When designing computer systems, one is often faced with a choice between using a more or less powerful language for publishing information, for expressing constraints, or for solving some problem. This finding explores tradeoffs relating the choice of language to reusability of information. The "Rule of Least Power" suggests choosing the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

Hoo man, David has an interview with Ball and Nogue about their High Desert Test Site project which is called Yucca Crater, and which appears to be an earthwork, but is man-made. It's a tricked out plywood recreational structure half-embedded in the desert which looks a bit like a half-pipe, an abandoned pool, and one of those deadly carnivorous pitcher plants. Because it'll have a climbing wall and a pool in it, in which some random tripping art student will, I'm afraid, drown one day.

But that's not important now. Yucca Crater is made from the leftover formwork from another Ball-Nogues project, Talus Dome, a public art commission for the Edmonton Arts Council. [Quesnell Bridge. Holy smokes, people, a mountain dome of giant mirrored spheres.

But why, you may ask, is the form available to bury in the desert if the Telus Dome is not actually complete yet? This is not some CAD/CAM hit ENTER and 3-D print operation. They actually pack those balls into that thing to make it.

image: Timothy Hursley via arch mag

Like how they made Cradle, Ball-Nogues' shiny ball 2010 commission for the "updated" facade of what [used to be] Frank Gehry's Santa Monica Place parking garage. [It's called Cradle I guess because calling it a bulging "men's Speedo" or "a big banana hammock" before they finished it might have raised some eyebrows.]

Anyway, who else but Design Boom has a big photo set of the making of Cradle. These balls are just hanging there, each held in place by a steel cable, the specific length of which was determined by rigging the whole thing up in a giant, wooden banana hammock mold. Designboom also shows how the balls themselves were made: they were welded together and blown in China. See how I avoided any innuendo there?

Whatever, I can't stop staring.

Where working set size is less than 4 GB, it may make sense to stay with a 32-bit OS and use PAE to access physical RAM beyond that limit. You get to keep 32-bit pointers but each process can only address 4 GB of RAM. However, you can just run multiple processes to take advantage of the extra RAM. Today’s web architectures and horizontal scaling means this may be a better choice than 64-bit for some applications.

The haunted house/cool house, the home of famous magician O.P. Sharma.

Bhoot Banglow Barra-2, Kanpur-208027 (U.P.)

An installation of MacPorts and the ports installed by it are only designed to work on a single OS release and a single CPU architecture. If you upgrade to a new OS version (e.g. from Leopard to Snow Leopard) or migrate to a new machine with a different type of CPU (e.g. PowerPC to Intel), you may get lucky and have your ports keep working, but in general, things will break.

Sea Forts

Chernikhov

Viktor Timofeev. Selected Works March - August 2008. / paintings / a++++

A set of Japanese highway interchange photos.

spite tower

spot the aui connector

In old China, streets and lanes were defined by width. Hutongs were lanes no wider than 9 metres. Many are smaller; Beijing hutongs range in width from 10 metres down to only 40 centimetres.

Pretty cool if I do say so myself. And I do. Who would have ever thought that one of the most famous villains of all time would end up as a decoration on a church? If you’re ever in Washington, D.C. be sure to check it out. And don’t forget your binoc

Some estimate that the cost to construct the X-Seed 4000 structure may be somewhere between US$300-900 billion, in current dollars.[2]

Feel the grandeur of the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel.

"It is not an accident that the housing bubble coincided with the phenomenon of Peak Oil."

crystalpunk is a self-invented movement for self-education that is reaching for the high ground, from the antechambers of happy amateurism below ground, remaining completely oblivious to the middle ground.

jam jam jam jam

zzzz fluxus

Ruins' drummer's collection of stone photos

Carol Kassel at Columbia sent me this in email about Shibboleth and OpenID

laura g lived here in the summer!

yes microformats!!!!

whoaaaaa

Most sites spend most of their load times getting non-html stuff. CSS sprites seem interesting

Microformats are small and gentle syntactic touch-ups for your web pages. They have one major purpose: to make your data readable by both man and machine. They are the technical diplomats of the Web; allowing the same piece of data to be shared among many

Beautiful photos of Soviet era bus stops

UCSD library?

Possible satanic community college architecture.

not sure what this is; too lazy 2 google

little color explorer

office 2.0 visio

jeff r and laura b told me about him

nyc subway

walking city

Let us rejoice in bad conversions and seek to amuse ourselves with them wherever possible, taking utmost pains to observe the careful, hopeless touches of their renovation and their indelible flourishes of nonsense on our landscape. Embrace blight!

At that time [1987], it had 50,000 inhabitants on 0.026 km², and therefore a very high population density of 1,900,000 / km². It was allegedly the most densely populated spot on Earth.