Day: October 3, 2018

SMART – STUPID – CONFORMIST – NON-CONFORMIST – OUTLIERS

Hans – the blue smurf – back with a vengeance! Why most people conform to the mainstream flow – even unto cruelty – even unto self-destruction – and why some unhappy few are outliers; and why the outsider is the most precious most often maligned.

OFF-GUARDIAN
BOTWORLDPRESS
REUTERS
INTERCEPT
REDDIT
A/B WORLD
SCIENCEWIRE

This Week in the New Normal #51

23 October 2022

Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world. A somewhat briefer than usual TWitNN today, as our editor has been felled by a bad case of the ‘flu – sorry, we mean “an …

The Last Temptation of Things

23 October 2022

Edward Curtin “I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.” Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays. Let me tell you a story about a haunted house and all the thoughts it evoked in me. Do we believe we can save ourselves by saving things? Or …

“Experts” now admit you will NEVER be “fully vaccinated”

22 October 2022

Kit Knightly We at OffG – and many of our fellow alt media sites – have been reporting for over a year now that the Covid “vaccination” campaign will never end. In short, you will NEVER be “fully vaccinated”. That much was obvious once health institutions around the world started “updating” their definition of the …

A Valid Argument

22 October 2022

Todd Hayen “Sheep, I don’t know what’s wrong with sheep these days.” (sung to the tune of Kids! from the musical Bye Bye Birdie). So what else is new? Sort of feels like Ground Hog Day (the movie). Every morning I get out of bed thinking that something must be different. Where is the sheep …

Tapestries and Tapeworms

21 October 2022

Sylvia Shawcross Ah the scientists. Bless their happy little hearts I always say. Having known a few of them and dealt with them on occasion I have to admit, they are a breed apart. I would even go so far as to say, that when it comes to working for a living, you’d not meet …

DISCUSS: Bye Bye Liz

20 October 2022

Just 44 days into the job, embattled British Prime Minister Liz Truss has just announced her resignation. Already among the more forgettable people in the world, with this move Truss consigns herself to the dustbin of history as nothing but a potentially tricky trivia question for future generations. It doesn’t come as much of a …

Multipolar World Order – Part 3

19 October 2022

Iain Davis In Part 1, we considered the forces shaping the world order and the attempts to impose various models of global governance upon it. In Part 2, we discussed the progress of the global power shift from West to East and asked why so many stalwarts of the so-called “unipolar world order” have not …

Governors up for Reelection 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025

1 June 2022

Of the 36 gubernatorial seats up for re-election in 2022, twenty are Republican, and sixteen are Democrat.

Current Members of the U.S. House of Representatives

4 May 2022

This is a list of individuals currently serving in the United States House of Representatives as of the 117th Congress

U.S. Senate Seats up for Reelection in 2022

4 May 2022

It's 2022 vision time. The U.S. Senate elections will be held on Tuesday, November 8, 2020. Thirty-four of the 100 Senators are up for reelection and will serve a six-year term from January 3, 2023, until January 3, 2029. The time to start organizing is now.

Why Do So Many Elderly Run America?

31 March 2022

Why are US politicians so old compared to other countries?

Could Putin Be Vulnerable to a Coup?

14 March 2022

Could Putin be vulnerable to a coup or uprising? All of the grievances that traditionally motivate a coup against a dictator are in place.

Should U.S. Flight Attendants Be Paid During Boarding?

18 February 2022

The majority of U.S. airlines don't pay their flight attendants until the airplane door closes, even though plane boarding is one of the most stressful parts of their job.

QAnon vs. Hitler's Brownshirts

28 January 2021

The world has seen QAnon before. It was called Nazism.

