A short film produced by Google to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Britain’s first supercomputer, the Ferranti Atlas. When first switched on in December 1962, Atlas was the world’s most powerful computer. Some of the software concepts it pioneered, like ‘virtual memory’, are among the most important breakthroughs in computer design and still used today. In this video you can see archive footage of the Atlas running as well as interviews with some of the engineers and researchers who used it.

This guy actually puts his finger into an active table saw & comes away without a scratch!

Will we have a white Christmas? It’s an age-old question that occurs to almost everyone this time of year. This report, created by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), contains maps and tables showing the percent probabilities for a snow depth of at least 1 inch on Christmas morning, as well as the probabilities for a depth of at least 5 inches and 10 inches.

The “First Order” Summary of Day Dataset for the period of 1961-1990 was used to compute these statistics. Only stations with at least 25 years of data were used and the ’61-’90 period was chosen to coincide with the standard period for computing climatological normals.

Via