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OffG ‘state of the union’ & new way to support us

25 September 2021

OffG had its sixth birthday this February. Our readership has grown massively since we launched, and especially over the last 18 months. We now have an audience comparable to some longstanding major names in the alternate media, which is pretty amazing. We publish content every day, as most of you know, we are just completing …

One Year in, the Struggle of Indian Farmers is Set to Intensify

25 September 2021

Colin Todhunter It is now one year since controversial farm bills were passed into law in India in September 2020. The three bills and the subsequent legislation have triggered a massive 15-month farmers’ protest that has attracted worldwide attention and support. Farmers, farmers’ unions and their representatives demand that the laws be repealed and state …

WATCH: CARING CORRUPTED – The Killing Nurses of The Third Reich

24 September 2021

Cizik School of Nursing has created a REMI Platinum Award-winning documentary film that tells the grim cautionary tale of nurses who participated in the Holocaust and abandoned their professional ethics during the Nazi era. The 56-minute film, Caring Corrupted: the Killing Nurses of the Third Reich, casts a harsh light on nurses who used their …

WATCH: COVID19/11 – Frances Shure

23 September 2021

COVID19/11: Narratives Intertwined is OffG’s new series of short interviews with prominent voices in the alternate media, vocal Covid sceptics and leading figures in the 9/11 truth movement. The series is intended to both mark the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center collapse, and discuss how that event helped shape the modern world and, …

9/11 and the Politics of Fear and Self-Preservation

23 September 2021

Whitney Webb The 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is a particularly somber one, not just because of the horrific nature of events of that day reaching its second-decade milestone, but because of how little we seem to have learned in that amount of time. The fear and trauma generated by the events of 9/11 …

30 facts you NEED to know: Your Covid Cribsheet

22 September 2021

Kit Knightly We get a lot of e-mails and private messages along these lines “do you have a source for X?” or “can you point me to mask studies?” or “I know I saw a graph for mortality, but I can’t find it anymore”. And we understand, it’s been a long 18 months, and there …

Inalienable Rights: A Suggested Solution To The Covid Coup

21 September 2021

Iain Davis Inalienable rights, founded upon the principles of Natural Law and natural justice, offer us a potential solution to the COVID coup d’état, or pseudopandemic as I call it. Exercising our inalienable rights, in observance of Natural Law, and collectively acting in peace to undermine the objectives of the conspirators, is the best way to resist it. The objective of the …

Current Members of the U.S. House of Representatives

9 February 2021

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

QAnon vs. Hitler's Brownshirts

28 January 2021

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

World Headlines: Capitol Siege by MAGA Mob

10 January 2021

On January 6, 2021, white insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol, proudly displayed the confederate flag, and set up gallows on the Capitol grounds.

U.S. Senate Seats up for Reelection in 2022

8 January 2021

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.

The Marijuana Industry's Dirty Little Secret

14 May 2019

The runaway-growth in the cannabis industry, fueled by rolling de-regulation and a high demand forecast, is bringing with it a growing carbon footprint.

A Personal Account of Hawaii's False Missile Alert

20 February 2018

Countries North Korea Can Currently Hit With Their Missiles

29 May 2017

Should North Korea ever have the capacity to launch a nuclear missile that could reach the U.S. mainland, Trump would have approximately ten minutes to react and make a decision to counterattack.

Reuters Highlights: Late September 2021

23 September 2021

The post Reuters Highlights: Late September 2021 appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

The 2020 Ryder Cup

22 September 2021

The post The 2020 Ryder Cup appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

ICYMI – As Inspiration4 soars above, streams of lava descend from the hills of La Palma

22 September 2021

The post ICYMI – As Inspiration4 soars above, streams of lava descend from the hills of La Palma appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

Windy Fire threatens California sequoias

22 September 2021

The post Windy Fire threatens California sequoias appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

Factbox-Golf-List of previous Ryder Cup results

21 September 2021

The post Factbox-Golf-List of previous Ryder Cup results appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

U.S. extends travel restrictions at Canada, Mexico borders, in Ciudad Juarez

21 September 2021

The post U.S. extends travel restrictions at Canada, Mexico borders, in Ciudad Juarez appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

Slow-motion lava shots after hours of eruption on La Palma

20 September 2021

The post Slow-motion lava shots after hours of eruption on La Palma appeared first on Reuters News Agency.

