Due to an unprecedented surge in interest, I bring you more of the lovely Gemma. Hit the jump for the rest of the gallery. I also added the lightbox feature to the previous galleries.

Yet another way to pretend to be productive at work. readatwork.com simulates a Windows XP desktop and loads a selection of literary works disguised as technical PowerPoint presentations. Above is a slide from Mark Twain’s A Dog’s Tale.

[Thanks Ming]

Shia LaBeouf, Natalie Portman, Christina Ricci, Scarlett Johansson, Orlando Bloom, Maggie Q, Hayden Christensen, Rachel Bilson, Kevin Bacon, Ethan Hawke, James Caan, Chris Cooper, and more.

[Thanks I Hate Delaware]

If you have never heard of CERN, then you either don’t know much about particle phisics, aren’t interested in science, or never read Dan Brown’s “Angels & Demons“. The European Organization for Nuclear Research is the most advanced particle physics laboratory in the world. It’s on the leading edge of research in subjects like black holes, alternate dimensions, unifying theories, quantum mechanics, etc. (and if you’re really smart, you’ll know that all of those things are related) Recently, CERN is most popular for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the largest particle collider in the world—due to began operation within the month.

In addition to the LHC, CERN also has a ton of interesting side projects. One of which is directly related to the collider. In order to be able to process and transmit the massive amounts of information the LHC will be outputting (see above illustration), CERN has constructed the Grid. Current internet data, through most part of its journey around the world to your computer, travel on old cables and wires originally laid for the telephone services. CERN’s Grid works just like the internet, except it exists on a completely new fiber optic infrastructure. To give you an idea just how fast this will be, it has been said that the Grid will be able to send “the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds”.

At this point, the Grid has about 55,000 servers around the world, and it will mainly be used to transmit scientific data like those from the LHC, but the number of servers is expected to rise to 200,000 in two years. The Times (not New York) has a very informative article about the Grid. Also check out CERN’s own introduction site to the GRID, made especially for the uninitiated.

[Thanks Andrew]

I’m totally gonna make these, and I don’t even need speakers.
[instructables]

A very cool web comic that has a simplistic style to it. Reminds me of the guy in the IKEA instruction booklets.

[demian5]

The official full release of Opera Mini is here! As with each of the beta release, this new version packs several new features including auto url completion, file uploading, save pages and find-in-page. The demo is done on a Sony Ericsson phone so it works out for me, but I’m pretty sure most of the features will be compatible with all java enabled phones. Point your phone to operamini.com to download the browser.

[Thanks David]