Month: August 2016

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HR 2.0 is the poster child for the next wave of SaaS innovation

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Reminder: We’re meeting in Columbus on Wednesday

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Heinrich Himmler’s Lost Wartime Diaries Confirm He Was a Total Bastard

While there is a plethora of videos showing how common centerfire ammunition is made, 22LR and similar rimfire ammunition has been kept relatively close to the chest. CCI had a video out a few years ago, but it disappeared from their official YouTube outlet and was not saved anywhere that I remember. The general process […]

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The post 22Plinkster Sees How His Ammo is Made appeared first on The Firearm Blog.

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22Plinkster Sees How His Ammo is Made

The MySQL Document Store functionality allows developers to use a relation database with or without SQL (structured Query Language), also known as NoSQL. The example in this blog is hopefully a simple look at this new feature of MySQL. The example data used is from JSONStudio.com and is a JSON formatted data set for US zip (postal) codes (656K compressed). So download your copy of this data set and lets get to work.

Create a collection

Collections are tables and below we create a collection name ‘zip‘ in the test database in the Python dialect.

mysqlsh -u root -p --py test
Creating an X Session to root@localhost:33060/test
Enter password:
Default schema `test` accessible through db.

Welcome to MySQL Shell 1.0.4 Development Preview

Copyright (c) 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.

Type '\help', '\h' or '\?' for help.

Currently in Python mode. Use \sql to switch to SQL mode and execute queries.
mysql-py> db.createCollection("zip")

Is it there?

As soon as most of use create a table we want to see if it is there.

mysql-py> db.getCollections();
[
 <Collection:zip>
]
mysql-py> 

So it is there. But what is the underlying structure of this table. Switch to SQL dialect (or open a mysql client.

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE zip;
+-------+--------------------------------+
| Table | Create Table |
+-------+--------------------------------+
| zip | CREATE TABLE `zip` (
 `doc` json DEFAULT NULL,
 `_id` varchar(32) GENERATED ALWAYS AS (json_unquote(json_extract(`doc`,'$._id'))) STORED NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 |
+-------+--------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> 

If you peeked at the zip code file you downloaded, you may have noticed that it has an _id field already. But what if your data set has no _id or you want to use another key/value pair from the data as an index? Simply use a stored generated column on the field of your choice. Remember good indexing practices still count as the underlying relational database still has to keep the infrastructure underneath up to date.

Loading data

I will skip over the loading of the zip code data (I can address that in a later blog post if there is any interest. For now lets take it as a given that the data has been moved into the new collection.

Finding a Rainbow

So lets look for a particular zip code. For out data set the zip code corresponds with _id field.And remember that this column is a generated column using that field from the JSON document.

mysql-py> db.zip.find("_id = '76077'")
[
 {
 "_id": "76077",
 "city": "RAINBOW",
 "loc": [
 -97.70652,
 32.281216
 ],
 "pop": 722,
 "state": "TX"
 }
]
1 document in set (0.00 sec)

mysql-py> 

How About Searching a Non-indexed JSON data

Lets look for the state of Texas, or TX in the JSON data. Previous we had the _ID field as a materialized column extracted from the JSON data. Now we are asking the MySQL server to read all the records and return the ones meeting the criteria. This does perform a full table scale of the data (not as efficient as as index) but, thanks to the relatively small amount of records, it does return fairly quickly.

mysql-py> db.zip.find("state = 'TX'")
.
. (Omitted)

. 
{
 "_id": "79935",
 "city": "EL PASO",
 "loc": [
 -106.330258,
 31.771847
 ],
 "pop": 20465,
 "state": "TX"
 },
 {
 "_id": "79936",
 "city": "EL PASO",
 "loc": [
 -106.30159,
 31.767655
 ],
 "pop": 52031,
 "state": "TX"
 }
]
1676 documents in set (0.06 sec)

mysql-py> 

Wrap Up

So now we can create a collection and search it. But what happens when we add records and especially records without our index-able key? That will be covered in another blog soon.
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MySQL Document Store — The NoSQL Zipcodes

Chinese legend tells of a great flood, and how Emperor Yu drove back the floodwaters, founding the Xia dynasty and giving rise to Chinese civilization. Now an international scientific collaboration has discovered the first geological evidence that such a flood may actually have happened—and the founding of the Xia dynasty may have happened hundreds of years later than historians previously thought. They describe their findings in a new paper in Science.

“Great floods occupy a central place in some of the world’s oldest stories,” the University of Washington geologist David Montgomery wrote in an accompanying commentary on the new findings. “Emperor Yu’s flood now stands as another such story potentially rooted in geologic events…. How many other ancient stories of intriguing disasters might just have more than a grain of truth to them?”

There are different versions of the Great Flood myth, handed down through oral tradition for hundreds of years before finally being written down around 1000 BC. But all feature the heroic Yu, who figured out how to dredge and channel all the flooded rivers and tributaries to control the floodwaters—a task that purportedly took decades to accomplish, even with the help of a dragon to dig channels and a giant turtle to haul mud. (Myths have their fanciful elements.) This led to him becoming emperor and establishing the Xia dynasty in China.

Whether or not the Great Flood actually happened has been a longstanding bone of contention among scholars. After all, the historical record may have included the story of the flood and Emperor Yu’s role in driving back the waters as propaganda to justify imperial rule. History is written by the victors. This new geological discovery is the first real evidence for such a flood taking place.