Federal Prisons' Switch to Scanning Mail Is a Surveillance Nightmare

26 September 2021

The Bureau of Prisons has piloted a program that can give authorities “huge secret intelligence into the public sender of postal mail.”

The post Federal Prisons’ Switch to Scanning Mail Is a Surveillance Nightmare appeared first on The Intercept.

$3.5 Trillion for the Build Back Better Agenda Is Much, Much Less Money Than You Think

25 September 2021

This big, scary-sounding number represents just 1.2 percent of U.S. GDP over the next 10 years.

The post $3.5 Trillion for the Build Back Better Agenda Is Much, Much Less Money Than You Think appeared first on The Intercept.

One Bill in Texas Legislature Would Ease Extreme Heat in Texas Prisons. Another Makes It Worse.

25 September 2021

With the climate crisis at hand, one bill requires air conditioning in prisons, while another would take it away from detained immigrants.

The post One Bill in Texas Legislature Would Ease Extreme Heat in Texas Prisons. Another Makes It Worse. appeared first on The Intercept.

Termination of Scientists Sparks Concerns About Possible China-Related Probe

24 September 2021

Colleagues fear the two scientists may have been targeted in fallout from the Justice Department’s controversial China Initiative.

The post Termination of Scientists Sparks Concerns About Possible China-Related Probe appeared first on The Intercept.

How Moderate Democrats Derailed Police Reform

24 September 2021

Centrists demanded a police reform bill that didn’t go too far. Now they don’t get one at all.

The post How Moderate Democrats Derailed Police Reform appeared first on The Intercept.

Nina Turner on Her Loss and Future

24 September 2021

The race to replace Marcia Fudge in Ohio’s 11th District was hers to lose — so what happened?

The post Nina Turner on Her Loss and Future appeared first on The Intercept.

Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research

23 September 2021

The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.

The post Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research appeared first on The Intercept.

Don’t judge a belt by it’s buckle.

26 September 2021

submitted by /u/Maitre-de-la-Folie to r/funny [link] [comments]

[OC] Longevity of chancellor Angela Merkel in office compared to other world leaders (source and informations in comment)

26 September 2021

submitted by /u/pierrebrt to r/dataisbeautiful [link] [comments]

[America] OC - My fantasy-style representation of America Continent. Made with feather pen, India ink and watercolours.

26 September 2021

submitted by /u/annageschwind to r/MapPorn [link] [comments]

Update on petrol station queue in London, a solid hour to queue to fuel up on 26th Sep

26 September 2021

submitted by /u/henrylondon1988 to r/london [link] [comments]

Someone vandalized the mysteriously constructed Georgia Guidestones that outline a NWO and depopulation agenda..

26 September 2021

submitted by /u/pikcoolski to r/conspiracy [link] [comments]

Would you rather...?

26 September 2021

View Poll

submitted by /u/CanULeftClick to r/polls [link] [comments]

Did Bret & Heather Weinstein "Bulk order" their own book?

26 September 2021

submitted by /u/f-as-in-frank to r/samharris [link] [comments]

Design research on the Clearleft podcast

22 September 2021

We’re halfway through the third season of the Clearleft podcast already!

Episode three is all about design research. I like the narrative structure of this. It’s a bit like a whodunnit, but it’s more like a whydunnit. The “why” question is “why aren’t companies hiring more researchers?”

The scene of the crime is this year’s UX Fest, where talks by both Teresa Torres and Gregg Bernstein uncovered the shocking lack of researchers. From there, I take up the investigation with Maite Otondo and Stephanie Troeth.

I won’t spoil it but by the end there’s an answer to the mystery.

