July 2018 Reading List

Last month, I changed teams, so my schedule was a little erratic and I didn't find much time to read a lot. After spending a week in Alaska (photos!), rejuvenating my energy and as things as settling down, I will be summarizing the articles I read here. I have also decided to read at least 1 book/month, and this month's book is 12 Rules for Life. I will be summarizing the core points here as well.

• 5 Cognitive Distortions of People who get stuff done
• Personal exceptionalism: "I am special"
• Definition: - a macro sense that you are in the top of your cohort, your work is snowflake-special, or that you are destined to have experiences well outside the bounds of "normal;" not to be confused with arrogance or high self-esteem
• Benefits: resilience, stamina, charisma
• Risks: assuming macro-exceptionalism means micro-exceptionalism, brittleness
• Dichotomous thinking: "X is shit. Y is genius."
• Definition: being extremely judgmental of people, experiences, things; highly opinionated at the extremes; sees black and white, little grey
• Benefits: achieves excellence frequently
• Risks: perfectionism
• Correct overgeneralization: "I see two dots and draw the right line."
• Definition: making universal judgments from limited observations and being right a lot of the time
• Benefits: saves time
• Risks: addiction to instinct and indifference to data
• Blank canvas thinking: "Painting by numbers isn't art. And I want to make art."
• Definition: - sees own life as a blank canvas, not a paint-by-numbers
• Benefits: no sense of coloring outside the lines, creates surprises
• Risks: "Ars gratia artis," failure to launch, failure to scale
• Schumpeterianism: "I am a creative destruction machine."
• Definition: sees creative destruction as natural, necessary, and as their vocation
• Benefits: fearlessness, tolerance for destruction and pain
• Risks: heartless ambition, alienation
• Never underestimate the wood and the craftsmanship: SF Fire Department Wood Ladders.
• History Of Steel: 
• The metal from heaven. Almost all of ancient iron came from asteroids (identify as they have higher nickel content).
• India is the first true steel producer around 400 BC. In shipments to Rome itself, Abyssinian traders from the Ethiopian Empire served as deceitful middlemen, deliberately misinforming the Romans that the steel was from Seres, the Latin word for China, so Rome would think that the steel came from a place too distant to conquer.
• Japanese Katana: The metal forging began with wrought iron. A chunk of the material was heated with charcoal until it became soft enough to fold. After it cooled, the iron was heated and folded about 20 more times, giving the blade its arcing shape, and all through the forging and folding, the wrought iron’s continued exposure to carbonaceous charcoal turned the metal into steel. A swordsmith used clay, charcoal, or iron powder for the next step, brushing the material along the blade to shape the final design. Patterns emerged in the steel that were similar to wood grain with swirling knots and ripples. The details were even finer than the dragon scales of European blades, and Japanese katanas were given names like “Drifting Sand,” “Crescent Moon,” and "Slayer of Shuten-dōji," a mythological beast in Japanese lore. Five blades that remain today, the Tenka-Goken, or “Five Swords Under Heaven,” are kept as national treasures and holy relics in Japan.
•  A single English furnace required about 240 acres of trees per year as fuel to generate heat. The solution to this problem was roasting coal, found by Abraham Darby, early 1700s. England had discovered the power of smelting with coal. But it still wasn’t making steel.
• Benjamin Huntsman came up with a process quite similar to the ancient Indian method of using a clay crucible, ~1770. However, Huntsman’s technique had two key differences: He used roasted coal rather than charcoal, and instead of placing the fuel inside the crucible, he heated iron and carbon mixtures over a bed of coals. This produced the best steel which possibly the world has ever seen.
• The crucible steelmaking process was much too expensive to produce items as large as cannons, so Henry Bessemer set out to find a way to produce steel in larger quantities. One day in 1856, he decided to pour pig iron into a container rather than let it ooze into a trench. Once inside the container, Bessemer blasted air through perforations on the bottom. Everything remained calm for about 10 minutes, and then suddenly sparks, flames, and molten pig iron came bursting from the container. When the chaos ended, the material left in the container was carbon-free, pure iron. Pure iron through the addition of carbon-bearing materials such as spiegeleisen, an alloy of iron and manganese—could easily be turned into high-quality steel.
