And so it begins...
Remember how WWII started? Well not started, but escalated; you know friends of friends thing. Behold the US as it constantly antagonizes all other superpowers: Here is the story

The plants are taking over....
These are particularly amazing quotes I found from AT&T's 50 things we did not know last year:
2. Grumpy people think more clearly because negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking.
9. Babies pick up their parents' accents from the womb, and infants are born crying in their native dialect. Researchers found that French newborns cry in a rising French accent, and German babies cry with a characteristic falling inflection.
12. Scientists have discovered how to scan brain activity and convert what people are seeing or remembering into crude video images.
19. The calmest place on Earth is on top of an icy plateau in Antarctica known as Ridge A, several hundred miles from the South Pole. It is so still that stars do not twinkle in the sky because there is no turbulence in the atmosphere to distort the light.
23. A massive, nearly invisible ring of ice and dust particles surrounds Saturn. The ring's entire volume can hold 1 billion Earths.
25. Seven new glow-in-the-dark mushroom species have been discovered, increasing the number of known luminescent fungi species from 64 to 71. The fungi, discovered in Belize, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia and Puerto Rico, glow constantly, emitting a bright, yellowish-green light.
29. The human body emits a glow that is 1,000 times less than what our eyes can detect.
50. Watermelon is more efficient at rehydrating our bodies than drinking water. It contains 92 percent water and essential rehydration salts.
So back home in the US of A, in the woods up north, my brother Witter and his buddy Mark have a small shop. They both have cars that they are rebuilding top to bottom, and a couple of motorcycles as well, they also have a car for scrapping and taking good parts off of.. or they did, until just a few days ago. Check out what a New Hampshireites do to be good the the environment, ie. when they are really bored:


I think this is pretty cool. The 4 european empires slowly breaking. The visualization is perfect.
This is mainly an experimentation with soft bodies using toxi's verlet springs.
The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. The visual emphasis is on their decline.