I learned a lot along the way too. I realised how many axes of research there are. There’s qualitative research (stories, emotion, and context) and then there’s quantitative research (volume and data). But there’s also evualative research (testing a hyphothesis) and generative research (exploring a problem space before creating a solution). By my count that gives four possible combos: qualitative evaluative research, quantitative evaluative research, qualitative generative research, and quantitative generative research. Phew!

Steph was a terrific guest. Only a fraction of our conversation made it into the episode, but we chatted for ages.

And Maite kind of blew my mind too, especially when she was talking about the relationship between research and design and she said:

Research is about the present and design is about the future.

🤯

I’m going to use that quote again in a future episode. In fact, this episode on design research leads directly into the next two episodes. You won’t want to miss them. So if you’re not already subscribed to the Clearleft podcast, you should get on that, whether it’s via the RSS feed, Apple, Google, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts from.

Have a listen to this episode on design research and if you’re a researcher yourself, remember that unlike most companies we value research at Clearleft and that’s why we’re hiring another researcher right now. Come and work with us!

Writing the Clearleft newsletter

16 September 2021

The Clearleft newsletter goes out every two weeks on a Thursday. You can peruse the archive to see past editions.

I think it’s a really good newsletter, but then again, I’m the one who writes it. It just kind of worked out that way. In theory, anyone at Clearleft could write an edition of the newsletter.

To make that prospect less intimidating, I put together a document for my colleagues describing how I go about creating a new edition of the newsletter. Then I thought it might be interesting for other people outside of Clearleft to get a peek at how the sausage is made.

So here’s what I wrote…

Topics

The description of the newsletter is:

A round-up of handpicked hyperlinks from Clearleft, covering design, technology, and culture.

It usually has three links (maybe four, tops) on a single topic.

The topic can be anything that’s interesting, especially if it’s related to design or technology. Every now and then the topic can be something that incorporates an item that’s specifically Clearleft-related (a case study, an event, a job opening). In general it’s not very salesy at all so people will tolerate the occasional plug.

You can use the “iiiinteresting” Slack channel to find potential topics of interest. I’ve gotten in the habit of popping potential newsletter fodder in there, and then adding related links in a thread.

Tone

Imagine you’re telling a friend about something cool you’ve just discovered. You can sound excited. Don’t worry about this looking unprofessional—it’s better to come across as enthusiastic than too robotic. You can put real feelings on display: anger, disappointment, happiness.

That said, you can also just stick to the facts and describe each link in turn, letting the content speak for itself.

If you’re expressing a feeling or an opinion, use the personal pronoun “I”. Don’t use “we” unless you’re specifically referring to Clearleft.

But most of the time, you won’t be using any pronouns at all:

So-and-so has written an article in such-and-such magazine on this-particular-topic.

You might find it useful to have connecting phrases as you move from link to link:

Speaking of some-specific-thing, this-other-person has a different viewpoint.

On the subject of this-particular-topic, so-and-so wrote something about this a while back.

Structure

The format of the newsletter is:

An introductory sentence or short paragraph. A sentence describing the first link, ending with the title of the item in bold. A link to the item on its own separate line. An excerpt from the link, usually a sentence or two, styled as a quote. Repeat steps 2 to 4 another two times. 

Take a look through the archive of previous newsletters to get a feel for it.

Subject line

Currently the newsletter is called dConstruct from Clearleft. The subject line of every edition is in the format:

dConstruct from Clearleft — Title of the edition

(Note that’s an em dash with a space on either side of it separating the name of the newsletter and the title of the edition)

I often try to come up with a pun-based title (often a punny portmanteau) but that’s not necessary. It should be nice and short though: just one or two words.

Design engineering on the Clearleft podcast

15 September 2021

If you’re subscribed to the Clearleft podcast, then the latest episode is winging its way through the ether to your podcast software. The topic is one close to my heart: design engineering.

I wrote about this role back in February. I think my fervour comes across in that post and you can probably hear it in the podcast episode too.

