Thanks to RobOusbey and MatStace.

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Check out these images of the earth’s gravitational field taken by a couple of satellites from the GRACE project:

This information will let scientists get a better idea of the earth’s internal structure, in turn helping them to model things like weather patterns and geographic change more accurately. Plus, it looks awesome.

(Via)

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Remember this guy with his heavily-optimised page for SEO Surrey? Well, I thought I’d do a search for him to try and find his real website (if there was one). I’m sure some prospective clients might run a search for him too. These are the results:

Woooops!

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The next hot trend on Twitter:

Rofl

My favourite tweet of the night so far on ‘upside down mouth’ comes from phpcodemonkey.

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Check out these pictures of an old-school supercomputer – this is the Cray X-MP 48, installed in the Chilton Computing Lab in 1986. This behemoth had 64 Mb of RAM and came with a free sofa.

The snazzy seating area provided somewhere to sit, relax, chat with friends and compute things…

Is it me or does it feel like the Cray is watching you?

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According to the Google blog, they’re changing the way snippets operate to allow more information into the search results. From my highly scientific and rigorous testing it appears to be more informational (i.e. long) searches at the moment that result in these enormous snippets, but this surely has implications for the humble meta description.

It’ll be interesting to see how many meta descriptions get borked by this update – will Google just pick some random text from the site in order to fill the extra space? Is it worth writing longer descriptions just in case?

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Disgraceful Rider took Frog and I to see Othello last week at the Playhouse – she’s pretty into theatre and my brother volunteers at the Carriageworks in town, but I’m sad to say I don’t tend to go. I’m not sure if it’s money- tickets are usually well over £20 which is a lot – or if I just don’t know enough about theatre to make an informed choice. You know what you’re getting with Shakespeare though – tragic characters, bawdy jokes and language you barely understand.

Also, Lenny Henry was playing the eponymous role.

The house was full which was great – everyone sort of hushed when Lenny walked on stage. He’s huge in person, about twice the size of anyone else on stage and that allowed him to command the space without doing a lot. The other actors would gesticulate to emphasise the action (useful when you understand half of what they say) but one thing I noticed was that Lenny stood still. His voice and his stage presence actually did what the other actors had to make an effort to do – convey meaning and emotion to a modern audience through outdated and difficult language.

Iago, played by Conrad Nelson, was particularly good, as was Emilia played by Maeve Larkin. Both had a way of speaking that held your attention and a three hour play didn’t seem that long at all. Iago was thoroughly unlikeable, plotting and scheming to bring about Othello’s downfall whilst his young wife Desdemona innocently played the catalyst to her own murder and Othello’s fate. At least, that’s what I thought until I read the programme. It turns out that Desdemona only looked innocent – she’d deceived her father to marry Othello, flirted with his lieutenant and carelessly lost a gift from her husband that he thought meant everything to her. Iago only told Othello the truth.

I wondered when I was watching the play – Othello is a ‘Moor’ – did Shakespeare mean an Arab or an African (i.e. a black guy)? Europe was pretty racist back in the day (to put it mildly) but was this the case in Shakespeare’s time? When did the notion that white people were superior really take off?

Was Shakespeare more accepting of facts – that black people could, and did, have high status – at the expense of common sensibilities? After all, as a playwright he got to push boundaries – why not write a black role into a play, in a society where actors had to be white?

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Paul’s got a bootleg copy of photoshop open and Barry is hard at work creating some fancy javascript action – that’s right folks, the chuckle brothers are getting a new website! I thought the old one was fab but don’t worry, you can still visit it here.

The new website may or may not feature premium content from the boys.

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For more unhappy kitties, visit Maria Konstantinov’s Saddest Cat.

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