Month: October 2016

Didi

it is wrong to obsess on uber. didi is way bigger.

“We do 20m rides per day, 3x everyone else, globally, added together.” — Didi Chuxing President Jean Liu at WSJ.D Live. “In September, we are greater than $20b run rate for annual gross bookings.”

Constellation Park

earning your keep after you die

Imagine the Manhattan Bridge twinkling from underneath with 100s of small pods filled with decaying biomass – the final resting place of many former New Yorkers, shining like stars in an otherwise dark sky. There, you might lay flowers near a pod containing the remains of a loved one, until decomposition finishes its course and all that remains is a container to keep as a remembrance. This is the vision that is Constellation Park, a shiny new cemetery proposed by DeathLab, a trans-disciplinary research and design space at Columbia University.

$11 Potato chip

Sweetish brewery St. Erik’s has created the world’s most expensive potato chips. The luxurious black box designed by St. Erik’s contains just 5 individual potato chips, each made by hand by a chef, using 5 special Nordic ingredients – Matsutake mushroom picked from pine forests in northern Sweden, truffle seaweed from the waters around the Faroe Islands, Crown Dill hand-picked on the Bjäre Peninsula, Leksand Onion grown on the outskirt of the small Swedish town of Leksand and India Pale Ale Wort, the same kind used to make St. Erik’s Pale Ale beer. The potatoes themselves, are also special. They apparently come “from the potato hillside in Ammarnäs, a steep, stony slope in a south-facing location where almond potatoes are cultivated in very limited numbers. The slope is difficult for modern agricultural machines to access, which means that all potatoes are planted and harvested by hand.”

Maxwell’s Demon

As far back as 1867, physicist James Clerk Maxwell described a hypothetical way to violate the Second Law: if a small theoretical being sat at the door between the hot and cold rooms and only let through particles traveling at a certain speed. This theoretical imp is called “Maxwell’s demon.”

“Although the violation is only on the local scale, the implications are far-reaching. This provides us a platform for the practical realization of a quantum Maxwell’s demon, which could make possible a local quantum perpetual motion machine.”

400 days to Titan

Adam Crowl has been examining the Spacex Interstellar Transport System and analyzing the possible missions to Saturn’s Titan and Jupiter’s moons. Flying to Titan will be easier than flying to the large Moons of Jupiter. The thick atmosphere as thick as Titan’s is a boon to space-travelers trying to shed excess speed. Plus Titan is held in its orbit by a lighter planet – Jupiter masses 318x Earth, while Saturn masses 95x. The minimum delta-vee for a parabolic solar orbit is 8.75 km/s from LEO. Working out gravity losses from finite time boosts in LEO isn’t easy, but at a guess it’ll be 0.1 km/s. That leaves about 0.4 km/s in the tank. We’ll need that aerobrake at Titan to land.

Harbor Ring

I realized that there was a disconnect between the idea of a cars-only crossing and the reality evolving in the region. Bikes are taking off all over the city. We now have waterfront development all along the harbor with parks and bike paths. It’s a whole rebirth, the “new New York.” And the powers that be have repeatedly rejected bike access on the bridge. We started thinking about how we could recast the idea of a shared-use path on the bridge. I’m an urban and regional planner by training, but I’ve been in the family hardware business, and so I thought, “We have to take a marketing approach to repackage Verrazano access.” It’s the missing link in the Harbor Ring. We became the Harbor Ring Committee.