As ever, I end up asking the question, “So what exactly is insert topic of the podcast episode here?”

I’ve got some smart folks answering that question. There’s an excerpt from Tobias Ahlin’s talk at this year’s UX Fest. And when I interviewed Adekunle Oduye for a previous episode on prototyping, we also discussed design engineering so I pulled out the relevant bits. But the bulk of the episode features the voice of Trys Mudford.

As you can gather from the many posts on Trys’s blog, he has a lot to say on the topic of design engineering. Luckily for me, he says it all with a clear, articulate delivery—the perfect podcast guest!

This episode finishes with a call to action (oh, the synergy!). If, after listening to 23 minutes of discussion on design engineering, you find yourself thinking “Hey, I think I might be a design engineer!”, then you should definitely head along to this job opening at Clearleft:

We’re currently looking for a design-friendly front-end developer with demonstrable skills in pattern-based prototyping and production.

Have a listen to episode two of season three of the Clearleft podcast and if you like what you hear, come and join us!

Accessibility testing

14 September 2021

I was doing some accessibility work with a client a little while back. It was mostly giving their site the once-over, highlighting any issues that we could then discuss. It was an audit of sorts.

While I was doing this I started to realise that not all accessibility issues are created equal. I don’t just mean in their severity. I mean that some issues can—and should—be caught early on, while other issues can only be found later.

Take colour contrast. This is something that should be checked before a line of code is written. When designs are being sketched out and then refined in a graphical editor like Figma, that’s the time to check the ratio between background and foreground colours to make sure there’s enough contrast between them. You can catch this kind of thing later on, but by then it’s likely to come with a higher cost—you might have to literally go back to the drawing board. It’s better to find the issue when you’re at the drawing board the first time.

Then there’s the HTML. Most accessibility issues here can be caught before the site goes live. Usually they’re issues of ommission: form fields that don’t have an explicitly associated label element (using the for and id attributes); images that don’t have alt text; pages that don’t have sensible heading levels or landmark regions like main and nav. None of these are particularly onerous to fix and they come with the biggest bang for your buck. If you’ve got sensible forms, sensible headings, alt text on images, and a solid document structure, you’ve already covered the vast majority of accessibility issues with very little overhead. Some of these checks can also be automated: alt text for images; labels for inputs.

Then there’s interactive stuff. If you only use native HTML elements you’re probably in the clear, but chances are you’ve got some bespoke interactivity on your site: a carousel; a mega dropdown for navigation; a tabbed interface. HTML doesn’t give you any of those out of the box so you’d need to make your own using a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and ARIA. There’s plenty of testing you can do before launching—I always ask myself “What would Heydon do?”—but these components really benefit from being tested by real screen reader users.

So if you commission an accessibility audit, you should hope to get feedback that’s mostly in that third category—interactive widgets.

If you get feedback on document structure and other semantic issues with the HTML, you should fix those issues, sure, but you should also see what you can do to stop those issues going live again in the future. Perhaps you can add some steps in the build process. Or maybe it’s more about making sure the devs are aware of these low-hanging fruit. Or perhaps there’s a framework or content management system that’s stopping you from improving your HTML. Then you need to execute a plan for ditching that software.

If you get feedback about colour contrast issues, just fixing the immediate problem isn’t going to address the underlying issue. There’s a process problem, or perhaps a communication issue. In that case, don’t look for a technical solution. A design system, for example, will not magically fix a workflow issue or route around the problem of designers and developers not talking to each other.

When you commission an accessibility audit, you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of it. Don’t squander it on issues that you can catch and fix yourself. Make sure that the bulk of the audit is being spent on the specific issues that are unique to your site.

Stakeholders of styling

13 September 2021

When I wrote about the new accent-color property in CSS, I pondered how much control a web developer should have over styling form controls:

Who are we to make that decision? Shouldn’t the user’s choice take primacy over our choices?

But then again, where do we draw the line? We’re allowed over-ride link colours. We’re allowed over-ride font choices.

