Radiation Dose [chat]

XKCD made a chart comparing various quantities of radiation doses. At first glance it seems meaningful and educational, insofar as I'd prefer a blue box of radiation to a red box, but then we realize that we still do not know what we're talking about despite the fact that we seem to have quantified it.

Argusne cenam rapit? Cena Argum rapit!?

From:
http://thedailywh.at/2011/03/24/on-the-importance-of-proper-punctuation-of-the-day/

Libya: More Irritated Brown People

I'm actually kind of pissed off by all the coverage of Libya.

A week ago Japan was naturally clusterfucked and so descended into a radioactive crisis. There were daily, sometimes hourly, updates on various news sites articulating the problems with the reactors. A wealth of stories could be found from multiple sources detailing the most recent contaminations, perpetually increasing death tolls, and a narrative of a people’s growing distrust in their government. All of which encased those delightfully little passive aggressive comparisons between the current nuclear crisis and that thing we did at the end of WWII to prevent those goldfish tending motherfuckers from slaughtering our troops in a land war.

It was awesome. It was interesting. It was novel.

Then I check the news sites to find that another fucking war broke out in the Middle East / North Africa / wherever, and so Japan takes a backseat to the same fucking thing we’ve been reading about since oh, I don’t know, ever? We had an awesome fixation upon impending nuclear meltdown going for about a week and then we descend back into boring, monotonous, normalcy. Another hive of sand-niggers done got pissed off and started slaughtering their own people. Whoopty-fuck-a-do; it must be Thursday.

Was another week or two of Japan really that much to ask for? I wanted to read more stories about the creator of pokemon fainting in response to the disaster, or learn that new crops and products had become contaminated. It was fantastic to check kotaku and find release schedules modified by a fucking tsunami, or games abandoned due to their focus upon the entertainment value of natural disasters. I mean, for fuck’s sake, game servers were shut down as a result of this thing. That’s awesome! And did no one else find delight in perusing the masses of Facebook posts which strove to incoherently link the Earthquake and Tsunami to Pearl Harbor?

That was some high-quality stupid; it was some quality dumb.

But now we’re back to “brown people are pissed off” and I have to go digging to find updated death tolls and Godzilla jokes. I mean, what, is xkcd going to make a chart detailing how fucking crazy Gaddafi is? Are my hulu commercial breaks going to be filled with red cross donation clips for Libya. No; of course not. Because brown people shooting each other is boring, predictable, normalcy.

We had an interesting news cycle; we received a deviation from the norm. And it was awesome. But now we’re back to business as usual. Libyaraqidamistan is in turmoil. The U.S. is bombing brown people. And, let’s go out on a limb, I’m guessing that Islam is involved.

That’s great and all. I’m really sorry that their sand is being blown up. But I’m going to go back to reading about christmas puppies being euthanized.

Because that, my friends, isn’t something I’ve seen before.

An Onion Article for Caleb

This Onion Article seems to have been written just for Caleb:

Last Of 2008 Christmas Puppies Euthanized, Marking Start Of Spring:

In a familiar sign that spring is just around the corner, animal shelters across the nation announced this week that they have put down the last batch of dogs that were given as Christmas gifts in 2008.

It's funny because it's true.