MNTS #40

[Week 7 / Year 2024] Noguchi, Two Wrongs, Steph Smith, Boston Whaler

Feb 18, 2024

Mainly, Notes To Self - my weekly attempt to compress everything noteworthy I read, watched, listened to, and discovered during the past week

Reading

Algorithms to Live By Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths - the chapter on caching introduced me to the Noguchi Filing System. A tantalizingly simple concept to create self-organizing systems. Essentially, it is an instance of the Last Recently Used principle, which states that the more recently something was used, the more likely it will be retrieved again in the future. Whenever an item is used and put back, it gets placed in the front / far left of the shelf or filing system. The Noguchi system is intended for document organization; however, I think this filing system would work well in any place with stacks or rows of things. The obvious places I thought to leverage this system were my closet, bookshelf, and kitchen. No more organizing by color, style, or genre. Just put the most recently used items first in the line or stack. Using this system, the answers to what I use, read/reference, and wear most automatically emerge bias-free. The other attractive aspect is how this would reduce the mental burden of figuring out what to buy more of or invest in higher quality versions of and what to throw out, move to an off-site archive, or stop purchasing entirely.

What might appear to others to be an unorganized mess, is infact, a self-organizing mess. Tossing things back on the top of the pile is the very best you can do, shy of knowing the future.

Statistical Process Control: A Manager’s Guide by Chris of Two Wrongs - continuing down the process control rabbit hole. I was curious to know about the magic constant of 2.66 for setting the upper and lower process limits of an XmR chart, and this piece provides a succinct explanation.

Listening

I really enjoyed this episode with Steph Smith. She is one of the most interesting thinkers I’ve come across in a while. If you’re short on time, I recommend just listening to the second half, where she shares her methods and tools for doing quick and dirty market research. Below are links to the tools she shared during the interview.