Ultimately, I came down on the side of granting authors more control:

If developers don’t get a standardised way to customise native form controls, they’ll just recreate their own over-engineered versions.

This question of “who gets to decide?” used to be much more prevelant in the early days of the web. One way to think about this is that there are three stakeholders involved in the presentation of a web page:

The author of the page. “Author” is spec-speak for designer or developer. The user. The browser, or user agent. A piece of software tries to balance the needs of both author and user. But, as the name implies, the user takes precedence.

These days we tend to think of web design a single-stakeholder undertaking. The author decides how something should be presented and then executes that decision using CSS.

But as Eric once said, every line of you CSS you write is a suggestion to the browser. That’s not how we think about CSS though. We think of CSS like a series of instructions rather than suggestions. Never mind respecting the user’s preferences; one of the first things we do is reset all the user agent’s styles.

In the early days of the web, more consideration was given to the idea of style suggestions rather than instructions. Heck, users could always over-ride any of your suggestions with their own user stylesheet. These days, users would need to install a browser extension to do the same thing.

The first proposal for CSS had a concept called “influence”:

h2.font.size = 20pt 40%

Here, the requested influence is reduced to 40%. If a style sheet later in the cascade also requests influence over h2.font.size, up to 60% can be granted. When the document is rendered, a weighted average of the two requests is calculated, and the final font size is determined.

I think the only remnant of “influence” left in CSS is accidental. It’s in the specificity of selectors …and the !important declaration.

I think it’s a shame that user stylesheets are no longer a thing. But I get why they were dropped from browsers. They date from a time when it was mostly nerds using the web, before “regular folks” came on board. I understand why it became a little-used feature, suitable for being dropped. But the principle of it still rankles slightly.

But in recent years there has been a slight return to the multi-stakeholder concept of styling websites. Thanks to prefers-reduced-motion and prefers-color-scheme, a responsible author can choose to bow to the wishes of the user.

I was reminded of this when I added a dark mode to my website:

Y’know, when I first heard about Apple adding dark mode to their OS—and also to CSS—I thought, “Oh, great, Apple are making shit up again!” But then I realised that, like user style sheets, this is one more reminder to designers and developers that they don’t get the last word—users do.

Accent all areas

9 September 2021

Whenever a new version of Chrome comes out, there’s an accompanying blog post listing what’s new. Chrome 93 just came out and, sure enough, Pete has written a blog post about it.

But what I think is the most exciting addition to the browser isn’t listed.

What is this feature that’s got me so excited?

Okay, I’ve probably oversold it now because actually, it looks like a rather small trivial addition. It’s the accent-color property in CSS.

Up until now, accent colour was controlled by the operating system. If you’re on a Mac, go to “System Preferences” and then “General”. There you’ll see an option to change your accent colour. Try picking a different colour. You’ll see that change cascade down into the other form fields in that preference pane: checkboxes, radio buttons, and dropdowns.

Your choice will also cascade down into web pages. Any web page that uses native checkboxes, radio buttons and other interface elements will inherit that colour.

This is how interface elements are supposed to work. The browser inherits the look’n’feel of the inputs from the operating system.

That’s the theory anyway. In practice, form elements—such as dropdowns—can look different from browser to browser, something that shouldn’t be happening if the browsers are all inheriting from the operating system.

Anyway, it’s probably this supposed separation of responsibility between browser and operating system which has led to the current situation with form fields and CSS. Authors can style form fields up to a point, but there’s always a line that you don’t get to cross.

The accent colour of a selected radio button or a checkbox has historically been on the other side of that line. You either had to accept that you couldn’t change the colour, or you had to make your own checkbox or radio button interface. You could use CSS to hide the native element and replace it with an image instead.

That feels a bit over-engineered and frankly kind of hacky. It reminds me of the bad old days of image replacement for text before we had web fonts.

Now, with the accent-color property in CSS, authors can over-ride the choice that the user has set at the operating system level.

On the one hand, this doesn’t feel great to me. Who are we to make that decision? Shouldn’t the user’s choice take primacy over our choices?

