Notes
What font is this I'm using today? See the articles below to find out.
Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication
🙌🏽 How to use a paper towel: the TED talk.
🎉🐲 From Dragon Innovation, via The Prepared, how Chinese New Yearimpacts product development cycles for hardware devices made overseas.
🗜 Earlier this week, Spencer Wright shared this video in his newsletter of a 1930s-era Beverly Shear being restored to what is quite possible better-than-original condition and it's such a great combination of machines and ASMR that I had to also share it here. Watch it at 2X speed for what I consider to be the full effect.
Software and Programming
🕹 Script-8 is a virtual 8-bit computer for making retro games.
💸 The Domain Name Price Game tests your digital speculation skills and asks you to figure out which of two terrible domain names is more expensive.
🌐 When the internet of the early 2000s started moving away from MySpace-like formats and towards Facebook- and Instagram-like formats, "[c]oding became a privilege, instead of a right."
🎣 It's not always easy to spot phishing scams online. Take this quiz to see how you fare. (In other news, I finally got to use the "fishing" emoji!)
🐄 Here it is, folks: Tudder. Tinder for cows.
🖥 CERN has reproduced the world's first internet browser for your web-surfing pleasure. It's definitely harder to use than Chrome or Firefox, though.
Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine
🔠➕➖✖➗ Did you know you needed fonts inspired by classic math problems in your life? I didn't either until I discovered the String Art Font on the database of Mathematical and Puzzle Fonts/Typefaces, which is responsible for this edition's awesome title.
🐝 Speaking of math, apparently bees can do it, too.
🌐 Perhaps you've heard that the earth's poles are shifting at an increasing pace? (I hope so, I wrote about it two weeks ago in the last edition of M&D!) Well, it's true and we don't really know why, but it might mess up your GPS navigation if your driving around in Greenland or Svalbard. Don't worry, though, it's probably not the end of the world - the earth's magnetic north and south poles have moved around quite a bit in the past 500 years.
Mapping, History, and Data Science
💰 "Because of strict transparency restrictions on Land Registry records, there is no public map of registered land [in the UK]. However, no such restrictions apply to the 5 million acres of unregistered land. Typically this land belongs to wealthy families, old institutions, the Church, or the Crown."
🧠 We speak about the brain using the language of cartography - regions, hemispheres, etc. So it makes sense that someone would represent a map of the brain as a literal map, like, with landmasses and stuff. Well, that's exactly what Eric Drass did in his piece "The Left Hemisphere".
🏡 From 1908 to 1940, Sears gave both Amazon and IKEA a run for their money, selling entire prefab house kits for customers to purchase via mail order catalog and subsequently assemble on their own. This might sound like a proposition that saw little sell-through, but over the course of 32 years over 70,000 kits were sold to locations all around the US. Many of these houses still exist today and it has become people's passion to locate and identify as many as they can.
📔 I present to you now a twitter thread about all the 20th century authors who had sexual relations with one another.
🗺 Previous editions of M&D have talked about studies that investigate what our zip code says about us. Tapestry, by ESRI takes it one step further anduses a variety of socioeconomic metrics to define and map the major "archetypes" in each zip code. One thing that stood out to me: Manhattan is both largely homogeneous and starkly divided.
Events and Opportunities
Oh man, are there a lot of upcoming events in this edition...
Monday, 2/25 The new NYC Entrepreneurs meetup group is having another go with their casual mixer (originally scheduled for 1/25) at the Empire Hotel rooftop.
Monday, 2/25 Y Combinator will be visiting Columbia University for some east coast office hours with founders, followed by a dinner and talk with YC partner Jared Friedman.
Monday, 2/25 The Secret Science Club meets again at the Bell House for a talk from microbiologist & Ebola researcher Kartik Chandran on how NOT to go viral.
Tuesday, 2/26 The ECHO Bio-Entrepreneurship networking group gathers together once again for their February mixer. As always, everyone is encouraged to bring an entrepreneur!
Tuesday, 2/26 The NY Maker Meetup meets up for their February event featuring a fireside chat about how to have more effective meetings at work.
Wednesday, 2/27 Women's health tech, or FemTech, is one of the largest sectors forgotten by most of the (still male-dominated) technology and life sciences world. There are, however, ample opportunities to bring new advances in science and technology to a space where it's much-needed, as the HITLAB will explore with two female founders doing just that.
Wednesday, 2/27 New meetup group Health-Tech Connect NYC is having their first meetup, bringing together people from a variety of fields interested in developing life sciences technologies.
Thursday, 2/28 Join uptown biotech incubator Harlem Biospace for their next Bourbon & Beakers networking event.
Thursday, 2/28 NYC's advanced manufacturing initiative Futureworks heads over to Tomorrow Lab to talk prototyping and go-to-market strategies for the next event in their Futureworks Incubator program.
Friday, 3/1 Check out the beautiful side of New York City's public data archive at the opening reception for the Data Through Design exhibit at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A wide variety of multimedia art exhibits will be on display, all of them based on publicly available data from the city government.
March 1 - 9 NYC has over 2000 public data sets that you can explore to learn more about how the city works (and sometimes doesn't work 😜). NYC Open Data Week is your chance to learn more about them through workshops, art exhibits, and community gatherings. There are too many events to list them all here, but check out the link to get the full list.
Sunday, 3/3 The New York arm of biomedical 3D printing interest group 3D HEALS is having a happy hour at the Campbell in Grand Central Terminal.
Thursday, 3/7 New Lab hosts a public showcase to celebrate The Circular City, a program that brings together entrepreneurs, city leaders, corporate partners, and university innovators to tackle urban challenges.
Friday - Sunday, 3/8-3/10 The 2nd Annual Washington Heights Jazz Festival features musicians who live and work in Washington Heights andis happening at a bunch of venues between 181st and 187th streets.
Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...
Tuesday, 3/12 In high tech fields, it can be tough to put together a strong pitch deck without also giving away your secret sauce. To help provide some guidance about how to gain investment without losing your tech, JLABS, Mount Sinai, and Golden Seeds are coming together to host a session on how to craft a non-confidential pitch deck.
Wednesday, 3/13 The third edition of JLABS x New Lab seminar series Existential Medicine returns to New Lab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to discuss the future of genetic engineering. Use code NewLab2019 to register.
Monday, 3/18 The Mid Atlantic Bio Angels hold their first 1st Pitch event of 2019 at Columbia University.
Thusday 3/28 JLABS @ NYC hosts members of the local biotech andstartup communities at their March Innovators and Entrepreneurs mixer.
Tuesday, 4/23 Mark your calendars now for the 4th Annual GRO Your Career life sciences conference at Columbia University (and yes, I am helping organize this event). A wide array of professionals from industries directly and indirectly related to the life sciences will be giving talks andparticipating in panel discussions, with lots of opportunities for networking.
Map of the Month
📏 The True Size Of... will settle once and for all the question "how big is Greenland?"
Odds & Ends
🎨 Think you've got an eye for design? Try perfectly matching colors in this game.