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My college classmate Jim Stodder is one of four authors of "Better Thinking, Better Results", a new book about applying Japanese "Lean" principles to an organization.

When it arrives, I will be reviewing Better Thinking, Better Results: Using the Power of Lean as a Total Business Solution [buy at amazon] , assuming of course that I finish the book, which seems likely.

The book is a study of what The Wiremold Company (a producer of electrical wiring assemblies) did over ten years to achieve its transformation.

Jim writes

Our book introduces a corporate culture in which everyone has a direct stake in the elimination of ALL forms of waste, at every level of the hierarchy Everyone is forced to rethink their own and everyone else's most basic work habits.

Sounds great, don't you think?

One of the trends that we have identified in the java pattens study group is the java developers moving toward serving as business consultants in one way or another. I'm sure it will be interesting to see what happens when "Lean" meets "Agile".

A couple of weeks ago an article ran in the New Yorker that was both heartwarming and deeply disturbing. It described the efforts of a New York prosthetic limb manufacturer to bring children from Sierre Leone to New York City, where they would be fitted with new prosthetic arms. The reason it was disturbing? Rebels in Sierre Leone have developed a culture of amputation, where they find civilians, no matter the age, and then hack off their arms. They even have a slang for it, asking if the victim wants her arm hacked off "short sleeve", i.e. above the elbow, or "long sleeve," leaving the elbow.

The thought of an ingrained cultural practice like this was so disturbing I couldn't find a way to write about it. It reminded me of the "Kalashnikov culture" of northwestern Afghanistan, where everyone carries Kalashnikov rifles and enjoys using them. It's very difficult for me to brush off this kind of callous human behaviour just by saying "oh, it's a lawless zone." It represents a low point of what humans are capable of doing.

But it could be much worse. It could be like Iraq today.

Tomorrow's New York Times has a disturbing story, too. How many People has Hussein killed? [NY Times] by John F. Burns

So much of the anti-war rhetoric about war with Iraq has focussed on the possibility of death to innocents in Iraq. But what about asking the question the other way. What to do about Saddam Hussein? Is it really moral for a nation to do nothing, when it can bring an end to Saddam Hussein's evil reign? Doesn't he forfeit rights to be a sovereign nation by his sadistic inhumanity?

I had never realized it, but in the 2nd Century BC, the Egyptians were buried with their crocodiles.

Or at any rate, with some crocodiles. Who can really say what the ownership of the crocodiles were at this point, at least without reading the papyri much more carefully. And in fact, not all of them have even been looked at or catalogued, let alone read.

I was intrigued, because there are some civilizations that left no written records, but over two millennia ago, the Egyptians left the Tubtunis Papyri,

That's how the morning started, looking at papyrus photos. Later in the day, we drove up to the Ronald Reagan Museum, where lots of scribblings on modern-day papyri can be found, all signed by Reagan. The letters, marked as declassified, have not yet been mummified in whatever the modern-day equivalent of crocodiles might be.

In addition, there is the characteristic display of gifts to the president usually found in presidential libraries. I was drawn to photograph the ballistic stone fired by the Romans in the first century at the (72CE) siege of Masada. It was an obvious symbol of the reason the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not admit of an easy solution anytime soon.

Masada was a citadel fashioned by King Herod in the event he needed to abdicate. However, it later became a Jewish stronghold and according to myth, the defenders of Masada took their own lives, en masse, when it became clear that the Romans would re-take the citadel. Today, Masada is an important national park, and a national symbol of freedom. I have read on the web that IDF Armoured Unit recruits swear an oath of allegiance on the Masada summit, saying "Masada will never fall again", but I do not know if it is actually true.

The ballistic stone is about the size of a baseball. It is quite round, for a stone, and one wonders why.

This weekend's peace march in Washington, D.C. hasn't been getting too much publicity on the West Coast. People are riding busses from as far north as Vermont.

As of yesterday, I had heard of 10 busloads from Vermont. There must be something going on in San Francisco too; that's how it usually shakes down.

Only one month to Valentine's Day, and UC Berkeley is not showing the love. An article in today's NY Times reports censorship of fundraising activity for moving the Emma Goldman archives. Who is making these decisions?

You can find the Times article for yourself, but you might be interested in taking a look at the Goldman site before you read the Times article.

Be sure not to miss this gift catalog of "emmarabilia" for your right-thinking Valentine.

Oh no! The film fanatic known as überchick has changed her site design and says she's thinking of changing it again. Get back to the city!

First the book didn't exist. Then it couldn't be found. But then it shipped early, the very next day! When I went to the Post Office to pick it up, they couldn't find the package, and offered to give me a phone call when they did locate it.

Let me ask you this. Has the U.S. Postal Service ever called you about your mail?

I went home and began playing Rip Van Winkle right away. Sure enough, 30 years later my mail carrier from the Post Office called (I recognized his voice), waking me up. My take-a-nap ruse had worked. My missing package had been located.

I had just 12 minutes to pick it up before they closed for the weekend.

I opened the package as I walked and read happily all the way home, laughing in the sunshine at the ancient wisdom found in a book most programmers have never heard of, complete with a wonderful and wise forward by the great Chinese computer scientist C.P. Yu: The Zen of Programming [buy at amazon] by the master programmer Geoffrey James, also author of the more substantial yet no less wise The Tao of Programming buy at amazon.com.