Everything You Know is Wrong

• OWL can be, as the French would say, databasesque. Using OWL to implement database like integrity constraints.


• It's time to throw away your database (a paper describing the advantages of column databases) and replace it with something more flexible and scalable (using C-Store to store RDF). And column databases mean no NULLs. The problem isn't that your data is normalized it's that it's not normalized enough (also mentioned here).


• Following a question that I had earlier this year about where is the good code to learn from, I've read about 3/4 of Beautiful Code. And while I have a hard time finding C/C++ code beautiful it certainly covers some good examples of code and the process behind writing it (including Beautiful Tests, Beautiful Concurrency and MapReduce).


• Latency Moore's curse.


• Nova links to why what you thought about genes is wrong (I've actually heard this before but hadn't come across any articles).


• Scaling laws in Biology. Humans run on 100 watts or used to. Now we have cars etc. our power requirements are now 11,000 watts (making us the biggest creatures that have ever lived). And the magical number: 4.


• The Enemies of Reason is now on Google Video.