DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Media Stories of 2003-2004

I could be sensationalist and scream These are the stories your government doesn’t want you to read! But I would never resort to sensationalism, unless, you know, it worked. The American people are far too clever for that.

Censored story #24 is pretty scary:

The Selective Service System, the Bush Administration, and the Pentagon have been quietly moving to fill draft board vacancies nationwide in order to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005.

How many of those soccer moms who are voting for Bush in order to feel safe would still vote that way if they knew that their sons, the ex-soccer players, were due to join 1000+ dead soldiers in Iraq? Here’s a hint: you won’t run out of fingers when you count them.

I’m surprised to see #3, Bush Administration Manipulates Science and Censors Scientists. That’s common knowledge, at least to readers of debris.com. And we already know the Washington Post staff reads debris.com.

These stories could probably really hurt the Bush campaign, if anybody were to actually read them.

Nature magazine:

In the build-up to the US presidential election, science is making a sizeable impact on the political agenda. But what will another four years of George W. Bush mean for science, compared with a term under Democratic challenger John Kerry?

To find out, Nature has asked the two candidates 15 questions about their science policies.

• Introduction and analysis
• The interactive version (in case it doesn’t appear inline at the link above)
• PDF version

How fast can you swim in syrup?

The dangers of playing bass in a drum and bass duo (Toast Machine).

Florida hurricanes are a message from God?

EnviroGlas is a terrazzo flooring made from recycled bottles.

Tool’s Ænima was recorded live, with no clicktrack?!

(Thanks to the usual suspects all the great linkage. You surf the web, finding cool stories, so I can concentrate on my job. Hey, wait a second…!)

The Goal is a business novel. It’s interesting enough to read after work, and valuable enough that you’ll be a little smarter when you return to work the next morning.

I would not normally expect a book written 20 years ago about a manufacturing plant to have much to say about modern-day information technology. But there are valuable lessons here about process management, meaning literally how to manage any process. They’re presented as lessons about how to run a manufacturing plant, but they’re really lessons about how to think.

The book is a novel, although you shouldn’t read it for tips on character development or crafty plot work. The format is a slave to the mission, or dare I say the goal? The characters arrive at answers after false starts and detours, enabling the reader to experience the analysis that would not be present in a one-page summary of “Eli Goldratt’s Ideas About Process Management.”

This is, in fact, one of the lessons of the book: learning is a result of doing, not of being told.

Even so, I’ll share one of the key concepts of the “Theory of Constraints,” an idea introduced here that apparently revolutionized the manufacturing world. Quoting from Goldratt’s consulting website: “just as the strength of a chain is dictated by its weakest link, the performance of any value-chain is dictated by its constraint.” If you can find the worst-performing section of any process, or code, or team, then you’ve found the limiting factor on the system’s overall throughput. Fix that bottleneck and you will have improved the system.

The main character in the book arrives at this conclusion in a long passage describing a hike with a group of Boy Scouts. I won’t recount the story here, because it’s the best part of the book — essentially, the main character proves the Theory of Constraints by analysing hikers on a trail. It’s far removed from running a manufacturing plant, or from managing a software project, or from being productive with your free time for that matter, but Goldratt’s ideas still apply.

I recommend The Goal. I learned from it, and I can imagine rereading it in a few years as a refresher course on clear thinking.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)