Category Archives: Stuff

Bruegel the Elder’s Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1556)

Pieter Bruegel’s Big Fish Eat Little Fish depicts a surreal, cannibalistic feeding frenzy on the waterfront: an unfortunate turn of events for a father-son fishing trip. A fearsomely large fish has been heaved upon the beach. From its gaping mouth, as well as a gash being carved in its midsection, spill forth two torrents ofContinue reading “Bruegel the Elder’s Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1556)”

Controversial impact crater under Greenland’s ice is surprisingly ancient

New date of 58 million years undercuts idea that strike triggered recent 1000-year plunge in temperatures In 2018, an international team of scientists announced a startling discovery: Buried beneath the thick ice of the Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland is an impact crater 31 kilometers wide—not as big as the crater from the dinosaur-killing impactContinue reading “Controversial impact crater under Greenland’s ice is surprisingly ancient”

Endurance: Shackleton’s lost ship is found in Antarctic

Scientists have found and filmed one of the greatest ever undiscovered shipwrecks 107 years after it sank. The Endurance, the lost vessel of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, was found at the weekend at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. The ship was crushed by sea-ice and sank in 1915, forcing Shackleton and his menContinue reading “Endurance: Shackleton’s lost ship is found in Antarctic”

Joro spiders likely to spread beyond Georgia

New research suggests the spiders could colonize the entire East Coast If you live in Georgia, it’s hard not to notice the state’s latest resident. The bright yellow, blue-black and red spiders’ golden webs will be all over power lines, in trees around town and even on your front porch come summer. The Joro spiderContinue reading “Joro spiders likely to spread beyond Georgia”

ZEN and the art of Reliability

Zendesk handles approximately 250,000 requests per second at daily peak into our infrastructure, with over ½ of those requests needing to read or write to a database. At our core we’re a humble Ruby on Rails application that is partitioned and heavily sharded. Our infrastructure was simple 10 years ago — Nginx with a RubyContinue reading “ZEN and the art of Reliability”

An Investigation of the Facts Behind Columbia’s U.S. News Ranking

Nearly forty years after their inception, the U.S. News rankings of colleges and universities continue to fascinate students, parents, and alumni. They receive millions of views annually, have spawned numerous imitators, spark ardent discussions on web forums like Quora, and have even outlived their namesake magazine, U.S. News & World Report, which last appeared inContinue reading “An Investigation of the Facts Behind Columbia’s U.S. News Ranking”

Parallel Grouped Aggregation in DuckDB

TL;DR: DuckDB has a fully parallelized aggregate hash table that can efficiently aggregate over millions of groups. Grouped aggregations are a core data analysis command. It is particularly important for large-scale data analysis (“OLAP”) because it is useful for computing statistical summaries of huge tables. DuckDB contains a highly optimized parallel aggregation capability for fastContinue reading “Parallel Grouped Aggregation in DuckDB”

Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles

Several Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) encountered by military, commercial, and civilian aircraft have been reported to be structured craft that exhibit ‘impossible’ flight characteristics. We consider a handful of well-documented encounters, including the 2004 encounters with the Nimitz Carrier Group off the coast of California, and estimate lower bounds on the accelerations exhibited by theContinue reading “Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles”

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