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Free Speech, Jacinda Ardern and the Tyranny of ‘Kindness’

13 October 2022

Colin Todhunter

Pfizer Exec admits “We never tested vaccine against transmission”

12 October 2022

A senior Pfizer executive has admitted under oath that the company never tested their Covid “vaccine” to see if it prevented transmission. Pfizer’s Chief Executive in Charge of Developing Markets Janine Small was testifying in front of the European Parliament’s Special Committee on Covid19 on Monday, when Dutch MEP Rob Roos asked: Was the Pfizer …

Pandemic Treaty: Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated

11 October 2022

Kit Knightly A few days ago the British Medical Journal published a report headlined: Don’t let economic crisis distract from preparing for a future pandemic The headline is quoting Sarah Gilbert – team leader behind the development AstraZeneca Covid “vaccine” – addressing the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) when it opened on September 29th. …

Only Adult Children Still Believe US Propaganda

11 October 2022

Edward Curtin Veteran OffG contributor Edward Curtin shares his interpretation of the conflict in Ukraine It should now be quite clear to any reasonable person that the Biden administration is hell-bent on destroying Russia and will risk nuclear war in doing so. It has already started World War III with its use of Ukraine to …

WATCH: Torturing the Truth

10 October 2022

We all know that torture is bad, but are we really aware of how much of the narrative of the past two decades was constructed on torture testimony? Do we know the CIA contractors who developed the torture program or the steps that the intelligence agencies took to cover up their illegal activities? And, when …

DISCUSS: Crimean Bridge Attack and Russian Retalliation

10 October 2022

In the early hours of Saturday morning, an explosion allegedly rocked the Crimean Bridge, the bridge spanning the Kerch straits and linking Crimea to the Russian mainland. The explosion damaged the rail bridge and caused a partial collapse of a small section of the road bridge. CCTV appeared to show a truck exploding or perhaps …

This Week in the New Normal #49

9 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. 1. Swift outlines potential CBDC network The international payment network SWIFT announced this week they have plans in place to creat a global network of …

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.

FBI Held Training With Indian Cop Who Oversaw Unit Accused of Torture and Murder

13 October 2022

The FBI’s training of Kashmiri police official Tahir Ashraf Bhatti might run afoul of the “Leahy laws.”

The post FBI Held Training With Indian Cop Who Oversaw Unit Accused of Torture and Murder appeared first on The Intercept.

The Texas Border County at the Center of a Dangerous Right-Wing Experiment

12 October 2022

Officials in rural Kinney County, Texas, are pushing Gov. Greg Abbott to take ever more extreme action against migrants and asylum-seekers.

The post The Texas Border County at the Center of a Dangerous Right-Wing Experiment appeared first on The Intercept.

Biden State Department Embraces Flawed Logic for Bolivian Coup in Leaked Report

12 October 2022

Adopting debunked claims of election fraud, the report reflects Trump-era support of the far-right coup regime of Jeanine Áñez.

The post Biden State Department Embraces Flawed Logic for Bolivian Coup in Leaked Report appeared first on The Intercept.

“Election Interference”: Oil Price Hike Is Saudi Arabia’s October Surprise Against Biden

11 October 2022

“The Saudis are working to get Trump reelected and for the MAGA Republicans to win the midterms.”

The post “Election Interference”: Oil Price Hike Is Saudi Arabia’s October Surprise Against Biden appeared first on The Intercept.

In Pig Welfare Case, Supreme Court Could Doom State Regulatory Laws Aimed at Industry

10 October 2022

The right-wing justices who claim to support “states’ rights” could once again expose their hypocrisy in the service of big business.

The post In Pig Welfare Case, Supreme Court Could Doom State Regulatory Laws Aimed at Industry appeared first on The Intercept.

The Right's Anti-Vaxxers Are Killing Republicans

10 October 2022

Since Covid-19 vaccines arrived, the gap in so-called excess deaths between Republicans and Democrats has widened, a new study says.

The post The Right’s Anti-Vaxxers Are Killing Republicans appeared first on The Intercept.

Texas Claims It’s “Too Late” for DNA Testing That Could Get Rodney Reed Off Death Row

9 October 2022

Now Reed is taking his fight to the Supreme Court.

The post Texas Claims It’s “Too Late” for DNA Testing That Could Get Rodney Reed Off Death Row appeared first on The Intercept.

This is an ad of Rema 1000, which is a Norwegian supermarket chain. "Simplicity is king" is one of their slogans.

13 October 2022

submitted by /u/Achakita to r/funny [link] [comments]

[OC] Number of police killings in developed countries

13 October 2022

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

1422 Paris map on top of today Paris

13 October 2022

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

MIA on Twitter - in the replies people are losing their shit.

13 October 2022

submitted by /u/Flaky-Mobile-8638 to r/conspiracy [link] [comments]

Tube socks

13 October 2022

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

Do you think that in general, life is easier for the opposite gender?

