Journal
Working notes, with the measurements attached.
Pieces about the systems small companies actually run on. Every figure states its date and its source, and every piece ends with a section on what the evidence does not prove.

- 29 October 2026
The Ship of Theseus Paradox Is Hiding in Your Customer List
An old paradox about identity, and the very practical question your database has to answer about every customer who changes.
- 29 October 2026
Frappe ERP and AI: Why Your Chatbot Doesn't Know Your Numbers
What it takes for AI to work with a company's real numbers, using ERPNext as the example, and the two new rules that come with it.
- 29 October 2026
Dunbar's Number: Your Business Has One Too
The famous limit of about 150 relationships is disputed. The idea underneath it explains when a small business runs out of memory.
- 29 October 2026
Debits and Credits: The 500-Year-Old Alarm Your Software Switched Off
Why double-entry bookkeeping was built to catch mistakes, and which mistake modern software can't catch.
- 29 October 2026
Benford's Law Explained: Why 30% of Numbers Start With 1
Benford's Law in 98 seconds: what it says, why it happens, and what a bad fit can and can't tell an auditor.
- 26 October 2026
An SEO ROI calculator, and why month three looks like a loss
An SEO ROI calculator for slow work: payback month, CAC, LTV to CAC and cumulative return over 36 months, with the arithmetic shown so you can check it.
- 24 October 2026
Six times we were wrong, and what caught it
A protein folding study that reached the published answer, and the six wrong answers it passed through first. What each one looked like, and what caught it.
- 24 October 2026
What it takes to run somebody else's research code
We ran a published molecular simulation toolkit we had never used. Eight defects, two hard blockers, and a count of how much of it actually runs.
- 24 October 2026
Replicating a published protein folding result
We reproduced two published protein folding measurements with a toolkit we had never used. The calibration that did it does not transfer to a third.
- 24 October 2026
Four walls we hit, and what each one would take
A protein folding study stopped in four different ways: a missing binary, a missing method, a budget, and a concurrency ceiling. What each would take.
- 19 October 2026
What makes a better business question
Most reports answer a question nobody would act on. Four tests for whether a business question is worth asking, and what your data has to carry to answer it.
- 19 October 2026
Can you count Christmas trees from space?
Four free satellite and lidar datasets, four tests over Boone and Vilas, three failures. What public data can and cannot measure about a local crop.
- 18 October 2026
Why is this textbook six dollars?
A used Objective-C textbook sells for six dollars while the publisher asks $47.99. What that spread measures, and what to ask before you buy a business system.
- 18 October 2026
Where does my website live?
Your website lives in a building with an address and a flood risk. How to find which one, why distance taxes every page, and why a local backup is not one.
- 18 October 2026
What it takes to sell beef on the internet
A working cattle farm sells online, at the farm store and wholesale from one system. How it gets found, and how it prices what it cannot weigh at checkout.
- 18 October 2026
The questions you stopped asking
A business does not lose information. It loses access to it, one question at a time, and every loss is rational. How to find what yours stopped asking.
- 18 October 2026
Protein folding simulation: replicating published results
Four proteins folded and checked against published measurements. Two replicate, one misses, and our folded-state threshold moves the answer more than the miss does.
- 18 October 2026
Moore's Law at 55: what cheap computing did to management
What Gordon Moore actually said, whether it held at 2.03 years, and why the nearly free analysis it bought is something most businesses never collected.
Free tools
Each one runs in your browser, shows its arithmetic, and sends nothing to us. See them grouped by what they are for.
- Lean Six Sigma toolkit: the five calculators below, and the order to use them in.
- Control chart maker: I-MR, c and p charts with the four Western Electric run rules.
- Process capability calculator: Cpk with its confidence interval, a Cpk against Ppk drift check and a normality test.
- Sigma level calculator: DPMO and sigma level with the 95% interval, and whether a kaizen really cut defects.
- Takt time calculator: takt time, line balance and the bottleneck.
- OEE calculator: OEE with each loss in minutes, and the one fix worth most.
- Count clicker: a free tally counter for cycle counts and line checks, with a CSV of every tap.
- Cycle count planner: paste your item list, get ABC classes and a balanced counting schedule.
- SEO ROI calculator: payback month, CAC, LTV to CAC and the return over 36 months.
- Simulation speed test: four classic physics kernels, run on your own GPU and CPU.
- Where an Order Spends Its Time: one order, quote to invoice, at one pixel per minute.
- All 100 County Seats: a route through North Carolina's 100 county seats, untangled as you scroll.
- If a CPU Cycle Took One Second: computer waiting times rescaled until one processor cycle lasts a second.
- Throwing Darts at Pi: Monte Carlo simulation, from pi to whether an order ships on time.
- Your Spreadsheet as a City: one bad formula in a quoting workbook, and how far the damage travels.
- Seven Years to a Fraser Fir: one acre of Christmas trees and the cash it holds before anything sells.
- Murphy to Manteo, to Scale: North Carolina at one mile to 40 pixels, elevation, counties and economy.
- AI leadership type quiz: twelve work scenarios sort you into one of eight AI leadership types, with a card to post on LinkedIn.
- Self-order kiosk: a touch ordering screen, working in the page. The menu and prices are invented, so the totals show the arithmetic and not a cost.
- Bottleneck Burger: an idle game that teaches takt time, the theory of constraints, the eight wastes and 6S by playing them.
- Back It In: back a 53-foot trailer into a dock door by dragging the wheel, and find out why drivers get out and look.
How fast is your machine at physics?
Four classic kernels, run on your own GPU and CPU inside this browser. It also works out how long your device would need for the protein folding study above, and shows the arithmetic so you can argue with it. Your results stay in your browser.