Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication
Leonardo da Vinci's reputation for designing technologies that were way ahead of his time is pretty well known, and the feasibility of yet another design - and innovative bridge structure - has been proven to work.
In a recent issue of The Prepared, Spencer shared an article from the New York Times in 2011 covering how flooding in Thailand that year significantly disrupted the world's hard drive supply (a lot of hard drives were manufactured in Thailand back then, it turns out). An interesting side effect of the flooding was the spurring of our transition away from disk drives and towards solid state drives - a reminder that technological change and progress isn't always "man-made".
The McMaster-Carr API documentation: An M&D link so category-bending, that I've literally put it in its own dedicated space between the Hardware and Software sections.
Software and Programming
If you were worried about not having access to technology after the apocalypse happens, don't worry Collapse OS has got you covered.
⚖ For most of us, artificial intelligence and machine learning are probably most visible in the recommendations we get when we shop online or the videos we're promoted on social media. In the criminal justice system, however, these algorithms can determine who goes to jail and who doesn't. In a situation where the stakes couldn't be higher, the correlations these algorithms draw frequently lays bare the biases that are still baked into so much of our society.
Just in time for election season: How to spot deepfakes.
The last season of Silicon Valley started this past Sunday. In honor of that, here's the Startup Generator.
Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine
It's time to move beyond the p-value, and the plots that live or die by it.
⚗🧪 Don't forget, folks, everything is a chemical.
I was recently introduced to the work of Robert MacCurdy who is doing all kind of crazy things with multi-material 3D printing, including printing fully-formed hydraulics and soft robots.
Mapping, History, and Data Science
🥤♻ Everyone knows we throw away a lot of plastic, but it can be hard to really comprehend what those quantities mean. To help put it into perspective, Reuters put together an incredible data visualization that will leave you absolutely speechless. (It's remarkable how quickly New York would be absolutely suffocated under a mountain of the stuff.
From Topos (the folks who brought you the pizza analytics post from the last edition of M&D): Redrawing the boundaries of the 5 boroughs for the 21st century.
The Pudding is back with a new tool for data-driven UK pub crawls built around arcane themes of your choosing!
The Internet often seems like an invisible force connecting all of our devices to one another and to the breadth and depth of human knowledge. As these two maps show, however, it takes a lot of tangible hardware (mostly cables) to bring the world wide web to each of us.
Events and Opportunities
Looks like the horizon past these next two weeks is finally starting to slow down...
Friday-Sunday, 11/1-3 Join NIST and CCNY for a weekend-long hackathon focused on developing technologies to improve community safety and help the first responders who help keep us safe. All skill levels are welcome and $35,000 in cash prizes will be awarded at the end of the weekend.
Monday, 11/4 Brooklyn Law School hosts two of Mount Sinai's leading AI researchers (who also happen to be colleagues of mine) for a discussion on the role of law and policy in advancing medical AI research. It's not ever edition of M&D you get an event that sits at the intersection of law, government, and technology, so you should definitely try to make it out to this.
Tuesday, 11/5 NYDesigns hosts their next Women in Tech happy hour at Bierocracy in LIC. As always, men and individuals who identify as female are welcome to attend, too.
Wednesday, 11/6 GRO-Biotech and the Einstein Biotech-Pharma Club are back with the best-named event in all of NYC biotech: Early ACCESS. Featuring panels and roundtable discussions with professionals from all around the life sciences, ACCESS is a great opportunity to learn about all the career paths available to students working in the life sciences.
Wednesday, 11/6 Join BioLabs and Launch Bio for the next installment of their monthly Larger than Life Science series. November's topic: how to build your company's boards, be they advisory or executive. Even if you're not working on your own startup, these events are always a great place to meet other people working in the community.
Thursday, 11/7 The LifeSci NYC meetup hosts their next event at BMCC with a focus on careers in the public health sector featuring a panel of NYC leaders in the field discussing what it means to work in public health, what it takes to get into the field and succeed, and what the public health ecosystem looks like in NYC.
Friday, 11/8 Nanotech NYC's next Nanonites happy hour get-together is happening at Clinton Hall in east midtown. The topics of discussion might be small, but the fun never is!
Friday, 11/8 The Intrepid museum's Innovators series returns for another evening of showcasing startups powered by NASA technologies, plus networking and mingling between scientists, entrepreneurs, and technologists.
Friday-Sunday, 11/8-10 For 36 hours on November 8-10, HackPrinceton will bring together 600 developers and designers from across the country to create incredible software and hardware projects. They'll have swag, workshops, mentors, prizes, games, free food, and more.
Tuesday, 11/12 The Secret Science Club hosts neuroscientist Nim Tottenham for their next event at the Bell House. Nim's talk, which will be doubling as the Dana Foundation's annual Brain Lecture, will explore human brain development and its relationship to emotional behavior, stress, and well-being.
Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...
Thursday, 11/21 Join the BioIdea team, healthcare investors, entrepreneurs, and life sciences professionals for their November Biotech Reception. This is a unique opportunity for investors, pharma & biotech leaders to connect in person to discuss the emerging biotech ecosystem in NYC.
Friday, 11/22 One of the year's most interesting conferences, SciViz NYC is back and once again bringing NYC-area visual science communicators, researchers, clinicians, journalists, artists, and enthusiasts together for an event focused on visualizing science for analysis, education, inspiration, and provocation. It's a day dedicated to exploring the parts of science we might forget about, but deserve just as much consideration.
Map of the Month
This 3D visualization of the Tokyo metro is one of the most beautiful transit maps I've ever seen. (Maybe in 2053, when we finally have modern - which will by then be antiquated again - signals in the entire NYC subways system someone will be able to do the same here.)