In a press conference yesterday, lead author Wu Qinglong of Peking University in Beijing described the accidental discovery of unusual sediment in the Jishi Gorge of the Yellow River. He hypothesized that it might be linked with the great flood and the founding the Xi dynasty. It was Wu who brought together the members of the collaboration, hailing from different disciplines, to find evidence to bolster that hypothesis.

According to co-author Darryl Granger, a geologist at Purdue University, they found that evidence by mapping and dating the distinctive sediments deposited downstream from Jishi Gorge. They also examined bones from skeletons of children who died in an earthquake, found at the archaeological site of Lajia. Radiocarbon analysis of the skeletons gave a date of around 1922 BC.

From this, the collaborators were able to reconstruct a sequence of likely events occurring around this time along the Yellow River. First, there was a devastating earthquake that caused a massive landslide. This dammed the Yellow River in the Jishi Gorge, located right at the edge of the Tibetan plateau. According to Granger, quake-caused landslides are quite common to this area. The resulting lake eventually spilled over the top of the dam of debris, weakening it until it collapsed catastrophically, sending a deluge of water downriver and flooding the lowlands.

The houses of that period would have been more like caves dug into windblown sediment, according to co-author David Cohen, an archaeologist at National Taiwan University, which collapsed when the earthquake hit, killing the people inside.

“We know [the earthquake] happened the same year [as the flood] because fissures in the ground caused by the earthquake are filled with flood sediment, as are pottery jars [at the site,” said Granger. “So the people killed in the quake and the flood are intimately related.” Had it been more than a year, the annual rains would have kicked in, filling those fissures and jars with finer sediment.

The flooding would have significant enough to devastate the region. In the Book of Documents, Yu describes the flooding:

“The inundating waters seemed to assail the heavens, and in their extent embraced the hills and overtopped the great mounds, so that the people were bewildered and overwhelmed.

That’s in line with the Chinese collaboration’s estimates based on their mapping and analysis of sediment the site. Granger estimated that the flood waters may have risen 38 meters (around 124 feet) above the usual river level—about one-third the height of the Empire State Building, per Cohen—with flow rates between 300,000 to 500,000 cubic meters (79 million to 132 million gallons) of water per second. “That’s equivalent to the largest flood registered on the Amazon River, and the largest known flood on Earth in the last 10,000 years,” he said. The pile of debris that dammed the river would have been somewhere between the height of the Three Gorges Dam that spans the Yangtze River and the Hoover Dam in the US.

This timeline also coincides with a major cultural transition, as the late Neolithic Era gave way to the Early Bronze Age, although Cohen describes this as more of an interesting parallel, with no evidence as yet for direct causation. There is evidence that the system of smaller chiefdoms in place before that time suddenly collapsed, and after a transitional period, larger cities, with more complex administrative structures, a writing system, and bronze manufacturing emerged around 1900 BC.

In that sense, “The story of Yu taming the flood is the story of a new political order emerging out of the chaos of the flood,” said Cohen.

[Science]

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China’s Mythical Great Flood May Have Really Happened

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This DIY Screen Hides Bulky AC Units, Storage, or Trash Bins in Your Yard

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In America, asthma now affects 1 in 10 children between the ages of five and 14, according to the CDC. These children must spend their childhoods with an inhaler within reach at all times, to help them weather sudden, terrifying episodes of an inability to breathe. That is good for the people who make the inhalers and not so good for the children and the parents. And asthma has been on the rise since the 1960s.

The conventional wisdom is that asthma, which is incurable, is caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. To isolate the first, a team of medical researchers looked at two genetically homogenous American farming communities, the Indiana Amish and the North Dakotan Hutterites. Both originate from roughly the same region in Europe and have belief systems that involve simple diets, simple lifestyles, a rule against keeping indoor pets, and the discipline to maintain spotlessly clean homes.

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Yet asthma is much more common in the Hutterites (15-20% of the population) than the Amish (just 2-4%). The researchers took blood samples from children in both communities and found that the Amish had far more robust immune systems. Why?

One thing the researchers noted is that the Amish and the Hutterites farm in distinctly different ways. 

The Amish way

The Hutterite way

According to The New York Times (boldface ours):

The Amish live on single-family dairy farms. They do not use electricity, and use horses to pull their plows and for transportation. Their barns are close to their homes, and their children play in them. 

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The Hutterites have no objection to electricity and live on large, industrialized communal farms. Their cows are housed in huge barns, more like hangars, away from their homes. Children do not generally play in Hutterite barns.

The researchers began collecting dust samples from both Amish and Hutterite homes. The Amish dust was loaded with bacteria from the nearby barn and animals within them, while the Hutterite dust was not. In lab tests, they found that introducing this Amish dust to mice subsequently boosted their immune systems, as their bodies began producing the white blood cells needed to fight the bacteria off. They became, after inhaling the dust, less prone to developing asthma.

"We found exactly what we found in the children," [Researcher Dr. Donata] Vercelli said. "If we give the Amish dust, we protect the mice. If we give the Hutterite dust, we do not protect them."

…"Our jaws were hanging open," [study author Dr. Carole] Ober said. "We could not believe it."

The full study, "Innate Immunity and Asthma Risk in Amish and Hutterite Farm Children," has been released today in The New England Journal of Medicine.

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In an earlier post, we looked at how Amish barn-raising is an important group activity that strengthens social bonds. Who would’ve guessed that in erecting this practical structure, they’re also unwittingly building an incubator that protects their children?

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Researchers Make Startling Discovery on What Can Prevent Asthma in Children: Barns

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This Guy Fighting an Excavator Is an Inspiration to Us All