randomosity

Not to suck dry an inter­est­ing blog, but Eng­lishRus­sia had another fas­cin­at­ing post this morn­ing. Its a won­der­ful col­lec­tion of tagged Google Earth shots from Rus­sian mil­it­ary sites. I was par­tic­u­larly inter­ested to see that the ‘Kirov’ is still float­ing. Not sure if its still in act­ive ser­vice, but is is moored at one of the North­ern Fleets docks in the one pic­ture. I always fan­cied that the lines of the Kirov were par­tic­u­larly grace­ful. I am not miss­ing the fact that its a rather potent killing machine, but am appre­ci­at­ing the aes­thet­ics of the design. For what is is worth, you can find more inform­a­tion about the Kirov on Wiki­pe­dia or at Mark Meredith’s Kirov Page. I know its a bit of a guy thing, and I am reminded of both Tony Soprano’s addic­tion to war doc­u­ment­ar­ies as well as Den­nis Leary’s Asshole song. I am chided, but still mildly intrigued.

Eas­ily under­stood rep­res­ent­a­tion of the CIA fact­book rep­res­en­ted in a flash-based rela­tion­ship browser. Very smooth and intu­it­ively nav­ig­able. Rela­tion­ship Browser from Mor­itz Stefaner is a very clever and robust imple­ment­a­tion of the inter­act­ive bubble charts that are all the rage. He has a wide vari­ety of other inter­est­ing pro­jects which he has been involved in, includ­ing some amaz­ing takes on tag­ging and word clouds.