malvasia bianca

Another quote from The Toyota Product Development System (p. 102), in the section on checklists: A company that cannot standardize will struggle to learn from experience and is not truly engaged in lean thinking. Indeed, any company that simply tries new things without standardizing along the way is “randomly wandering through a maze,” repeating the […]

A quote from Morgan and Liker’s The Toyota Product Development System: Toyota does very little “information broadcasting” to the masses. Instead, it is up to the individual engineer to know what he or she is responsible for, to pull what is needed, and to know where to get it. Here’s the full context (pp. 95-96; […]

A passage I occasionally reread when I get in a certain sort of discussion: Among the ancient gods of Naucratis in Egypt there was one to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred. The name of that divinity was Theuth, and it was he who first discovered number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, as […]

I might as well comment comment on Jobs’ recent DRM is bad letter. At first, it was really exciting. But there’s a fair amount of intellectual dishonestly there, too: Item: The statistics are bogus. You can’t just divide the number of songs sold on iTunes by the number of iPods sold and get anything meaningful. […]

I didn’t realize it was possible to beatbox while playing the flute. Gyoza stadium sounds awesome. Star Wars in ASCII. I spent a pleasant hour last weekend watching Ben and Fitz’s poisonous people talk. (And then caught myself exhibiting one of those symptoms on a mailing list last week. Sigh…) I suppose you’ve already seen […]

I’m going through my backlog of stored up links; this animation of cellular behavior deserves its own post. Just watch the video – in its own way, it’s the coolest thing that I’ve seen in, like, a decade. My favorite part is where this cellular machine walks up a rope dragging a big bubble of […]

Random trivia from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: when moving your eyes slowly from left to right, the left side of your brain is controlling the actions. Like when, say, reading English. I don’t want to make too much of this: I assume it’s true, but exactly what to derive from this isn’t clear. […]

I just finished the latest Zelda. Summary: a good game, quite well done. But not a great game, for two reasons: the previous games in the series, and a certain other game in the genre that came out the same year and that is much much better. The good: it’s a Zelda game, with all […]

There would seem to be a vaccine company named AlphaVax. I guess they thought AlphaVaxPdp11 would be too confusing?