(Editor’s note: I recently took to using Tumblr again. For a while, I’ve been curating interesting stuff here. But Tumblr has evolved into a really fantastic application for doing this. So, my policy going forward is to post my stuff here and curate other people’s awesome stuff over there. That said, I’ll probably do “best-of” posts, like this one, to keep you interested and informed.)

I’ll just sit here and quietly hope that the plans for an urban park around the Trinity aren’t derailed by everything that is politics.

Try something. Every time somebody complains about the evils or failings of “the government,” strike out “the government” and see what results.

Often, simply striking out “government” reveals a completely different, and far more useful, commentary.

I think that many of the NoSQL crowd either fail to either recognize, or to properly describe that their preferred databases don’t replace applications like MySQL and Postgres, just as Ruby doesn’t replace Java. Instead, the explosion of these new options for persistence just work better for some domains (and worse for others).

Ben Scofield’s spot-on here. One of the many transitions we’re undergoing is from “I’ll use MySQL most of my career” to “I’ll tinker with a different database for every project over a couple years and then pick and choose the best as time goes on”.

Politicians should tone down the rhetoric. Protesters should read some history before making Hitler comparisons. Talk-show hosts should stop pretending that paranoid nitwits are asking reasonable questions.

The Economist does well to explain the insanity that is propagated by American political media. Reading articles like this help me stay sane. Also: ignoring media with deadlines shorter than a week, and consuming as much constructive satire as possible.

And if you like that, you’d probably also like some Russian submarines, their interiors, and their underground bases.

While we’re dwelling on intriguing/depressing concrete structures: one dude’s home built into a former missile silo and the Oak Ridge plant where the materials for the Manhattan Project were refined.