A strangely hypnotic video of the Gecko engine (the one behind Firefox) rendering a Wikipedia page. It’s far more complicated and dynamic than I would have imagined from watching pages load in a browser normally.
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The worst human ever
This Nazi racist paedophile terrorist may well be the worst human there has ever been. I imagine he also listens to music on his mobile phone loudly on the bus. The bastard.
Wait, Leeds has a CTU? When did they become real things?
Link [via Owen]
Literature in three lines or less
Some classics of literature in three lines or less:
C.S. LEWIS: Finally, a utopia ruled by children and populated by talking animals.
THE WITCH: Hi, I’m a sexually mature woman of power and confidence.
C.S. LEWIS: Ah! Kill it, lion Jesus!
Makes the Digested Read look overlong.
Immigrant words are eating our swans
There’s a fairly ridiculous article on the Guardian website at the moment called Stop now – the English language is full, in which the author warns that, ‘if you let everyone play with the national lexicon, someone eventually will break it’, much as, apparently, an influx of immigrants will fill up and eventually break the country. I’m not sure what breaking a language would involve, but he appears to have forgotten that, while there are new words coming into existence all the time, not all of these catch on with all people and that words are going out of use all the time as well.
Apparently there are too many synonyms for things these days, and that rather than this being a natural consequence of different culturally or geographically distinct groups of people talking to each other, it somehow represents a complete waste of time (or at least, dictionary pages). Instead of this, we should be showing a ‘more vigorous maintenance of those words we already have’, like they’re pandas or polar bears or something like that. Stupid, stupid stuff.
Chris Morris talking about particle physics
Chris Morris of all people, talking about particle physics at CERN. See, I knew physics was cool.