Aftermath of flooding in Brazil’s Amazonas state

21 May 2022

The post Aftermath of flooding in Brazil’s Amazonas state appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

People take the plunge with a shark dive in Florida

18 May 2022

The post People take the plunge with a shark dive in Florida appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

The moon is seen during a lunar eclipse in Los Angeles

16 May 2022

The post The moon is seen during a lunar eclipse in Los Angeles appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

Wildfire in California

12 May 2022

The post Wildfire in California appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

A Swiss farmer works in his field with his tractor in Sullens

10 May 2022

The post A Swiss farmer works in his field with his tractor in Sullens appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

Verstappen beats Leclerc to win first Miami Grand Prix

9 May 2022

The post Verstappen beats Leclerc to win first Miami Grand Prix appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

Judge releases Oath Keepers member pending trial for U.S. Capitol attack

5 May 2022

The post Judge releases Oath Keepers member pending trial for U.S. Capitol attack appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

Texas Invents New Barriers to DNA Testing While Blaming Rodney Reed for Delay Tactics

23 October 2022

Amid mounting evidence of Reed’s innocence, Texas dickered over deadlines in a convoluted argument before the Supreme Court.

The post Texas Invents New Barriers to DNA Testing While Blaming Rodney Reed for Delay Tactics appeared first on The Intercept.

How Democrats Botched Trump's Impeachment

22 October 2022

A new book examines why congressional leadership pulled their punches when it mattered most.

The post How Democrats Botched Trump’s Impeachment appeared first on The Intercept.

The Wealth of America’s Bottom 50 Percent Has Doubled During the Pandemic Years

21 October 2022

The net worth of the poorer half of U.S. households — while still modest — is now far higher than it’s ever been.

The post The Wealth of America’s Bottom 50 Percent Has Doubled During the Pandemic Years appeared first on The Intercept.

Saudis Sought Oil Production Cut So Deep It Surprised Even Russia

20 October 2022

OPEC+ slashed oil production following a Saudi pressure campaign that experts say aims to hurt Democrats in the midterms.

The post Saudis Sought Oil Production Cut So Deep It Surprised Even Russia appeared first on The Intercept.

Did a Woke Mob Cancel the “Jihad Rehab” Doc? Here’s the Real Story.

20 October 2022

The substantive objections over informed consent were completely obscured by a ruckus over "cancel culture" and identity politics.

The post Did a Woke Mob Cancel the “Jihad Rehab” Doc? Here’s the Real Story. appeared first on The Intercept.

Biden’s Former Haitian Envoy Slams White House Plan for Armed Intervention

19 October 2022

“We're going to have a civil uprising in Haiti similar to 1915,” said former Ambassador Dan Foote.

The post Biden’s Former Haitian Envoy Slams White House Plan for Armed Intervention appeared first on The Intercept.

The Biggest, Dumbest Race for the Senate

19 October 2022

John Fetterman’s competition against Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania could determine consequential rights nationwide. Have the candidates forgotten that?

The post The Biggest, Dumbest Race for the Senate appeared first on The Intercept.

[OC] American College Football ESPN's FPI Efficiency Weeks 2 through 8

24 October 2022

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School uniform policy by country

23 October 2022

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The common thing

23 October 2022

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I just moved here yesterday, is this what it’s usually like outside?

23 October 2022

submitted by /u/Creepy_Switch_3380 to r/london [link] [comments]

Would you rather own a magical controller that can make any food you want appear right in front of you or be given $50,000 right now?

23 October 2022

View Poll

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The media is obviously color blind

24 October 2022

submitted by /u/Frog-Face11 to r/conspiracy_commons [link] [comments]

Salman Rushdie has lost sight in one eye and use of one hand, says agent

23 October 2022

submitted by /u/Huss0903 to r/samharris [link] [comments]

JavaScript

19 October 2022

A recurring theme in my writing and talks is “lay off the JavaScript, people!” But I have to make a conscious effort to specify that I mean client-side JavaScript.

I thought it would be obvious from the context that I was talking about the copious amounts of JavaScript being shipped to end users to download, parse, and execute. But nothing’s ever really obvious. If I don’t explicitly say JavaScript in the browser, then someone inevitably thinks I’m having a go at JavaScript, the language.

