Month: November 2018

Colorado – The road to carbon neutrality

Well written article in the Colorado Sun on the state of Colorado’s energy infrastructure and the quest for renewable energy.

Wind turbines near Matheson, Colorado, are part of Xcel Energy’s new 600 megawatt Rush Creek Wind Project. Rush Creek, which became operational in October 2018, uses 300 turbines to generate enough electricity to power 325,000 homes. Xcel estimates the project will cut 1 million tons of carbon emissions each year from its system. (John Leyba, Special to The Colorado Sun)

https://coloradosun.com/2018/11/26/colorado-100-percent-renewable-energy/

Olivier – Richard III, Jed Harris inspiration

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“There, staring back at me from the mirror, was my Richard, exactly as I wanted him. I’d based my makeup on the American theater director Jed Harris, the most loathsome man I’d ever met. My revenge on Jed Harris was complete. He was apparently equally loathed by the man who created the Big Bad Wolf for Walt Disney.”

On Acting, Laurence Olivier.

Spinoza and William James on freedom

Spinoza long ago wrote in his ethics that anything that a man can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that something else is good. He who habitually acts sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza. To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives the name of freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good. Get them habitually to tell the truth, not so much through showing them the wickedness of lying as by arousing their enthusiasm for honor and veracity.

Talks to Teachers, William James
via Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16287

PROP. LXVII. A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

Proof.–A free man is one who lives under the guidance of reason, who is not led by fear (IV. lxiii.), but who directly desires that which is good (IV. lxiii. Coroll.), in other words (IV. xxiv.), who strives to act, to live, and to preserve his being on the basis of seeking his own true advantage; wherefore such an one thinks of nothing less than of death, but his wisdom is a meditation of life. Q.E.D.

Ethics, Benedictus de Spinoza
via Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3800

Toyota’s Six Rules for the application of kanban

Toyota has formulated six rules for the application of kanban

  1. Each process issues requests (kanban) to its suppliers as it consumes its supplies.
  2. Each process produces according to the quantity and sequence of incoming requests.
  3. No items are made or transported without a request.
  4. The request associated with an item is always attached to it.
  5. Processes must not send out defective items, to ensure that finished products will be defect-free.
  6. Limiting the number of pending requests makes the process more sensitive and reveals inefficiencies.

via wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban

Show Biz Wisdom

“The show must go on.”
“Always leave them wanting more.”
“You see the same people on the way up as you do on the way down.”
“You can put as much effort into a bad movie as a good one.”
– Proverbial Wisdom

“There are no small parts, only small actors.”
– Constantin Stanislavski

“I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”
– Oscar Wilde

“All the world is a stage”
– Shakespeare

“Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”
– William Goldman

“Make sure you get paid.”
– Mick Jagger

Kurt Vonnegut on Armistice Day

When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut. 1973
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_of_Champions

Health care workers and computers, Atul Gawande on.

Why Doctors Hate Their Computers

More than ninety per cent of American hospitals have been computerized during the past decade, and more than half of Americans have their health information in the Epic system. Seventy thousand employees of Partners HealthCare—spread across twelve hospitals and hundreds of clinics in New England—were going to have to adopt the new software. I was in the first wave of implementation, along with eighteen thousand other doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lab techs, administrators, and the like.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computersc

Armistice Day

Armistice Day is commemorated every year on 11 November to mark the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I, which took effect at eleven o’clock in the morning—the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918.

Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_Day

This is what a world war 1 battlefield in Verdun France looks like today. from interestingasfuck

Watership Down

waterhsip-down

Watership Down is a survival and adventure novel by English author Richard Adams, published by Rex Collings Ltd of London in 1972. Set in southern England, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural environment, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel follows the rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and seek a place to establish a new home, encountering perils and temptations along the way.

via Wikipedia