  However, a problem arose. It turned out that Bessemer had used an iron ore containing very little phosphorus, while most iron ore deposits are rich in phosphorus. The old methods of iron smelting reliably removed the phosphorus, but the Bessemer Converter did not, producing brittle steel. The issue vexed metallurgists for two decades, until Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, found a solution. Thomas discovered that the device’s clay lining was not reactive with phosphorus, so he replaced the clay with a lime-based lining. It worked like a charm. The new method, which churned out five tons of steel in 20 minutes, obsoleting The old Huntsman crucible process, which produced a paltry 60 pounds of steel in two weeks.
• Even with so much production, the steel smelting wasn't perfected yet! It would take an idea dreamed up 100 years before the end of WWII to revolutionize the process once more. German scientist and glassmaker William Siemens realized in 1847 that he could lengthen the amount of time a furnace held its peak temperature by recycling the emitted heat. He built a new glass furnace with a small network of firebrick tubes. Hot gases from the melting chamber exited through the tubes, mixed with external air, and were recycled back inside the chamber.
  It took nearly 20 years for Siemens’ glassmaking furnace to find its way into metallurgy. In the 1860s, a French engineer named Pierre-Emile Martin learned of the design and built a Siemens furnace to smelt iron. The recycled heat kept the metal liquefied for longer than the Bessemer process, giving workers more time to add the precise amounts of carbon-bearing iron alloys that turned the material to steel. And because of the additional heat, even scrap steel could be melted down. By the turn of the century, the Siemens-Martin process, also known as the open hearth process, had caught on all over the world.
• Andrew Carnegie (CMU named after him) revolutionized American steel industry. About a decade before Sidney Thomas refined the Bessemer Converter, Carnegie brought the Bessemer process to America and acquired phosphorus-free iron to produce steel, single-handedly producing about half as much steel as all of Britain.
• The American steel industry continued to explode into the 20th century. In 1873, the United States produced 220,000 tons of steel. By 1900, America accounted for 11.4 million tons of steel, more than the British and successful German industries combined. In 1914, the United States produced 23.5 million tons of steel. In 1918, production had doubled again. During World War II, the U.S. manufactured 25 times more steel than it did during World War I.
• Iconic structures such as Rockefeller Center, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the George Washington Bridge, and the Golden Gate Bridge were built with Bethlehem steel, one of the two biggest steel suppliers in US, other being U.S. Steel, which contributed to building Empire State Building.
• The steel beer was introduced in the 1930s by Pabst for its Blue Ribbon brew.
• A Swiss engineer named Robert Durrer found an even better way after WWII. He blasted pure oxygen into the furnace (rather than air, which is only 20 percent oxygen), and found that it removed carbon from the molten iron more effectively. Durrer also discovered that by blowing oxygen into the furnace from above, rather than below as on a Bessemer Converter, he could melt cold scrap steel into pig iron and recycle it back into the steelmaking process. This “basic oxygen process” separated all traces of phosphorus from the iron, too. The method combined the advantages of both the Bessemer and Siemens-Martin furnaces, producing vast quantities of steel became cheaper yet again.
• Low wages overseas and the use of the basic oxygen process made foreign steel cheaper than American steel by the 1950s, just as the steel industry took a hit from a cheaper alloy for home goods: aluminum. In 1970, U.S. Steel’s run as the world’s largest steel company ended after seven decades, supplanted by Japan’s Nippon Steel. China became the world’s top steelmaker in the 1990s, and Bethlehem Steel closed its plant in Bethlehem in 1995. It wasn’t until the late 20th century that most American steel mills finally adopted the basic oxygen process. As of 2016, the United States ranked fourth in steel production according to the World Steel Association.
• Today, metallurgists are in the early stages of developing eco-friendly steel production methods. At MIT, researchers are testing new electricity-based technologies for smelting metals. These electric smelting techniques have the potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions if they can be improved to work on metals with higher melting points, such as iron and steel. Last February, an Austrian manufacturer called Voestalpine began constructing a mill designed to replace coal with hydrogen fuel—technology that is likely at least two decades away.
• Cheapest Solar Power Plant, with Purchasing Power Agreement (PPA) at $23.76/MWh for next 25 years, which is a new record! (Interesting reads: LCOE forecasts. NOTE: This is a separate way to calculate the costs, not related to PPA)
• Not just solving Rush Hour game but generating all interesting configurations as well! A good read :)
• Thailand Cave Rescue: A little over-dramatic story, but a good piece to know what all happened.