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I'M PRETTY SURE I INVENTED A TIME MACHINE

(via @rands)

This link is making the rounds today: images of Sacsayhuamán, with walls of massive stone blocks that fit together so perfectly it is astonishing ( Read more... )

All you Reverend Dan Catt fans will want to read his latest post on the Flickr blog, about the new Panda APIs.

It's Serious Business.

1. hummingbirds fighting over who gets the chance to bathe in a small stream. It seems like it's the season of love and all the males want to look slick for the ladies. I crouched down nearby and did get some photos, with hummingbirds buzzing all around me like basso profundo bumblebees. But only with my iphone, so it's mostly little orange blurs. Oh ( Read more... )

The days' chores are going undone -- I stumbled on this terrible but also strangely beautiful new world that James Griffioen is documenting on his blog, Sweet Juniper (named for his daughter), mostly through photography (portfolio, FlickrHe lives in Detroit, a city shedding population so rapidly every year brings new school closings. He ( Read more... )

Interesting post from Bret today about how Friendfeed uses MySQL. Basically, they don't. They store braindead simple BLOBs in MySQL. Then they create indices as entirely separate tables. And then they wrote a transaction layer on top of that in Python.

This is the same strategy that people ridicule as The Inner-Platform Effect -- where someone " ( Read more... )

I spent all of Saturday at NIMBY 2.0 helping with the grand clean up and reorganization. Mostly it was a lot of dust and lifting and fiddling with rather rickety shelving, but the feeling of power-drilling things directly into the wall was exquisite. I think I'm going to have to get a power drill for those days when I'm feeling blue, and just ( Read more... )

Dmitry Orlov: engineer, peak oil theorist, prophet of the collapse of the United States of America and comedian.

In my book, I advocated banning the sale of new cars, as was done in the US during World War II. [...]

Here we are, only a year or so later, and I am most heartened to see that the US auto industry has taken my advice and is in the ( Read more... )

I'm rather pleased that my Flickr Code blog post on the Astrometry.net project seems to have excited a lot of people. It's an exciting project and deserves the attention it's getting ( Read more... )