Clarke Ching - Split Infinitives and Beyond.

Theiving bastards

Tonight I foiled a robbery. Some bastard tried to steal my laptop bag as I sat sipping my Yo Sushi miso soup in London's Paddington station. My bag was sitting at my feet when some foreign chap - forgive me but does everyone in in London sound foreign or is it just me? - came and sat next to me. He told the sushi guy he was waiting for someone and a few moments later I heard a very quiet dragging sound which sounded suspiciously like my laptop bag. It was. I grabbed it and politely moved it out of the guys way, apologising for putting it where I had. He took off and I realised he was trying to steal it.

I'm doing some work with a company down here tomorrow morning and the one and only copy of the files is on my laptop. The bag also has my passport and all my diabetic tablets and some shockingly expensive omega3 oil which I need to take twice a day to keep me out of hospital.

Good thing I think everyone in london is a pickpocket otherwise I may not have noticed the attempted theft.

My only disappointment is that I didn't nab the guy. Those who know me may be suprised that this is the third robbery I've foiled. I once wrestled a bag snatcher to the ground and I was interrupted a pub robbery in progress and got two guys "sent down". I should write a book.
.oOo. Sent from my BlackBerry www.ClarkeChing.com +44(0)7920114893

Fade to black

From the Washington Post:

When Polaroid users pulled a picture out of their cameras, an image would slowly appear before their eyes. Now, like the process in reverse, the image of the Polaroid instant camera -- dimming for years -- has finally gone black.

Polaroid, based in Waltham, Mass., is shutting down factories in the United States and abroad as the company abandons the technology that made the instant photo possible, the Boston Globe reported yesterday. The company will cease production of its film by next year.

Pizza Crunch

My wife has just told me that the local fish and chip (we live in Scotland) does a dish called the "pizza crunch".  What they do is take 1 pizza, coat it in batter, then deep fry it.  No kidding. 

Excellent free book: The Medici effect

From 800CEORead:

Frans Johansson's Medici Effect is now available for free as a pdf download from his website.

It's a fantastic book, which I wrote about three years ago:

When I recently combined a MaCSween's vegetarian haggis with soy sauce, wasabi and natural yoghurt and created a taste sensation that I didn’t have to share with my wife, I exploited the idea that is know as the Medici effect. 

This is the fascinating idea that breakthrough ideas often come at the intersection of different fields. 

You can download for free but if you like the book then why not buy it on paper too?

TOC at delta airlines

The current APICS magazine has a 4 page story about Delta Airline's use of TOC - specifically DBR and Critical Chain:

Delta Airlines is going against industry trends in maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO). In 2006, Delta Airlines Technical Operations (Delta Tech Ops) expanded its engine maintenance business with a resounding 33 percent increase in orders from external customers. This remarkable achievement was accomplished not only during a time when Delta was facing bankruptcy, but also amidst an industry push to continue outsourcing airline MRO operations. Such substantial growth was achieved through the infusion of a new execution management system rooted in the theory of constraints (TOC).

Grab it quick ... the article will only be free until the next issue is posted.

Waste?

I've just got back from seeing the movie "No Country for Old Men".

I thought that some of you might appreciate this little bit of dialogue:

Bad boss man: Did I say you could sit? Carson Wells: No, but you strike me as a man who wouldn't want to waste a chair.

From a lean point of view, is a chair sitting empty waste?

Diabetes - caffeine ampers blood sugar control

I'm type 2 diabetic and I drink a lot of coffee.  I'm currently trying to get my blood sugar readings back under control.  They've been a bit bad lately, but they've been having some very nasty effects on my triglyceride levels.

The key, for me, is to lose weight and that's going fine but now it looks like I'd be silly to keep drinking coffee too. 

The New York Times reports:

... When the patients ingested caffeine, their average daily blood sugar levels went up by 8 percent. After meals, their blood sugar levels rose even higher, shooting up as much as 26 percent after dinner ...

Small changes - Plastic bags in Ireland

The New York Times reports on Ireland's plastic bag tax:

DUBLIN — There is something missing from this otherwise typical bustling cityscape. There are taxis and buses. There are hip bars and pollution. Every other person is talking into a cellphone. But there are no plastic shopping bags, the ubiquitous symbol of urban life.

      

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.

Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog ...

Have you ever wondered ...

Have you ever wondered ... if the person who named the aardvark put the extra "a" at the start so that it would appear early in the dictionary?

We might not have heard of it otherwise.

Food miles - a little bit stupid?

The UK Times reports:Nev

If you buy a packet of Waitrose blueberries from Chile, it’s a crime against humanity. If you nibble mange tout from Africa, you’re practically murdering the planet. And if you eat apples from New Zealand, well, you’re in league with the devil.

Why? Food miles, of course. It’s obvious that if you buy food from thousands of miles away, the transport alone must consume vast amounts of energy, thus fuelling climate change and global meltdown. As any concerned citizen knows, think green, think local.

Or think again. Researchers are finding that food miles are far from the whole story when assessing the environmental impact of what we eat. At a conference last month on the economics of food, Chris Foster of Manchester Business School presented some startling conclusions from a review of the evidence.

The biggest environmental impact of many food products, he said, came from their production. Bulk transport by land or sea was of “low significance”. And he suggested that policy-makers should “critically unpick the ‘local food’ agenda”.

Never trust any measurement - like food miles - which only measures part of the whole equation.  There's a good reason why I don't grow banana's in my back garden here in Scotland.  It's nothing to do with them being locally grown and having low food miles.