I have absolutely nothing against JavaScript the language. Just like I have nothing against Python or Ruby or any other language that you might write with on your machine or your web server. But as soon as you deliver bytes over the wire, I start having opinions. It just so happens that JavaScript is the universal language for client-side coding so that’s why I call for restraint with JavaScript specifically.

There was a time when JavaScript only existed in web browsers. That changed with Node. Now it’s possible to write code for your web server and code for web browsers using the same language. Very handy!

But just because it’s the same language doesn’t mean you should treat it the same in both circumstance. As Remy puts it:

There are two JavaScripts.

One for the server - where you can go wild.

One for the client - that should be thoughtful and careful.

I was reading something recently that referred to Eleventy as a JavaScript library. It really brought me up short. I mean, on the one hand, yes, it’s a library of code and it’s written in JavaScript. It is absolutely technically correct to call it a JavaScript library.

But in my mind, a JavaScript library is something you ship to web browsers—jQuery, React, Vue, and so on. Whereas Eleventy executes its code in order to generate HTML and that’s what gets sent to end users. Conceptually, it’s like the opposite of a JavaScript library. Eleventy does its work before any user requests a URL—JavaScript libraries do their work after a user requests a URL.

To me it seems obvious that there should an entirely different mindset for writing code intended for a web browser. But nothing’s ever really obvious.

I remember when Node was getting really popular and npm came along as a way to manage all the bundles of code that people were assembling in their Node programmes. Makes total sense. But then I thought I heard about people using npm to do the same thing for client-side code. “That can’t be right!” I thought. I must’ve misunderstood. So I talked to someone from npm and explained how I must be misunderstanding something.

But it turned out that people really were treating client-side JavaScript no different than server-side JavaScript. People really were pulling in megabytes of other people’s code to ship to end users so that they could, I dunno, left pad numbers or something.

Listen, I don’t care what you get up to in the privacy of your own codebase. But don’t poison the well of the web with profligate client-side JavaScript.

Knowing

11 October 2022

There’s a repeated catchphrase used throughout Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet: ignorance is our ammunition.

There are certainly situations where knowledge is regrettable. The somewhat-silly thought experiment of Roko’s basilisk is one example. Once you have knowledge of it, you can’t un-know it, and so you become complicit.

Or, to use another example, I think it was Jason who told me that if you want to make someone’s life miserable, just teach them about typography. Then they’ll see all the terrible kerning out there in the world and they won’t be able to un-see it.

I sometimes wish I could un-learn all I’ve learned about cryptobollocks (I realise that the term “cryptocurrency” is the more widely-used phrase, but it’s so inaccurate I’d rather use a clearer term).

I sometimes wish I could go back to having the same understanding of cryptobollocks as most people: some weird new-fangled technology thing that has something to do with “the blockchain.”

But I delved too deep. I wanted to figure out why seemingly-smart people were getting breathlessly excited about something that sounds fairly ludicrous. Yet the more I learned, the more ludicrous it became. Bitcoin and its ilk are even worse than the occassional headlines and horror stories would have you believe.

As Jules says:

The reason I have such a visceral reaction to crypto projects isn’t just that they’re irresponsibly designed and usually don’t achieve what they promise. It’s also that the thing they promise sounds like a fucking nightmare.

Or, as Simon responded to someone wondering why there was so much crypto hate:

We hate it because we understand it.

I have yet to encounter a crypto project that isn’t a Ponzi scheme. I don’t mean like a Ponzi scheme. I mean they’re literally Ponzi schemes: zero-sum racing to the bottom built entirely on the greater fool theory. The only difference between traditional Ponzi schemes and those built on crypto is that crypto isn’t regulated. Yet.

I recently read The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, a novel with the collapse of a Ponzi scheme at its heart. In the aftermath of the scheme’s collapse, there are inevitable questions like “How could you not know?” The narrator answers that question:

It’s possible to both know and not know something.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

The audio from dConstruct 2022

7 October 2022

dConstruct 2022 was great fun. It was also the last ever dConstruct.

