At half past ten tonight (about ten minutes from now) it will be exactly 36 years since the first episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was broadcast. To mark the occasion, the BBC is not only repeating the…
Category: fun stuff
Inside Insides
Inside Insides is building a collection of animated MRI scans of foods. It doesn’t sound all that fascinating, but take a look at this: (MP4 video link) That’s a head of broccoli. You’ll never guess what this next one is:…
Tagged with: magnetic resonance imaging
Stealth monitor
Here’s a clever idea — strip the polarizing filter away from a computer monitor and turn it into a pair of polarizing sunglasses. When you look at the screen through the sunglasses, it will appear perfectly normal. Everyone else will…
Tagged with: science
Solution to GCHQ competition
Note: The domain that hosted this competition appears to have been taken over by malware pushers, and the pages hosted on other sites around the web have all been deleted. Where possible, I have replaced the links in this article…
Tagged with: GCHQ
HackerRank
Have you heard of HackerRank before? Their 20/20 Hack October programming contest launched a few hours ago. I just had a quick scan through the current leader board, and it looks like I’m the only Brit taking part in this thing so…
Tagged with: programming
** Insert “Uranus” joke here **
Here’s a tip: if you’re going to the Proms this year and you need to break wind, try doing it during one of the fortissimo sections so nobody will be able to hear you. So for example, in last night’s…
Tagged with: music
Regular expression crossword puzzles
In case you don’t know, a regular expression (or “regex” for short) is a search pattern that can be used to find patterns in text documents. For example, the regular expression (?<!c)ie will match the letters “i” and “e” in…
New quiz: Misperceptions
Take this online quiz first, then come back to read the rest of this post. It won’t take long, honest. All done? Don’t be too disheartened if you got a low score. If you scored more than zero, then you’re…
Dandelion clock
Here’s a dandelion clock I made using SVG’s built-in animation functions. Unlike every other SVG clock I’ve seen*, this one doesn’t use any Javascript at all. Instead, the hands are rotated by using <animateTransform> tags, and their starting positions are…
Tagged with: SVG
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