This is all pretty exciting and mindblowing to me. So much so, that if I mentioned when each event or idea blew my mind, it'd start getting repetitive. So I left all that out below. Fill it in as needed.

Prominent theoretical physicists have been focused for a while on the properties of black holes. We have a good bead these days on what basically ( Read more... )

There's research ongoing into a relatively unknown form of nuclear power, called "Induced Gamma Emission" (IGE). There are rumors/innuendo that research potentially could be towards a new form of fusion bomb, or a new radiological weapon. It also might create the world's best battery.

Induced Gamma Emission first forces nuclei into an excited state ( Read more... )

Before I get started, I give you a spoiler warning through 4x13 "Sometimes a Great Notion", the first episode of season 4.5.  Oh, and a geek alert, too. GEEEkkky.

And some terms: The "original Seven" (or just the Seven) are the "classic" Cylons we've known for most of the show: Cavil, Leoben, D'Anna, Simon, Aaron, Six, and Boomer/Athena. The Final ( Read more... )

"How hard is it to build a highly scalable social messaging system? Not hard if you use the right tools. Over the last week and a half, in my spare time, I wrote a Twitter clone in Scala and lift. It's 884 'wc -l' lines of code including comments. It can handle 1M+ users on a two Intel Core 2 Duo boxes (one as the web front end and the other as the ( Read more... )

New Horizons, the unmanned NASA probe headed to Pluto, has one surprising primary goal: it's targeting something we haven't even discovered yet.

New Horizons will take 9 years just to reach Pluto-Charon.  Its mission could last into 2020, 14 years after its 2006 launch date.  It's a remarkable mission because our understanding of its flight path has ( Read more... )

Let's say you have a simple discussion board.  There's a posts table (simplified):
create table posts ( id int )
id
1
2
3
4

And a table where users can mark their favorite posts:
create table favorites ( post_id int, user_id int )
post_id, user_id
1 1
2 2
3 1
3 2

Problem: Now let's say we're trying to write a Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord find that gets all posts, ( Read more... )

It confuses the hell out of me every time I try to think about about.  Here are some notes, in my own words, on when to use what.
There are actually many different forms of relationships in Rails:

• belongs_to - this table has a foreign key to another table
• belongs_to :polymorphic - a belongs_to table whose foreign key actually points at many tables, ( Read more... )

This is an example of how Ruby on Rails' ActiveRecord fails to prevent the infamous N+1 query problem sometimes, even in very simple schemas that arose naturally from the requirements.

Let's say you have a discussion board.  There's a Topics table and an Users table.  (There's also a Comments table, naturally, but that's ignorable for now).

Let's say ( Read more... )

For the first time, astronomers have predicted a falling star. 2008 TC3, a 3 meter asteroid, was spotted less than a day before it it exploded over the Sudan in the early morning twilight.

Asteroids like this hit the Earth on a monthly basis. This particular one was spotted as it was at magnitude 19. Thanks to new survey telescopes coming online ( Read more... )

(Inspired by a parenthetical comment by William Gibson in one of his books ( Read more... )