“ We often wonder what a conservative paradise would really look like on the liberal blogs, and it looks like Colorado Springs—home to many defense contractors and to Focus on Family—has become a shining star in the much-desired collapse of basic government services that Grover Norquist and other anti-government fanatics have always wanted. ”
20100208 @ 0857
February 8th
February 3rd
“ My fellow parishioners believed that they would, with the wave of god’s magic spirit wand, become completely holy upon entering paradise. They never seemed to understand the dilemma that created for me. Why not just do it now? Why not just make us holy? If you’re going to wave the magic stick upon our entrance into the heavenly city, why not wave it now? Why not subvert our free will now for our own peace of mind and the peace of the entire fucking earth if you’re going to subvert it eventually? Why not end suffering, misery, rape, molestation, poverty, genocide, and every other evil free will allegedly allows if you’re going to end the shit eventually anyway? What sort of perverse concept of god allowed for this sort of malicious stupidity? ”
20100203 @ 0934
January 27th
“ For thrift stores like the Salvation Army, about half the garments donated eventually wind up in overseas market stalls or as industrial fiber. That translates into 17,000 jobs in the United States, an estimated 100,000 jobs in Africa’s informal economy and a multinational trade in second-hand clothing valued at more than $1 billion a year. ”
20100127 @ 0747
January 26th
January 25th
“ The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations. ”
20100125 @ 1636
January 19th
“ It’s weird to say your life needs more friction. But I think mine does. Distractions are so easy to get to, there’s almost no good reason not to partake. Unless I count the one big reason: we all have big, important, useful work we could be doing. ”
20100119 @ 2239
— De-optimizing, via minimalmac
“ You can’t call reason insufficient and then turn around and offer a reasonable explanation for why you believe. Either you rely on reason or you don’t. And if you do, then follow it where it leads. It will not go all the way down, but neither does faith go all the way up. ”
20100119 @ 2236
“ My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. ”
20100119 @ 2235
Link Roundup: Hierarchical Data in Document Databases
Specifically MongoDB, but also for CouchDB. I needed a simple way to store a hierarchy, and here’s some links:
- The “classic” sitepoint article: storing hierarchical data in a database
- From Oracle, some information about materialized paths, also in SQL
- The best overview so far, Sean Cribb’s Modeling a Tree in a Document Database
- A question and answer on StackOverflow, which links to this thread on the MongoDB google group
- An entry on the CouchDB wiki, and a related article about trees in CouchDB
- My simple mongo_mapper-based solution, which is naive and not robust but gets the job done for now. My solution uses some cues from the dm-is-nested-set API.
January 17th
