeks, as well as looking into steel rule dies for making parts, etc. Expect updates.

SFO

Added on by Spencer Wright.

San Francisco: I will be in you 12.24-12.26. Holler at me.

This photograph, of the Golden Gate Bridge, was taken by my parents sometime in 1976-1977. 

Placebophiles

Added on by Spencer Wright.

This is definitely worth reading: Rob McGinley Myers on placebophilia. He takes his erstwhile obsession with audio equipment as an example - one in which he eventually concludes that "he was listening to his equipment rather than music."

It's easy to sneer at the placebo effect, or to feel ashamed of it when you're its victim. And that's precisely why I found Felix Salmon's piece revelatory, because instead of sneering at the placebo effect of fancy wine, its marketing, and its slightly higher prices, he thinks we should take advantage of it. If the placebo effect makes us happy, why not take advantage of that happiness? The more you spend on a wine, the more you like it. It really doesn’t matter what the wine is at all. But when you’re primed to taste a wine which you know a bit about, including the fact that you spent a significant amount of money on, then you’ll find things in that bottle which you love ... After all, what you see on the label, including what you see on the price tag, is important information which can tell you a lot about what you’re drinking. And the key to any kind of connoisseurship is informed appreciation of something beautiful.

...

Maybe each of these activities (listening to high end audio gear, drinking high end wine, having needles inserted into your chakras) is really about ritualizing a sensory experience. By putting on headphones you know are high quality, or drinking expensive wine, or entering the chiropractor's office, you are telling yourself, "I am going to focus on this moment. I am going to savor this." It's the act of savoring, rather than the savoring tool, that results in both happiness and a longer life.

Dog

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Yesterday, or something.

Dog is generally a lot of fun in the snow :)

I guess I'm naive, but I hadn't thought that the road salt would be as much of a hindrance as it has been the past few weeks. It only takes a block or two and I notice him limping around - something I rarely saw when we lived in the country. I even went so far as to buy him some booties, which has no joke increased the number of girls smiling at us/him by 5000%.

Short!

Added on by Spencer Wright.

The Public Radio is now shorter :)

We've been working on fitting everything into the next size down jar for a little while, and this afternoon we made a few steps in that direction. To celebrate, I spent a few hours modeling the target jar. 

The previous model was one of my first surface models, and I hacked it together *hard.* In the meantime I've gotten a lot more experience with NURBS, and it was great banging this out quickly. It's a lot more realistic in many ways, though I did half-ass the Ball logo a bit.

On the electronics front, Zach cranked out a new board design and we should be ordering a new PCB tomorrow. I also ordered new lids (one based on the new design, which is heading in the direction of sheet metal stamping). Meanwhile we've got a breadboarded version running, though it's a bit unwieldy. 

Expect more in the next week.

Public Radio Progress

Added on by Spencer Wright.

More on the electronics side soon (we had some good progress today), but for now just a few images.

I spent a bit of time today remodeling the lid to account for a few slight changes. The real rationale has to do with the potentiometer, which needed to be reoriented slightly. In the meantime I laid the speaker holes out a bit differently, and I'm pleased with the result.

I hope to have the whole thing together & in a jar by the middle of this coming week - finally! 

Diamonds are Bullshit

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From "Diamonds are Bullshit," 2013.05.19 by Rohin Dhar of Priceonomics.com. Emphasis mine.

And so, in 1938, De Beers turned to Madison Avenue for help. They hired Gerold Lauck and the N. W. Ayer advertising agency, who commissioned a study with some astute observations. Men were the key to the market:

Since “young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings” it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship...

...Lauck needed to sell a product that people either did not want or could not afford. His solution would haunt men for generations. He advised that De Beers market diamonds as a status symbol:

 ”The substantial diamond gift can be made a more widely sought symbol of personal and family success — an expression of socio-economic achievement.”

…

"Promote the diamond as one material object which can reflect, in a very personal way, a man’s … success in life."

This article also contains an interesting discussion of the price economics of diamonds, which due to their complicated and subjective valuations end up being remarkably poor investment vehicles. Interesting stuff.

The Reserve.

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From "Analysis of Reserve and Regular Bottlings: Why Pay for a Difference Only the Critics Claim to Notice?" Published by Roman Weil, Co-Chairman, Oenonomy Society of the US, 2013.05.16. Emphasis mine.

The wine maker harvests the grapes, sorting the best from the ordinary. At the end of the harvest, the pile of ordinary grapes exceeds the size of the pile of the best grapes, often by a factor of more than five. The wine maker takes special care in turning those best grapes into wine, bottles it separately, labels it differently, calls it the Reserve Bottling, to distinguish it from the bottling of wine made from the ordinary grapes, and offers it for sale at a price from as little as 40 percent higher to as much as three times the price of the regular bottlings. The process of sorting ordinary from best may involve the wine maker's selecting barrels of grape juice after the press or after some aging, or from sorting wines grown on one plot differently from another plot. One way or another, the wine maker distinguishes regular wine from similar, putatively great wine, with a reserve designation, perhaps using a different word, but the same concept.

Here, I report my tests of wine testers' ability to distinguish reserve bottlings from regular. My results show that:

  • just over 40 percent of my wine tester subjects can distinguish in blind tastings the regular from the reserve versions of a wine, whereas one-third could if the process was random, and
  • of those who can distinguish, half prefer the reserve and just under half prefer the regular.

Conclusion: Wine drinkers cannot distinguish much better than chance between regular and reserve versions of a wine. Those who can distinguish the difference do not prefer the more expensive reserve except at random. In only a fifth of the tests could the tester both distinguish the regular from the reserve and prefer to drink the more expensive reserve.

Later, on the experimental methods:

Most of the testers were either MBA students at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago or its alumni, alumnae, and their companions. They are primarily upper middle-class, experienced and enthusiastic wine drinkers, but not experts. All testers paid an entry fee for the testing, which fee covered full costs of the testing, and in the case of some of the alumni, more.

And later still:

What to do with these results? ...If you serve the reserve wine, be sure to show your guests the label, because the chances are four to one against any one person's being impressed by the taste, so that any warm feelings the guest forms of your generosity will likely come from visual, not olfactory and taste, stimuli.

Currently

Added on by Spencer Wright.

I think this is technically workbench #4.

I spend quite a bit of time prototyping at my desk, and a lot of stuff ends up behind me, here. Could be worse.

Massive

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From "Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man Behind Android," The New York Times, 2013.12.04. Emphasis mine.

“The opportunity is massive,” said Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business. “There are still people who walk around in factories and pick things up in distribution centers and work in the back rooms of grocery stores.”

What McAfee is saying here is totally nontrivial. All around the world and across every sector of the economy there are human beings performing menial tasks.

Until I see evidence that menial work is useful for more than building character, I'm all for ending that.

Control

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From "Why Gamers Can't Stop Playing First-Person Shooters," by Maria Konnikova, New Yorker Online. Emphasis mine.

Control, compounded by a first-person perspective, may be the key to the first-person shooter’s enduring appeal. A fundamental component of our happiness is a sense of control over our lives. It is, in fact, “a biological imperative for survival,” according to a recent review of animal, clinical, and neuroimaging evidence. The more in control we think we are, the better we feel; the more that control is taken away, the emotionally worse off we become. In extreme cases, a loss of control can lead to a condition known as learned helplessness, in which a person becomes helpless to influence his own environment. And our sense of agency, it turns out, is often related quite closely to our motor actions: Do our movements cause a desired change in the environment? If they do, we feel quite satisfied with ourselves and with our personal effectiveness. First-person shooters put our ability to control the environment, and our perception of our effectiveness, at the forefront of play.