updated: 2026-08-06
In this talk, I explain how practical Xarray-SQL can be at performing essential geospatial queries. I then explain some initial realizations for how to make differential databases concrete via a demo of training a 3 layer neural network in SQL.
Everything old is new again: Bringing the relational model to climate data
This is the presentation where I debuted Xarray-SQL. I also talk a bit about the history of the idea and made some bets for the future.
Thoughts on Weather Foundation Models
I cover a lot of ground in this three part series on weather foundation models. I start by explaining how numerical weather models work, then discuss modern ML weather forecasting approaches. I then finish with a rather "out-there" hypothesis that weather foundation models – maybe, all foundation models – are primarily a database technology.
Why Machine Learning People Should Think about Databases
In this talk at CNG, I make the provocative claim that foundation models are "just" a database technology. I attempt to coin the term "differential database."
Episode #16: Alex Merose on Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
I was a guest on Jed Sundwall's literature podcast, Techs on Text. We covered a lot of ground in our discussion of two texts (Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata and Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work by Maurizio Lazzarato), touching on the philosophy of work, hegemonic effects of patriarchy, inadequacy of language, and reality's surprising amount of detail.
Pangeo is a Database
In this talk, I argue that the Pangeo software collective is not merely an ecosystem for big data geoscience, but a new database system.
Fundamentals of Earth Engine import & export of satellite data
In this talk, I debuted Xee, an Xarray extension for
Google Earth Engine. I also discussed my other open source data
engineering projects, like weather-tools.
Apache Beam on Dask- Portable, Scalable, Scientific Python
In this introduction to Apache Beam, I discussed ongoing efforts to support Dask. I spoke about how both portability and scalability in data engineering are essential to help address the climate crisis.
Music from chaos: Audiofying the Lorenz Attractor
My lightning talk was accepted at my first PyCon! I presented a side project to synthesize electronic music with Python.