My neighbor down the street is Bob.  He has Alzheimer’s Disease and other ailments, and I feel bad for him.  For the last 2 months, I go to his house every Monday night to put him to bed.  Another neighbor and I pick him up and walk him to bed and tuck him in.  It’s been a very humbling experience — one of those experiences that reminds you that life is very short and that people and relationships are — above all else — the really important things in life.   But, why do I sometimes forget and get carried away in the unimportant?

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The Republicans held a filibuster the other night to block the Reid-Levin Amendment from a vote.   The aim of this article is to axiomatically show, using Proof Theory, how Majority Rule works and, that, the mathematics behind Majority Rule is in fact the easy part; the really, really difficult part are the social and game theory-like games that we play with each other, as the recent filibuster demonstrates. 

Of the filibuster, Senator Harry Reid said:

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I’ve been doing some research on Heijunka and found the article below that I felt was very informative and insightful.  The article below was written by Daniel T. Jones and was originally published in Manufacturing Engineering, August 2006, Volume 137, Issue 2, Page 29.

Heijunka is one of those highly useful Japanese words — like mura and muri (see below)-that have had a hard time finding their way into common English usage.  (By contrast muda, kaizen, and kanban seem to have made themselves quite at home.)  Yet heijunka — which means leveling — is truly critical to creating a lean production system, because it’s the key to achieving stability.

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The Applie iPhone, in my view, is such a big step toward more friendly computing.  The interface is refreshing, the device is beautiful, and the interaction is, for the most part, intuitive.  Indeed, in a world of quick-to-be discarded phones and devices, I’m on the verge of buying one, but not yet.

But, First Some Pictures. . .

Last week, I made a quick visit to the Apple store in Walnut Creek, California on the unveiling of the iPhone.  Things weren’t as crazy as I thought they would be.  Below are some pictures from that visit:

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