There Now

That's a bit better.
New logo at the top.
A bit of smoothing to the header and footer. A slightly wider column.
That'll do 'til I learn CSS, or next time, which ever comes first.
--ml

Fate's Fingers of Fickleness

I have spent the last week attempting a little hands on learning of cascading style sheets and other arcana of the W3C.org. Finally today the template was parsed and proofed and published and dam it looked good in Firefox.
It looked like a cow flop in Mozilla. Needless to say it looked even worse in Internet Borer.
So we are back to pure Douglas Bowman's Minima.
Hopefully it's readable. At least in form, content is aesthetics -- thus debatable.
Standards -- some folks have them, some folks acquire them, some have them thrust upon them. So why did I hurl them back?

--ml

Lazy is a Relative ...

"Never stand when you can sit. Never sit when you can lie down." So my father often told me, his eyes atwinkle.
I think he may have thought of Frank Gilbreth. As a chemical enginer and plant manager he had a consuming interest in doing the work better. He enjoyed the tale Gilbreth used to describe his approach to the time and motion studies he performed in the teens and twenties of the last century.
"Take me to your laziest worker," he would tell the foreman as he arlrived to begin a new study.
That sounds a bit nuts at first. But you might consider this: In the harsh free booting capitalism of the teens and twenties any factory hand who was lazy in the sense of not doing the job would not last the day. So any worker still employed who was considered by his fellows to be lazy was the faster worker with the least surplus, or inefficient, motion.
Lazy is a relative term.

--ml

Analects of Management

Verso cxviii:

Only 4 out of 10 business startups remain in business after four years.
Surely this fact is of comfort only to the survivors?
--ml

Do You Therblig?

Or, perhaps: I love red, ripe, juicy, therbligs!

Or, more to the point: take the ergh! out of ergonomics.

Definition for: therblig

The fundamental motions of the hands of a worker. These operations are made up of 17 types of motion: search, select, grasp, reach, move, hold, release, position, pre-position, inspect, assemble, disassemble, use, unavoidable delay, avoidable delay, plan, and test to overcome fatigue. Frank Bunker Gilbreth defined these motions in his system of motion study. (Therblig is Gilbreth spelled backwards).

Time and motion study was a big deal a hundred years ago, or so. Seems there were two approaches. The Taylorites led by Frederick Taylor sought to make work more efficient, and thus increase productivity. Taylor was followed in the field by Frank and Lilian Gilbreth, whose methods were aimed at making work better, and thus faster. Both methods sought to reduce unit production costs. Taylor assumed the worker was working slowly for his own reasons. The Gilbreths examined the work to see if it could be arranged in a more efficient manner and assumed that the workers would be willing.
Both approaches worked. I find the Gilbreths, particularly Lillian's discoveries, more useful in my kitchen.
-- ml

the mighty acorn

Elaine is a botanist as well as a friend. Once she added this item to my meagre store of knowledge: "There are few plants that will actually kill you. But there are a great many that, if you eat them, will make you wish you were dead."

Think then of the great desperation that led the Amerinds to make a flour out of acorns. Yes, those insouciant brown nuts with their burr caps that heave up mighty oak trees. Ever taste one? Straight from the tree, au naturel, I cannot reccomend more than the slightest taste with something handy to thoroughly rinse your mouth out, after you expectorate the nutmeat. The bitter flavor is tannic acid -- the same that tans leather. Over-strong tea will give you something similar -- though at the pastel end of the spectrum. The tannins in acorns are more like primary colors. Yet, properly processed, acorn flour makes an okay bread, or so I was told long ago when I worked at a school camp in California.

The Amerinds gathered the nuts carefully in the fall, picking them over for worms and molds, as they shelled the critters. The crushed nutmeats were hung in bags in fast running streams for days, and possibly weeks. At first the water turned a dark brown from the tannic acid. When the water ran clear, the nuts were ready to dry, grind, mix and bake. As dry stores, the acorns helped them through the winter. I doubt the acorns contain any gluten to hold the gas created in raising. So I expect the acorns would have made more of a cracker then a bread. No doubt it was eaten with relish -- as being better than nothing at all.

That first comer, though! The one who was so tired of starving that the bitterness of the raw acorn was preferable if not tolerable. Was it an accident? A bag of acorns found in a stream that gave the hint about leaching? But why gather acorns into a bag if you don't know how to use them? Squirrels hoard the acorn harvest for winter use. Maybe a ground squirrel's nest was flooded? But the squirrel stores the nuts in the shell -- they weren't cracked. Did someone attempt to make a soup? Steeping or boiling the nuts would release the tannin? Perhaps an interruption. A cup with water and shelled acorns left to soak. Though the stock was too bitter to drink, the nut was sweeter.

I ponder these things awestruck that not only did the discovery occur, but that the discoverer had the moxie to grab his companions by their scruffs and make them understand that something had changed. That it could be made to change. And for the better.

--ml

Fiddley Stuff

Registration is no longer required to comment on this site. The daughter of the house complained about the form.

