Why I can't go on vacation

These pictures are so gorgeous, that I want to go there, sub zero temps and all. As far as I'm concerned these relics are our modern marvels of the world.

Edward Burtynskey does this obsession better, and with more philosophical and theoretical flair, I just react to these photos emotionally. There's a lovely U.S. Navy graveyard in the Suisun Bay near San Francisco that's fine, but the primal nature of the russian ships, ripped apart by the ice, is far more moving to me.

Via [IOC]

Tierney Thys

I've been commuting from Berkeley into San Francisco everyday, which, despite the decent and improving status of BART as a mass transit system, still takes over an hour to accomplish. I've been passing the time away watching videos from the TED conferences which have recently been put on the web.

I'm jealous of the people who get to go to these talks. The quality is very high and the curation of the attendees seems to be generally superior to anything else like it. Talks by Will Wright, Thomas Barnett and Jeff Hawkins are all noteworthy.

The winner for completely blow your mind that this could ever exist, though, is Tierney Thys' lecture on the Mola mola, a 10 foot long jellyfish eating variant of the sunfish. Really incredible stuff. Check it out.

As an extra bonus for anyone interested in visualization, Jonathan Harris' talk on We Feel Fine (regretably apparently broken now), and Universe is fascinating as well. Credit goes to RD over at The Quiet Quiet for first introducting me to these projects.

Berkeley DB

I confess that I strayed. Perhaps its been spending too much time in fake grad school that had confused me, or perhaps I'm just not as saavy a developer as I thought I was.

I've been working on a certain 100,000,000 row dataset problem using hand built data structures and mmap-ing them out of the file system. This morning, on a lark, I loaded the data into a Berkeley BD instance, and I'm haven't looked back since. Even with a Btree index the database builds faster than my own code, or that of other good netflix libraries, and then you get the benefit of the index on retrieval.

I haven't evagelized for Berkeley DB here yet. And not everyone will agree with me that its a good solution for most of your data access needs (certainly my alma mater didn't. But if you have a highly performant problem and what a quick, simple and very low overhead mechanism for managing your data give Berkeley DB a look. It eve has ruby bindings. It's free as in beer and code. [Updated: See comment below for an actual description of the licensing requirements.]

So for all two of you that read this blog and know and care about these things: Why are we still using relational databases for our websites. I understand the need for flexible systems for our reporting tools and data mining, but when a website has maybe 30 queries that need to be executed, and that database is almost always the first piece of a architecture to fail, why not use a customer database without the overhead of query management? Why are we still parsing SQL for simple CRUD calls when it could be done 10 times faster?

Richard Serra

JP and I missed the ginormous (now a word recognized by the O.E.D - w00t!) Richard Serra exhibit by about 16 hours when we were out east for MSA's graduation. Instead we got a bunch of rain. But we both remember the Dia:Beacon exhibit we saw a few years ago fondly and wish we'd made it to MoMa.

The nerdy among you saw the Serra segment on the NewsHours last night, the rest of you will have to settle for wikipedia. In a nutshell he works on many materials and tries to create new spaces and forms using an number of simple transformations like "lifting" or "cutting".

To get a completely innappropriate view of him check out his work in Cremaster 3 as "The Architect" pouring vaseline down the Gugenheim spiral.

At any rate. If you visit or live in NYC you should check out the exhibit before the pieces fall on someome and get banned.

Here's a pretty 'arty' description of his work. IT really doesn't suck as much as these guys make it seem. In fact his pieces are pretty incredible.

Thom Mayne

Thom Mayne's San Francisco Federal Building had me awe struck when I saw it yesterday for the first time. The building makes use of various materials that come out at incredibly sharp angles and there's an amazing use of negative space in the upper levels of the main tower along with exterior spaces that are traditionally interior (like the stairwells). It's a wonderful thing to see and I recommend it to anyone visiting the San Francisco area. Incredibly the building qualifies for LEED certification and uses less than half the energy of a traditional office building through aggresive use of shade. All this while being completely compliant with post-9/11 DHS security measures.

Miya Ando Stanoff

Miya Ando Stanoff made the rounds on the internet a few years ago (I was sure I first learned about her on CoolHunting, but I can't find it up there anymore). She works with flat cold steel that's treated with tempering heat (I think) and pigments. The result is a really cold effect that's very soothing to me. I had the privilege of seeing her work in person in San Jose a little over a year ago, and the effect really is quite stunning. Her site has a new movie on it that makes me all mellow.

Whiteboards aren't just for math

Miranda July is currently my favorite example of irreverent sensitive humor and her movie about almost, but not quite broken, people looking for love, Me and You and Everyone We Know might just be my favorite movie ever. She's just written a new book as is promoting it through the most unique website I've seen this year. Check it out.