You have arrived at the mid-week hump. Have a $container of $beverage and enjoy some reading before you speed along with the rest of your life.

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Lean, not backpressure

Lucas Costa writes about techniques to keep code-generating robots in check. Without really knowing it himself, he is reinventing parts of lean manufacturing.

Full article (1–3 minute read): Lean, not backpressure

Flashcard of the week

I think I may have had this one before, but it repeated to me now and I think it's such a good way to look at it. One of the books on traffic engineering I read talked about congestion on roads. The flashcard asks

How does the book elegantly describe congestion?

I like this because it taps into a way of thinking that doesn't come naturally to me.

Congestion is the location where excess demand is stored.

Because of course that's it. The people stuck in traffic, they are occupying roads whose purposes are, partially, to store those people when the road they want to go on has demand high enough to exceed capacity. During high-demand periods, roads are storage devices in addition to conveyors.

The mistake I make is I think of things like traffic flow purely as a flow, but it's not only a flow – it's also a stock, in system-theoretic terms. It's actual cars sitting in actual locations, then moving between them. It's a bit of both, depending on how you look at it.

I make the same mistake with trash. I think of the trash produced by our household as a flow. I think of it as instantaneous. But it's also a stock: the rubbish bin under our sink is a vessel for storing the trash at home before it is moved to the landfill. (Well, some of it is recycled somehow. I don't know the full details.)

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