Watch the beastie.

And finally a site, www.my-earth.org.uk, which I have to admit I mention mainly because of the gecko. In programming terms it belongs to the same family of coding as Evert Vandeberg's spinning cube in that the gecko follows your cursor. But I think inverse kinematics is somehow involved because initially the gecko's head follows your movements and the body, with its four legs, walks along in a rather convincing way across the largely acid green background. The fun bit is trying to make the gecko bite its own tail--a bit like pulling the wings off flies when you were a little kid. This is the site of the UK's pavilion at this year's Aichi Expo 2005 which contains the work of British artists and inventors who have been 'all inspired by nature'. There is an interactive guide to the pavilion--interactive in the sense that a little stick figure in a yellow jumper scoots up and down at random moments and the mugshots of the various artists appear when you click on one or other of the little red boxes in the isometric diagram of a forest. There is a Japanese alternative text: sadly this is mostly anodyne civil servant and pol-talk.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail]