My mental model of how manufacturing works is basically the Sesame Street video of a crayon factory , with everything queued up just so, and feeding one at a time into the next step of the process. Thanks to advances in computer vision and robotics, modern manufacturing can look a lot more disorganized since it's apparently easier to make robots that can tolerate variations in their input than to keep everything perfect throughout the pipeline. Here's a video of robots toiling in some sort of breakfast fact
posted by Ben Darnell @ 7/09/2009 09:47:00 PM 3 comments
I really enjoyed this talk by Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational ). The most interesting part to me starts at the 25:30 mark, where he discusses how an unattractive third option can influence people's choices between two better options. The example he uses is a subscription offer from the Economist: Online-only subscription for $59 Print-only subscription for $125 Print and online subscription for $125 Since the print and web combination is the same price as the print subscription alone, no one ch