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South Ossetia
George Friedman has a good short analysis of what happened in South Ossetia from the Russian perspective. He doesn’t have an explanation from the U.S. perspective, and I don’t either. It seems possible that Saakashvili ordered the invasion of South Ossetia without any support from the U.S., and that the U.S. felt obliged to support…
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Revelation
My aunt, who lives just outside of Portland, Oregon, told me that one of her neighbors told her that Barack Obama was the anti-Christ. She thinks the comment was meant fairly seriously, and in any case felt too intimidated to reply. I told her that she should have pointed out that the anti-Christ would be…
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Feral Cats
Last Thursday we trapped five feral kittens living in our backyard. We took them to the vet on Friday morning, where they were neutered and were vaccinated for rabies. We picked them up on Saturday, and kept them inside. On Sunday we let the two males go. Today we let the three females go. Unfortunately,…
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Poverty
Today is Blog Action Day, and this year’s topic is poverty. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus famously said “For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.” This may have been intended as a reference back to Deuteronomy 15, in which Moses said that every seven years all…
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Exception Destruction
Languages that support exceptions need to support destructors or they need to support a try/finally construct. Otherwise using exceptions is too difficult, because if you have some local state to clean up in a function, you have to catch and rethrow every exception. The goal of exceptions in C++ is that code which does not…