If you were there, and you’d like to re-live the magic, the audio from the talks is now available on the dConstruct Archive. Here they are:

George Oates Lauren Beukes Daniel Burka Sarah Angliss Matt Webb Seb Lee-Delisle Anil Seth

Thanks to some service worker magic, you can select any of those talks for offline listening later.

The audio is also available on Huffduffer on the dConstruct Huffduffer account. Here’s the RSS feed that you can pop into your podcast software of choice.

If you’re more of a visual person, you can watch videos of the slides synced with the audio. They’ve all got captions too (good ones, not just automatically generated).

So have a listen in whichever way you prefer.

Now that I’ve added the audio from the last dConstruct to the dConstruct archive, it feels like the closing scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Roll credits.

Supporting logical properties

30 September 2022

I wrote recently about making the switch to logical properties over on The Session.

Initially I tried ripping the band-aid off and swapping out all the directional properties for logical properties. After all, support for logical properties is green across the board.

But then I got some reports of people seeing formating issues. These people were using Safari on devices that could no longer update their operating system. Because versions of Safari are tied to versions of the operating system, there was nothing they could do other than switch to using a different browser.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but as long as this situation continues, Safari is not an evergreen browser. (I also understand that problem lies with the OS architecture—it must be incredibly frustrating for the folks working on WebKit and/or Safari.)

So I needed to add fallbacks for older browsers that don’t support logical properties. Or, to put it another way, I needed to add logical properties as a progressive enhancement.

“No problem!” I thought. “The way that CSS works, I can just put the logical version right after the directional version.”

element { margin-left: 1em; margin-inline-start: 1em; }

But that’s not true in this case. I’m not over-riding a value, I’m setting two different properties.

In a left-to-right language like English it’s true that margin-inline-start will over-ride margin-left. But in a right-to-left language, I’ve just set margin-left and margin-inline-start (which happens to be on the right).

This is a job for @supports!

element { margin-left: 1em; } @supports (margin-inline-start: 1em) { element { margin-left: unset; margin-inline-start: 1em; } }

I’m doing two things inside the @supports block. I’m applying the logical property I’ve just tested for. I’m also undoing the previously declared directional property.

A value of unset is perfect for this:

The unset CSS keyword resets a property to its inherited value if the property naturally inherits from its parent, and to its initial value if not. In other words, it behaves like the inherit keyword in the first case, when the property is an inherited property, and like the initial keyword in the second case, when the property is a non-inherited property.

Now I’ve got three CSS features working very nicely together:

@supports (also known as feature queries), logical properties, and the unset keyword.

For anyone using an up-to-date browser, none of this will make any difference. But for anyone who can’t update their Safari browser because they can’t update their operating system, because they don’t want to throw out their perfectly functional Apple device, they’ll continue to get the older directional properties:

I discovered that my Mom’s iPad was a 1st generation iPad Air. Apple stopped supporting that device in iOS 12, which means it was stuck with whatever version of Safari last shipped with iOS 12.

Design systems thinking

26 September 2022

As you can probably tell from the stuff I’ve been linking to today and today’s Clearleft newsletter, I’ve got design systems on my mind.

What I like about design systems is they encourage systems thinking …in theory. I mean, it’s right there in the name, right? But in practice I see design sytems focusing on the opposite of systems thinking: analytical thinking.

Okay, I realise that’s a gross oversimplification of both systems and thinking and analytical thinking, but why stop now?

Analytical thinking is all about breaking a big thing down into its constituent parts. By examining the individual parts you gain an understanding of the whole.

This is a great approach to understanding the world, particularly when it comes to phenonema that work the same everywhere in the universe. But it doesn’t work so well with messy phenonema like, say, people doing things together.

Systems thinking takes the opposite approach. You look at the bigger picture with the understanding that the individual parts are all interconnected somehow and can’t really be viewed in isolation.

