What Happened to all the Snow?

What Happened to all the Snow? – NASA Science:

First of all,” he explains, “we are experiencing a La Niña pattern of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. This pushes the jet stream and the cold arctic air northward.”
“On top of that, this year’s Arctic Oscillation has been stronger.”

The Arctic Oscillation is a see-sawing pressure difference between the Arctic and lower latitudes.  When the pressure difference is high, a whirlpool of air forms around the North Pole. Last year, the whirlpool motion was weaker, allowing cold air to escape from the polar regions and head southward to the US.

“This year the whirlpool has been more forceful, corralling the cold air and keeping it nearer the pole. That has reinforced the La Niña impact.”

[“It ain’t over till the Siberian Huskies sing.”]

Source: Lennard Zinn

Switching to NoSQL

OmniTI ~ Seeds ~ Winter ~ 2012:

It’s not that switching to NoSQL is a bad idea necessarily; there are some things that RDBMS software can’t do as well as a more dedicated solution. But, if you think that switching to NoSQL will just let you hand-wave away all of the challenges of running a database, you are terribly misguided. If you’re a DBA and you are worried about a future with NoSQL, take heart; study your product less and focus on these key architectural design points more. Those skills are critical now, and they will remain so in the future, NoSQL or not.

[Lots of good points.]

Amazon DynamoDB: First Look

Amazon DynamoDB: First Look:

NoSQL has, as a category, crossed the chasm from interesting science project to alternative data persistence mechanism. But while NoSQL tools like Cassandra and Riak are available in managed form via providers like Joyent and Heroku, DynamoDB is, in Popescu’s words: “the first managed NoSQL databases that auto-shards.”

It is also possible that SSD pricing contributed directly to the launch timing, with pricing for the drive type down to levels where the economics of a low cost shared service finally make sense.

SSDs

One underdiscussed aspect to the Dynamo launch is the underlying physical infrastructure, which consists solely of SSDs. This is likely one of the major contributing factors to the performance of the system, and in some cases will be another incentive to use Amazon’s platform as many traditional datacenters will not have equivalent SSD hardware available to them.

[A good analysis.]

“Not So Deep As a Well: Collected Poems” by Dorothy Parker

“Not So Deep As a Well: Collected Poems” by Dorothy Parker:

The Leal

 The friends I made have slipped and strayed,
   And who’s the one that cares?
A trifling lot and best forgot —
   And that’s my tale, and theirs.

 
Then if my friendships break and bend,
   There’s little need to cry
The while I know that every foe
   Is faithful till I die.

[Wonderful. Mournfully funny.]

Source: GroundReport.com

d: Where do books fit?

The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA:

In other words: Apple is trying to establish a rule that whatever I create with this application, if I sell it, I have to give them a cut. And iBooks Author is free, so this arrangement sounds pretty reasonable.

[This is being bandied back and forth. Where else but through iBooks would an iBooks file be used so who cares, or maybe it was an overzealous lawyer at Apple, or as the above. What is the place of books in the future of education.

I was rarely interested in sitting and reading a textbook. Even history, with its arc and story was often reduced to a memorization of a bunch of facts about which I no longer had the slightest interest. But science lab, or a field trip to a historical place, or anything where you did something, worked with something, *touched* something worked for me.

So where do textbooks fit? Where does it make sense to have a primary learning experience consist of this? Most of us can look up facts whenever we need them. We can find well written accounts of virtually any topic, and it’ll include almost up to the minute news and recent changes in all but the most esoteric fields.

What I’d like to see for my kid is some sort of 1:1 iPad to student program. That should easily cover the 5 Rs. Art class, music class, etc. can all be bought this way as well, although I wouldn’t try and remove the chance for kids to play real instruments, apply paint to canvas, water color, go to museums, and mix stuff together in a science lab. Quite the opposite, I would encourage that more time and money be spent on those things. The social experience of going to school, the chance to bring Noah first hand (literally) experience with things that I cannot are why I want from his school. I admit, to my sorrow, that part of this is also “day care”. Both my wife and I work, so we need to make sure some one we trust is caring for Noah, but I want that time filled with great stuff now, while his mind is like a sponge. For the moment, Noah’s working on the basics (reading , writing, etc.) Soon those things will be just gateway skills to the real stuff. And I want him to have a modern education, not one that was designed 100 years ago.]

Source: venomous porridge

The other side of SOPA

Put Up or Shut The F… Up | The Cynical Musician:

Supposedly the tech crowd are some of the smartest people on this planet. I mean, they’ve come up with the free encyclopedia anyone can edit, a site where I can broadcast myself and a way for me to find what I’m looking for on the web, that’s not evil at all. Surely, figuring out a way how we can stop unprincipled, opportunistic arsewipes making money from creators’ work without paying them, while at the same time keeping the Internet secure and assuring that people’s free speech rights aren’t abridged, isn’t beyond the capabilities of those bright minds. I’m not asking for the impossible: I just want to see a situation where it is very hard to run a pirate site and the chances of getting caught and punished when doing so are considerable. I want to see piracy being a bad business to go into.

[I haven’t heard about this side of the argument from the tech people… it’s a problem and a half.]

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB:

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast performance at any scale. Today’s web-based applications often encounter database scaling challenges when faced with growth in users, traffic, and data. With Amazon DynamoDB, developers scaling cloud-based applications can start small with just the capacity they need and then increase the request capacity of a given table as their app grows in popularity. Their tables can also grow without limits as their users store increasing amounts of data. Behind the scenes, Amazon DynamoDB automatically spreads the data and traffic for a table over a sufficient number of servers to meet the request capacity specified by the customer. Amazon DynamoDB offers low, predictable latencies at any scale. Customers can typically achieve average service-side in the single-digit milliseconds. Amazon DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability.

[Hmmm. I like some of the aspects of this… still digging’ into the details.]

Information wants to be expensive

Information wants to be expensive:

The full quote, from Stewart Brand, actually goes like this:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

It’s interesting how the “information wants to be expensive” part of that axiom is largely forgotten these days, isn’t it?

[Always. Excellent point.]

Source: Coyote Tracks