But then again, where do we draw the line? We’re allowed over-ride link colours. We’re allowed over-ride font choices.

Ultimately I think it’s a good thing that authors can now specify an accent colour. What makes me think that is the behaviour that authors have shown if they don’t have this ability—they do it anyway, and in a hackier manner. This is why I think the work of the Open UI group is so important. If developers don’t get a standardised way to customise native form controls, they’ll just recreate their own over-engineered versions.

The purpose of Open UI to the web platform is to allow web developers to style and extend built-in web UI controls, such as select dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons, and date/color pickers.

Trying to stop developers from styling checkboxes and radio buttons is like trying to stop teenagers from having sex. You might as well accept that it’s going to happen and give them contraception so they can at least do it safely.

So I welcome this new CSS condom.

You can see accent-color in action in this demo. Change the value of the accent-color property to see the form fields update:

:root { accent-color: rebeccapurple; }

Applying it at the document level like that will make it universal, but you can also use the property on an element-by-element basis using whatever selector you want.

That demo works in Chrome and Edge 93, the current release. It also works in Firefox 92, which literally just landed (like as I was writing this blog post, support for accent-color magically arrived!).

As for Safari, well, who knows? If Apple published a roadmap, then developers would have a clue when to expect a property like this to land. But we mere mortals cannot be trusted with such important hush-hush information.

In the meantime, keep an eye on Can I Use. And lack of support on one browser is no reason not to use accent-color anyway. It’s a progressive enhancement. Add it to your CSS today and it will work in more browsers in the future.

Coaching on the Clearleft podcast

8 September 2021

Season three of the Clearleft podcast is here!

The first episode is a nice gentle one to ease into things. It’s about coaching …and training …and mentorship. Basically I wanted to find out what the differences are between those three things.

But I must confess, there’s a commercial reason why this episode is coming out now. There’s a somewhat salesy promotion of an upcoming coaching programme with Julia Whitney. This is definitely the most overt marketing I’ve done on the Clearleft podcast, but if you listen to the episode, I think you’ll agree that it fits well with the theme.

Fear not, future episodes will not feature this level of cross-promotion. Far from it. You can expect some very revealing podcast episodes that pull no punches in getting under the skin of design at Clearleft.

The stars of this episode are my colleagues Rebecca and Chris, who were an absolute joy to interview.

Have a listen and hear for yourself.

California fights fire with fire to protect giant sequoias

26 September 2021

The so-far successful battle this month in California to save the world's biggest trees from ever-worsening forest blazes seems to offer an important lesson: You can fight fire with fire.

Volcanic ash cloud closes La Palma airport; new vent emerges

25 September 2021

The airport on the Spanish island of La Palma shut down Saturday because of an ash cloud spewing out of a volcano that has been erupting for a week, and scientists said another volcanic vent opened up, exposing islanders to possible new dangers.

Zoo Miami: Orangutan dies following dental surgery

25 September 2021

An orangutan has died at Zoo Miami following a dental surgery, officials said.

Flights scrapped as new volcanic eruptions hit Canaries

25 September 2021

Fresh volcanic eruptions in Spain's Canary Islands prompted the cancellation of flights, airport authorities said Friday, the first since the Cumbre Vieja volcano came to life again.

Guatemala's Fuego volcano quiets after eruption

25 September 2021

Guatemala's Fuego volcano on Friday has quieted after a 32-hour long eruption, authorities said Friday.

More than 3,000 shark fins confiscated in Colombia

25 September 2021

Thousands of shark fins were confiscated by Colombian authorities before they could be illegally shipped to Hong Kong, officials said.

Researchers develop new method for detecting superfluid motion

25 September 2021

Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology are part of a new study that could help unlock the potential of superfluids—essentially frictionless special substances capable of unstopped motion once initiated. A team of scientists led by Mishkat Bhattacharya, an associate professor at RIT's School of Physics and Astronomy and Future Photon Initiative, proposed a new method for detecting superfluid motion in an article published in Physical Review Letters.

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