a timocracy of one

Enough Statistics so that Zed won’t yell at you – Devlin Daley

Reminds me how horrible our whole society is about the basics of stats and probabilities. I think our overly trained ability to pick out patterns really hurts us. At least it’s not just programmers who are clueless about stats – it’s just more surprising because they are technically proficient and assumed to be intelligent and educated in math. Good survey lecture for what programmers should know before thinking about doing any benchmarking.

Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB – Jay Lehnardt

Why is everyone hating on RDBs. ;) Cool talk – already read a lot about CouchDB, though. Do like the focus on some of the whys for parallelization/map-reducing. Hmmm, couchdb as the git of data. I would follow it closer, if I had a use anywhere on the horizon. I figure by the time I get around to using it the nitty gritties might have changed (especially usage and client libraries)