13 October 2022

View Poll

submitted by /u/Shine_0513 to r/polls [link] [comments]

To give you an idea where the priorities of our gov’t are…

13 October 2022

submitted by /u/Illustrious_Ant_1194 to r/conspiracy_commons [link] [comments]

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.

That was dConstruct 2022

13 September 2022

dConstruct 2022 happened last Friday, September 9th.

And what an event it was! All eight talks were superb. To have eight speakers and not a single dud is pretty great. To have eight speakers and each one be absolutely brilliant is more than I could’ve hoped for.

Hidde has written a summary of the talks. I loved each and every one. I got to sit there in the front row of the beautiful Duke of York’s cinema and watch these supersmart people blow my mind.

With six of the eight speakers having spoken at previous dConstructs, there was a lot of nostalgia in the air on Friday.

It was the last dConstruct.

A lot of people seemed surprised by this even though I kept saying it was a one-off event. Really, the last dConstruct happened in 2015. This year’s event was a one-time-only anniversary event.

Obviously because the day was so great, people expressed sadness and disappointment that there wouldn’t be another. But like I said, if a band like The Velvet Underground reforms to do one last gig, that’s pretty cool; but if a band like The Velvet Underground reforms to go on endless tours, that’s kind of sad. It’s time to move on. Have one last blow-out and go out in style.

And who knows? Maybe there’ll be some other kind of dConstructy gathering in a different format. Perhaps an evening salon event is more suited to this kind of interdisciplinary mish-mash. But as a one-day conference, dConstruct is now officially over.

To be honest, there was never any doubt that dConstruct 2022 would be an excellent day of talks. I knew that each of the speakers would deliver the goods. I played it somewhat safe with the line-up. Because this was a kind of “best of” event, I could draw upon speakers from previous years who were guaranteed to be mesmerising.

In a weird way, that also highlights the biggest problem with this year’s dConstruct. Even though every individual talk was terrific, when you pull back and look at the line-up in aggregate, you can’t help but notice its lack of diversity.

That’s on me.

I could show you the list of people I tried to get. I could talk you through the spots that fell through. But all I’d be doing is giving you excuses. I could show that my intentions were good, but intentions don’t matter as much as actions. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and what we ate last Friday was wonderful but also sadly representative of dConstruct’s homogenous history. For that reason alone, it’s time to draw a line under dConstruct.

It was a bittersweet send-off. On the one hand, I got to enjoy a day of brilliant talks. On the other hand, I’m pretty disappointed in myself that the line-up wasn’t more diverse. I can make all the claims I want about valuing diversity, but they’re hollow without meaningful results.

So that’s enough looking to the past. I’m bidding farewell to dConstruct and setting my sights on the future, a future that features more and different voices.

If you came along to dConstruct 2022, thank you! If you enjoyed attending dConstruct just half as much as I enjoyed hosting it …well, then I enjoyed it twice as much as you.

Friendly virus shown to attack Fusobacterium, which causes gum disease and stimulates breast and colon cancer

13 October 2022

In a world first, La Trobe University researchers have discovered a virus that attacks a prominent disease-causing bacterium—a "ringleader" that recruits harmful bacteria to cause periodontitis, and potentially helps cancer grow and spread.

Physicists predict the novel entangled states on programmable quantum simulators

13 October 2022

Quantum science has not only deepened human understanding of the structure of matter and its microscopic interactions, but also introduced a new paradigm of computing and information science—quantum computing and quantum simulation. Quantum informatics research has won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Boosting eco-friendly battery performance using catalysts with unconventional phase nanostructures

13 October 2022

The metal-carbon dioxide battery is a promising and environmentally friendly technology, but its energy efficiency is limited. Recently, a research team co-led by chemists from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) discovered an innovative way to overcome this problem by introducing an unconventional phase nanomaterial as a catalyst, boosting battery energy efficiency up to 83.8%. The study reveals a novel design of catalysts for the new generation of meta-gas batteries that can contribute to carbon neutral goals.

30,000 near-Earth asteroids discovered, and numbers are rising

13 October 2022

We have now discovered 30,039 near-Earth asteroids in the solar system—rocky bodies orbiting the sun on a path that brings them close to Earth's orbit. The majority of these were discovered in the last decade, showing how our ability to detect potentially risky asteroids is rapidly improving.

Video: Solar Orbiter speeds toward its next rendezvous with the sun

13 October 2022

The ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission arrives at its next close approach to the sun on 12 October 2022 at 19:12 UTC (21:12 CEST). This sequence of images shows the progress of the ESA/NASA spacecraft as it heads inwards on its voyage of discovery. The sequence begins on 20 September and finishes on 10 October.

Japanese cockroach east-west separation established more than 5,000 years ago

13 October 2022

Researchers in Japan have identified different cockroach species based on egg casing impressions in Jomon-era pottery. Using the information, they found that the two main species in modern Japan had already been divided, east–west, at that time more than 5,000 years ago. Their work was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports on Aug. 30, 2022.

Behavior change is essential to address the climate emergency

13 October 2022

The U.K. will fail to meet its net zero and environment targets unless there is a significant increase in efforts to bring about behavior change, according to a major new report.