Truly this is the pinnacle of technology: Keepon, the dancing robot. Watch the video with the music track for best effect, he really starts rocking out about a minute in. Apparently it’s for developing and studying dance-oriented nonverbal play with children
, but they’re missing a trick if they don’t also explore the ability of this little chap to part stoned students from their cash.
This is a pleasing little Google Maps hack.
I remember once arguing heatedly with someone who refused to believe that you’d actually be closer to New Zealand, rather than the canonically accepted Australia, if you dug a hole straight down from the UK. In the pre-intertube dark ages I had no way of proving how utterly wrong this gentleman was, because pointing it out on a globe was insufficiently convincing to the intellectual titan against whom my I had pitted my topographical acumen. But now, thanks to Google and this handy little tool, I am vindicated, and shall no longer heed the sneering disbelief of Craig Thingy from Mr Deakin’s class, the dopy little toerag.
Anthony Gormley’s splendid piece Another Place is being allowed to stay on Crosby Beach despite nimbyish grumblings from some locals, and more understandable concerns from environmental groups and fishermen.
Here are some photos I took when I went to visit the site last November. At the time it looked like Gormley’s one hundred iron men were about to be moved on, which seemed a shame. They really suit their current situation, staring out past the huge dock cranes and wind turbines towards Wales and the Wirral, so it’s pleasing to know that they will be allowed to remain there for the forseeable.
West Yorkshire folk can be nasty creatures; being one, I should know. Many of the characters encountered in Anne Brontë’s first novel are unpleasant in a manner that will be recognisable to anyone who has observed the social tics peculiar to the inhabitants of the thirty or so miles around Leeds and Bradford. The children entrusted to Agnes’s tutelage are vile, and would require nothing more than mp3 ringtones and modern attire to fit in with those to be found hanging about the Kingsgate centre in Huddersfield. Her astoundingly inconsiderate employers are differentiated from their present-day counterparts only by their lack of Porsche Cayennes and mains services. The few sympathetic characters are thrown into marked relief by the effect of all this ghastliness, and the reader cannot help feeling sorry for the heroine despite her initial spinelessness and her overbearing religiosity.
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Take a look at this slide-show about ugly animals, which suggests that people are only motivated to help save cute and fluffy endangered species, and are utterly indifferent to the fate of the slightly peculiar looking ones, citing the Aye-Aye as an example. I disagree. Perhaps I’m abnormal, but I think those chaps are extremely cute, in their own weird way; the same goes for the Slender Loris they mention on the last page, a magnificently odd creature indeed, but in no way unpleasant to look at. They are even more endearing in person. When at London Zoo I always visit the Aye-Aye in his special “Madagascan-time” darkroom house, and I am eagerly awaiting the reinstatement of the various Lorises when the ZSL finishes doing whatever it is they’re doing to make the small-mammals section more habitable.
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