Magnitude and Direction — Issue #152
New wood joints, facetune for handwriting, and tomatoes in space
Welcome to the latest installment of my bi-weekly newsletter, covering some of my favorite new developments in the fields of biotech, data science, engineering, and more. If this is your first issue, it's great to have you! For everyone else, thanks for coming back!
If you like this email, forward it to a friend (I can't encourage this enough) and if you're seeing it for the first time, subscribe here to get it regularly. As always, if you come across something cool you'd like to share, send me a note.
Notes
Soooo.... this edition got totally left by the wayside amidst the very events the previous edition listed. For anyone who non-ironically uses this newsletter as a bi-weekly confirmation of life, I'm here to let you know a few days late that rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated. All this being said, Tuesday is allegedly the best day of the week for reading emails, so let's see if that holds true here.
Oh, and this edition’s font is called GothicE.
Jobs
No new job postings in this edition. Check out previous editions for earlier listing.
Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication
🕯️ This tiny volumetric display uses some creative design choices to get down to scale.
🪓 This slick bit of wood joinery design takes advantage of the capabilities of laser cutting to produce a strong, but hardware-free joint.
💥🚗 Rethinking the designs of intersections and installing bike lanes has helped Hoboken eliminate traffic deaths for over half a decade.
🧥 In the past month, it feels like this coat hanger has taken the internet by storm.
Software and Programming
✍️ Perfect Freehand is like facetune for your handwriting.
🤖 This is what an LLM looks like.
💬 If your ego is extremely fragile, you can send "blue bubble" messages from your Android phone for just $2/month.
Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine
👂 More than one in ten adults has tinnitus, and a new study on its origins may help scientists figure out a cure.
🛰️🍅 There's not much space up on the ISS (no pun intended), but it's apparently roomy enough to lose a tomato for almost a year.
Mapping, History, and Data Science
📧🐦 Next time you need to send an email in Europe, you might want to consider using a carrier pigeon instead.
📹 Smart doorbells like Ring have never made it easier to get eyewitness footage of crime, but that wealth of information may not be converting to any changes in public safety.
🚇 This visualization of Boston's subway data is as informative as it is beautiful (and I'd like the creators to do NYC next).
Events and Opportunities
Thursday 12/14 (+ Weekly on Thursday) Starta Fall 2023 Pitch Contests. Join Starta Accelerator for their weekly Fall 2023 Pitch Contests, where founders hone their startups' pitch in front of a panel of judges consisting of VCs, angels ,and industry experts. After the presentations, there will be time for Q&A followed by networking with other frontrunners, entrepreneurs and investors of the NYC startup scene.
Thursday, 12/14 3rd Annual Hardware Holiday Party at NewLab. The NYC Hardware Meetup is back at Newlab with Informal for their annual Hardware Holiday Party! This year the meetup is also partnering with the NY Robotics Network to put this event on. As is the holiday tradition, there’ll be good beer, nice wines, delicious food, and a live jazz band playing holiday classics. Attire is informal and holiday sweaters are highly encouraged. Bonus points if yours lights up or has interactive elements!
⭐Saturday, 1/20/24 Mouthy Baby Returns to Arlene's Grocery! Coming off a jam-packed double-set at the Brooklyn Music Kitchen, we're once again returning to another familiar venue with a headlining show at Arlene's Grocery. With our friends in Off Wing joining us on the lineup, you can be sure this show is gonna be packed to the gills and full of energy, so get your tickets before they run out!
Other events coming up you think I should know about? Let me know here!
Map of the Month
⏱️🏙️ I could spend hours playing around with this map that estimates how long it takes to get around NYC from anywhere else in NYC.