To put it very bluntly, analytical thinking is about zooming in whereas systems thinking is about zooming out.

When it comes to design systems—or design in general—you need to have a mix of both.

If you neglect the analytical thinking, you may end up with a design system that has well-documented processes for how it operates, but is lacking the individual components.

If you neglect the systems thinking, you may end up with a design system that’s a collection of components, but with no understanding of how they’re supposed to work together.

Ideally, you want a good mix of both.

But I’ve got to be honest: if I had to err on one side more than the other, I think I’d rather have less analytical thinking and more systems thinking.

Accessibility is systemic

20 September 2022

I keep thinking about this blog post I linked to last week by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. It’s called Quality Is Systemic:

Software quality is more the result of a system designed to produce quality, and not so much the result of individual performance. That is: a group of mediocre programmers working with a structure designed to produce quality will produce better software than a group of fantastic programmers working in a system designed with other goals.

I think he’s on to something. I also think this applies to design just as much as development. Maybe more so. In design, there’s maybe too much emphasis placed on the talent and skill of individual designers and not enough emphasis placed on creating and nurturing a healthy environment where anyone can contribute to the design process.

Jacob also ties this into hiring:

Instead of spending tons of time and effort on hiring because you believe that you can “only hire the best”, direct some of that effort towards building a system that produces great results out of a wider spectrum of individual performance.

I couldn’t agree more! It just one of the reasons why the smart long-term strategy can be to concentrate on nurturing junior designers and developers rather than head-hunting rockstars.

As an aside, if you think that the process of nurturing junior designers and developers is trickier now that we’re working remotely, I highly recommend reading Mandy’s post, Official myths:

Supporting junior staff is work. It’s work whether you’re in an office some or all of the time, and it’s work if Slack is the only office you know. Hauling staff back to the office doesn’t make supporting junior staff easier or even more likely.

Hiring highly experienced designers and developers makes total sense, at least in the short term. But I think the better long-term solution—as outlined by Jacob—is to create (and care for) a system where even inexperienced practitioners will be able to do good work by having the support and access to knowledge that they need.

I was thinking about this last week when Irina very kindly agreed to present a lunch’n’learn for Clearleft all about inclusive design.

She answered a question that had been at the front of my mind: what’s the difference between inclusive design and accessibility?

The way Irina put it, accessibility is focused on implementation. To make a website accessible, you need people with the necessary skills, knowledge and experience.

But inclusive design is about the process and the system that leads to that implementation.

To use that cliché of the double diamond, maybe inclusive design is about “building the right thing” and accessibility is about “building the thing right.”

Or to put it another way, maybe accessibility is about outputs, whereas inclusive design is about inputs. You need both, but maybe we put too much emphasis on the outputs and not enough emphasis on the inputs.

This is what made me think of Jacob’s assertion that quality is systemic.

Imagine someone who’s an expert at accessibility: they know all the details of WCAG and ARIA. Now put that person into an organisation that doesn’t prioritise accessibility. They’re going to have a hard time and they probably won’t be able to be very effective despite all their skills.

Now imagine an organisation that priorities inclusivity. Even if their staff don’t (yet) have the skills and knowledge of an accessibility expert, just having the processes and priorities in place from the start will make it easier for everyone to contribute to a more accessible experience.

It’s possible to make something accessible in the absence of a system that prioritises inclusive design but it will be hard work. Whereas making sure inclusive design is prioritised at an organisational level makes it much more likely that the outputs will be accessible.

Let’s get logical

15 September 2022

I was refactoring some CSS on The Session over the weekend. I thought it would be good to switch over to using logical properties exclusively. I did this partly to make the site more easily translatable into languages with different writing modes, but mostly as an exercise to help train me in thinking with logical properties by default.

All in all, it went pretty smoothly. You can kick the tyres by opening up dev tools on The Session and adding a writing-mode declaration to the body or html element.

For the most part, the switchover was smooth. It mostly involved swapping out property names with left, right, top, and bottom for inline-start, inline-end, block-start, and block-end.

