- Another item to file under “obsolete or unfashionable technologies I hold on to”: Is the Relational Database Doomed? Here I am teaching the gospel of SQL when all the cool kids swear by NoSQL.
- Speaking of being a grumpy old guy, why is it that when I look at the amazing images taken by Opportunity’s 12 years on Mars, all I see are track marks and litter on a once pristine planet? This reminds me strongly of Mariner 9 by Kelly Richardson, which I’ve seen displayed at the National Gallery last year.
- My friend Xavier sent me the coolest belated Christmas gift ever, a tablecloth printed with the beautiful 1:50,000 swisstopo map of Western Switzerland. He used a service called Spoonflower to custom-print the fabric. Of course I immediately started thinking of all the cool things I could do, notably a wallpaper with contour lines, e.g. of the Niagara escarpement…
- This is our 4th winter in Toronto and so far it’s been much milder than the previous years. It snowed again last night, but nothing like the snows of yesteryear.
- Keeping on the arctic theme, negatives from Shackleton’s second Antarctica expedition have been found and were finally developed after more than a century. Instagram, 1914 style.
- Is the age of the hydroelectric dam over? Fist this fascinating 99% invisible episode about fish cannons is full of offhand comments that dams are being routinely dismantled in the US and how it’s a good thing for salmon and humans. Then I learn in the New Yorker about crumbling African dams that could soon become “the dam industry’s Chernobyl.” I do hope we have good alternatives for replacing all the lost power generation and off-peak storage. The answer to the latter could lay in part a few kilometers from me in Lake Ontario, where energy storage using underwater compressed air is being tested as I write this.
- On this topic, I keep going back to the superb What can a technologist do about climate science piece published by Bret Victor last November. He lists a few alternative solutions for energy storage, including the slightly crazy idea of using surplus energy to drive a train uphill, then letting it roll back downhill to harvest that energy back.
- Keepalive is a piratebox hidden in a boulder in northern Germany. Lighting a fire on its side with generate enough power to bring the server to life and share PDF survival guides over WiFi. I just hope there is a USB port on the boulder to power up the lost wanderers’ devices (and that they remembered how to start a fire without needing a survival guide)…
- Ever wondered why businesses ask you how likely you’d recommend a product of service to a friend? It informs the Net Promoter Score, a metric that is used to measure customer satisfaction. Publishers are using it too!
- This nice visualisation tool for place names motivated me to start playing with geo data again. The Overpass API allows bulk download of OSM nodes, and Overpass Turbo has a nice interface to try out Overpass queries.