August 2012
July 2012
“NBC’s official Olympic website describes Australia as located in central Europe… people have been pointing it out for at least a day, and NBC is sticking to its story.”
—
Australia Moves To Europe « Uncrunched Now I understand why nbcfail is trending… (via interestingsnippets)
geography is hard
First glider discovered in a cellular automata on an aperiodic tiling →
plus.google.com
(Tim Hutton)
penrose p3 tiling
“let’s try to find all possible ways to visualize a
ludicrously small data set of two numbers. Afterwords,
let’s try to pick the best visualization.” —45 Ways to Communicate Two Quantities | Visual.ly Blog (via notational)
ludicrously small data set of two numbers. Afterwords,
let’s try to pick the best visualization.” —45 Ways to Communicate Two Quantities | Visual.ly Blog (via notational)
Currently, and for the approximately zero people that are interested, mongoimport fails when importing large hex-encoded WKB geometry representations (approximately 4MB or larger). Which is a reasonably big and/or reasonably complex multipolygon for those playing along. MongoDB has a document size limit of 16MB. So there is some disconnect between what is importable and what is storable. And, yes, I do have a 16MB WKB polygon, i.e. many many nodes. That is a honking big geometry in any format.
Anyway, all of this is to say that despite some noise about how MongoDB (or pick your flavor of NoSQL) should have true geospatial support, instead of just points, I suspect that those implementations will be some time in coming based on these limitations. If it can’t handle complex polygons, it can’t really handle polygons. We could debate WKB vs WKT vs some geometry object that isn’t stringified; that isn’t really the point. The point is large, complex geometries exist in the world and spatial is a whole heck of a lot more than some dinky little point for a check-in. And when you see folks talking about their big geospatial data in mongo, they are generally talking about the equivalent of an ascii grid in the document - a 2D matrix tagged with the x, y of the cell centroid, cell value, and some metadata defining the origin and cell size, etc. So they’ve implemented an ascii grid in the fancypants nosql. I’ll just remember the look of horror on a colleague’s face as he told me about how raster data used to be stored in text files! as a matrix! that may not have a spatial reference! Kids with CS degrees, let me tell ya.
“It’s honestly not, most of the “disruptive” stuff I worked on is “dull”, the dull details and the oh so dull, dull 80% making stuff actually work. Shipping projects are full of the “dull” but very important tasks of making them actually work, I’m down with the hard bashing code out part, I enjoy it, there’s an art to everyday coding that’s thoroughly enjoyable.”
—Leaving the Guardian, creativity vs mild depression, the quantified self and running. | (via iamdanw)