The border-radius properties tripped me up a little. You have to use shorthand like border-start-end-radius, not border-block-start-inline-end-radius (that doesn’t exist). So you have to keep the order of the properties in mind:

border-{{block direction}}-{{inline-direction}}-radius

Speaking of shorthand, I also had to kiss some shorthand declarations goodbye. Let’s say I use this shorthand for something like margin or padding:

margin: 1em 1.5em 2em 0.5em;

Those values get applied to margin-top, margin-right, margin-bottom, and margin-left, not the logical equivalents (block-start, inline-end, block-end, and inline-start). So separate declarations are needed instead:

margin-block-start: 1em; margin-inline-end: 1.5em; margin-block-end: 2em; margin-inline-start: 0.5em;

Same goes for shorthand like this:

margin: 1em 2em;

That needs to be written as two declarations:

margin-block: 1em; margin-inline: 2em;

Now I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it feels really weird that you can’t use logical properties in media queries. Although as I said:

Now you could rightly argue that in this instance we’re talking about the physical dimensions of the viewport. So maybe width and height make more sense than inline and block.

But along comes the new kid on the block (or inline), container queries, ready to roll with container-type values like inline-size. I hope it’s just a matter of time until we can use logical properties in all our conditional queries.

The other place where there’s still a cognitive mismatch is in transforms and animations. We’ve got a translateX() function but no translate-inline(). We’ve got translateY() but no translate-block().

On The Session I’m using some JavaScript to figure out the details of some animation effects. I’m using methods like getBoundingClientRect(). It doesn’t return logical properties. So if I ever want to adjust my animations based on writing direction, I’ll need to fork my JavaScript code.

Oh, and one other thing: the aspect-ratio property takes values in the form of width/height, not inline/block. That makes sense if you’re dealing with images, videos, or other embedded content but it makes it really tricky to use aspect-ratio on elements that contain text. I mean, it works fine as long as the text is in a language using a top-to-bottom writing mode, but not for any other languages.

UK's oldest human DNA obtained, revealing two distinct Paleolithic populations

24 October 2022

The first genetic data from Paleolithic human individuals in the U.K.—the oldest human DNA obtained from the British Isles so far—indicates the presence of two distinct groups that migrated to Britain at the end of the last ice age, according to new research.

Analyzing diverse data types can accelerate drug discovery, study says

24 October 2022

A new paper in Cell Systems explores the importance of using multiple data types in drug discovery. The paper screens more than 1,000 drugs tested in six doses and demonstrates that gene expression and cell morphology provide different information for drug prioritization.

Insects contribute to atmospheric electricity

24 October 2022

By measuring the electrical fields near swarming honeybees, researchers have discovered that insects can produce as much atmospheric electric charge as a thunderstorm cloud. This type of electricity helps shape weather events, aids insects in finding food, and lifts spiders up in the air to migrate over large distances. The research, appearing on October 24 in the journal iScience, demonstrates that living things can have an impact on atmospheric electricity.

First wild European bison born in the UK in thousands of years

24 October 2022

A herd of bison released into woodland near Canterbury, Kent, have surprised conservationists by giving birth to a calf.

Researchers develop laser that could 'reshape the landscape of integrated photonics'

24 October 2022

How do you integrate the advantages of a benchtop laser that fills a room onto a semiconductor chip the size of a fingernail?

Even good gene edits can go bad

24 October 2022

A Rice University lab is leading the effort to reveal potential threats to the efficacy and safety of therapies based on CRISPR-Cas9, the Nobel Prize-winning gene editing technique, even when it appears to be working as planned.

More yield, fewer species: How human nutrient inputs alter grasslands

24 October 2022

One of the reasons for the global threat to biodiversity is that we humans introduce more nutrients into our environment than would naturally be present there, for example, when fertilizing agricultural land. In addition, precipitation re-distributes excess nutrients to other areas, and nutrients can also enter our soils through air pollution.