What’s Up With Russia & Georgia?
Posted on August 12th, 2008 at 12:42 pm by necco

In my quest to understand this new explosion of war in the world I went to my Russian friend at work.  He closed his office door and asked if I wanted the long explanation or the short one.  Long, of course.  About an hour later I had a better idea of the conflict, at least from the perspective of a Russian.  His take on the conflict goes something like this: Russia and Georgia have traditionally been friends, Georgia is viewed as a small country with it’s own unique ethnicities (20 of them, at least) and as a beautiful resort state (think Aspen).  After the fall of the USSR Georgia had a few provenences in the 1990s that declared independence (again, lots of distinct cultures exist).  One of these places was South Ossetia.  After awhile Russia took this country in.  Georgia wanted to join the NATO gang, but NATO said, “Uhmm… no… because you don’t have all your states under control.”  So, Georgia hatched a plan to pretend to go about peacefully getting its stuff back in line, but then actually attacked South Ossetia… it’s own citizens that it was trying to get back!  It’d be like if North Dakota joined Canada and then we bombed North Dakota to get them back.  Russia was pissed when Georgia bombed the little state under it’s wings, so it came back with force.  The take-away here is that Saakashvili (Georgian president) did something stupid and then got pounded by Putin.  War sucks.  The War Nerd has an explanation that my Russian friend claims is more accurate than main stream media… even if the War Nerd considers war to be poetic:

http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-south-ossetia-the-war-of-my-dreams/

Looking Presidential
Posted on August 12th, 2008 at 11:33 am by Steve

George W. Bush smacking the ass of a female Olympic volleyball player
Words fail me.

OMG this is totally fun.
Posted on August 11th, 2008 at 12:41 pm by Mutt

My friend Jay Schuster just pointed me to a really fun graphical description language, which can produce beautiful images with remarkably small amounts of code.

I encourage you to check out the galleries at contextfreeart.org and try it yourself if you’re inclined.

To give you a taste of what it’s like, this snippet of code:

startshape SeedOfLife
background { b -1 }

rule SeedOfLife {
DotCircle {}
6 * {rotate 60} DotCircle { y 1 }
}

rule DotCircle {
180 * {rotate 2} CIRCLE { y 1 s 0.025 hue 120 sat 1 brightness 1}
}

… produces this image:

The Seed of Life, as rendered by Context Free Art

Abandoned NASA Trailer
Posted on August 11th, 2008 at 3:03 am by dr.hoo

“Photographer Richard Harrington stumbled upon this abandoned NASA trailer, abandoned on a dusty lot somewhere between L.A. and Las Vegas, and as you would expect, it’s a retro space-tech dream inside.” – VIA Gizmodo

Some Good Advice…
Posted on August 6th, 2008 at 9:37 pm by necco

…now and then:

Try not giving a NSFW word…

Get Your War On – The Animated Series!
Posted on August 1st, 2008 at 4:14 am by dr.hoo

Our favorite comic is now an animated series…

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