The Mother-in-Law complained about the tiny type size, complementing the Good Friend who asked if the gigantic type was a bug or a feature. This neatly illustrates the core design problem: you can't please everybody. Particularly you can't please everybody when every browser treats the html slightly differently. At +2 my type is equivalent to standard newspaper format. Theoretically. Those who find it the wrong size on their browser may adjust it with the text sizing option in the view menu. In Firefox [control]+ or [control]- will do the job. Repeat if necessary.
If you find yourself doing this for every thing you look at on the web, try adjusting the text size in your preferences section. In Firefox the fonts section of the general preferences menu lets you set a minimum font size. Hope this helps.
--ml

Serendip Beckons

Let's say that a man wants to build a good house for his wife. The most important step toward success will have been to select the right wife.

Let's say that a man wants to write a book about how to build good houses. He has to know what to say. He finds out by making mistakes, recognizing them, living with them, and going on from there. This process is impossible unless his wife will go along too.

Thanks largely to Gordon, but also to Rudy, Mel, Joe, Peter, and Dick, this book got written. I'm afraid there would have been nothing much to say if the inevitable mistakes had caused trouble at home.

Therefore this book will have to be dedicated solely to Caroline.

Last week I meant to continue my post Prime Sources. I pulled my dog-eared copy from the shelf and opened it at an early page to grab a quick quote. I found:

With thought, you can have a house that is distinctively yours. It will be a good house, a fun house, a year-round house, a life-time house. It will be your shelter, your tool for living, and your statement of belief.

And:

Although I will explain to you what you do not need to buy, it is not the purpose of this book to persuade you to spend less money. That would be economic heresy. The purpose of this book is to explain to you how, through thoughtful choice of plan and materials, to get more house for the same money.

This one caught my eye:

If each house consumer can get a better bargain for his money, more houses will be consumed, that is, more people will have houses to live in, more money will have been spent, in total, and the houses themselves will be fit to live in.

Then there was:

... chickens can be persuaded to lay eggs in chicken houses, and cows to give milk in cow houses, but the functions required of houses for humans are more complex.

Or I might use:

The first modern architect was a man who looked at his family, his needs, his location, his available materials, his tools, his strength, his resources, then built accordingly. He lived a long while ago.

All of these were on the second page of the first chapter. By then I was reading the book. Again. Anew I delight in his clarity, thoughtfulness, thoroughness, and common sense. The author makes the modest claim of assisting his reader to build a home that is "warm, dry, light, quiet, clean, useful, spacious, pleasant, and paid for." One of the side effects of seriously reading his text is some good practice in the increasingly rare art of thinking for oneself.

I have yet to build a complete house -- by his methods, or my own -- but I have used several of his ideas in various remodeling projects with excellent results. I heartily recommend Rex Roberts' Your Engineered House for any student of design and anyone who wants to build a home. For that matter, it is a charming diversion to read; a means of moving your mood into a more creative channel. I double dog dare you to not put pencil to paper before too many chapters have been savored. The link above will take you to an online copy, or you can find it through the usual suspects.

-- ml

Analects of Management

Verso cmxlviii:
We have objective standards which cannot be expressed in words.

It's a Point of View

Musing on weekend activity in the neighborhood it struck me that, to a realtor, a tree is never a view. Or perhaps it might be a "territorial view", which suggests a need for very tall sight excluding fences to screen your barbe from the gas works next door. To realtors "views" are free value added enhancements to the usual jerry built cottage. Put it next to a mountain and add half again to the price. Since, as a culture, we Americans all take our opinions from experts, this indicates that what you can see beyond your yard is more important than what you can see in your yard.
Contrast this with the Japanese who, when they can afford such luxuries -- space being at a distinct premium -- carefully construct their yard as a garden with near, middle and distant views that do not include the neighbors. If the site lacks a suitable distant view, then a large tree at the fence is used. When needful a completely different view is suggested inside the garden then is available outside the garden. For the Japanese what is in their yard is of concern, while what is beyond is less so. Involvement with the neighbors is nothing but trouble.
Goemon is an incredibly fine restaurant in the Bunkyo-ku section of Tokyo. It is located between the multi-story buildings that line a major downtown arterial and a rock out-cropping as tall as the buildings. On the street all is noise and light and hustle with traffic, pachinko parlors and shoppers. Turn in to the narrow alley that leads to Goemon's and all that diminishes. At the entrance is a large iron ufuro, or bath tub. This is significant of the historical Goemon, a heart of gold bandit who ended his career being boiled to death in one. The tub took its name from the outlaw. The restaurant took its name from the tub. Think of it as "Robin's 'Hood" for a more occidental turn. Past this the brick gives way to the traditional wood materials of a traditional Japanese Inn. This envelops a garden -- complete with carp pond -- on three sides. Diners sit in small rooms, one per party, looking at the garden during the inclement bits of the year. In the al fresco season, they move into the garden. Seated, one may look toward and up the rock out-cropping. The eyes come to rest on a very -- very tall evergreen jutting from the summit which points alertly into the night sky as though guarding a mountain pass. All the noise of the city is absent from this courtyard. The diners have no sight in any direction of city buildings. The night sky reveals stars -- not the city glow that obliterates them elsewhere in the Kanto. It is a superb design which achieves its goals with a minium of apparent effort. The food exceeds the setting. What is it? Your choice of seasonal compilations of tofu or of the same with the addition of thinly sliced raw chicken breast. Superb is too drab a word.