Like many medications, the wakefulness drug modafinil, which is marketed under the trade name Provigil, comes with a small, tightly folded paper pamphlet. For the most part, its contents—lists of instructions and precautions, a diagram of the drug’s molecular structure—make for anodyne reading. The…
Jonathan
The need to regulate online privacy is a truth so universally acknowledged that even Facebook and Google have joined the chorus of voices crying for change. Writing in the New York Times last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai argued that it is “vital for companies to give people clear, individual…
Sarah Miller, writing for Popula: “Sunny day flooding” is flooding where water comes right up from the ground, hence the name, and yes, it can certainly rain during sunny day flooding, and yes, that makes it worse. Sunny day flooding happens in many parts of Miami, but it is especially bad in…
It’s April 2013 in New York. Ensconced in a Chelsea studio bubbling with celebrities and champagne, an international man of mystery records his vanity music project. The ballad the 30-year-old sings is called “Void of a Legend.” The man calls himself Jho Low. At one point in his recording session,…
Programmer migration patterns I made a little flow chart of mainstream programming languages and howprogrammers seem to move from one to another. There's a more common kind of chart, which shows how thelanguages themselves evolved. I didn't want to show the point of view oflanguage inventors, but…
web-birthday-2019 transparent 600 #00669b Today, 30 years on from my original proposal for an information management system , half the world is online. It’s a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come, but also an opportunity to reflect on how far we have yet to go. The web has become a public square,…
In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency:…
With the swelling confidence of a colonial power happening upon a long-settled distant land, today Mark Zuckerberg discovered the concept of privacy. In a ballooning 3,225 words — a roughly average word count for the terminally verbose Facebook founder — Zuckerberg informed his miserably loyal 2.3…
In the debate between determinists and compatibilists it is often repeated that the side arguing that free will and determinism are compatible are just playing word games, and changing the definition of "free will". However, it's probably the other way around. When the debate is first framed in…
Yesterday morning, the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport SelectCommittee published its long-awaited final report into disinformation and ‘fakenews’. The report – which follows a long and at times dramatic investigation –is full of interesting and insightful details about political…
I have never been a fan of " DRYing ," out unit tests (i.e., abstracting duplicated test setup). I have always preferred to keep all of my test setup inside each individual test, and I opined about how this made my test suite more readable, isolated, and consistent; despite all of the duplication.…
“Hygge” has become a household word in the English language, by way of the lifestyle pages of the New York Times and the Guardian . A Danish word pronounced ”hew-geh,” according to the least hapless pronunciation guide, hygge can be described as the art of “being consciously cozy,” or the innocent…
I. Mr. Hathway In 1959, when I went to work for Newsday , on Long Island, the paper had a managing editor named Alan Hathway, who was an old-time newspaperman from the nineteen-twenties. He was a character right out of “The Front Page,” a broad-shouldered man with a big stomach that looked soft but…
Maurizio Sarri places a significant emphasis on attacking play. There are two components within this: the first is based on circulating ball possession to attract defensive pressure from the opponent, creating gaps to play through, get attackers running with the ball in space and/or in behind, and…
1. At ten of five in the morning, Lao Dao crossed the busy pedestrian lane on his way to find Peng Li. After the end of his shift at the waste processing station, Lao Dao had gone home, first to shower and then to change. He was wearing a white shirt and a pair of brown pants—the only decent clothes…
12.19. 2018 Far below the Antarctic circle, I watch a woman cry real tears because she can’t get gluten-free toast. Mary is a plummy old English lady traveling alone, an Agatha Christie figure who I expected would spend her time solving mysteries on the ship. When people started disappearing in the…
Draw me your map of utopia and I’ll tell you your tragic flaw. In 10 years of political reporting I’ve met a lot of intense, oddly dressed people with very specific ideas about what the perfect world would look like, some of them in elected office—but none quite so strange as the ideological soup of…
Yesterday, I wrote about why event delegation is better than attaching events to specific elements . In response, my buddy Andrew Borstein asked: What’s the difference between event delegation/bubbling/capturing? This is a great question that I get fairly often. The terms are often used…
Dec 11, 2018 Michael Cox ESPN.com writer The Premier League currently finds itself with the most impressive array of managers in its 27-season history, and the eclectic cast includes three managers who have contributed significantly to the evolution of modern football. The first is Manchester City's…
One day in March of 2000, six of Google ’s best engineers gathered in a makeshift war room. The company was in the midst of an unprecedented emergency. In October, its core systems, which crawled the Web to build an “index” of it, had stopped working. Although users could still type in queries at…
Mike Monteiro Nov 15, 2018 · 4 min read On November 1, 2018, I was teaching an ethics workshop in Ottawa, Canada. One of the topics we covered that day was the power of organized protest. If you walk out of your job in protest, you have a problem. But if you can talk your entire department into…
(Watch videos of me presenting this material at PyCon Canada or PyCon US .) Imagine you are a creator deity, designing a body for a creature. In your benevolence, you wish for the creature to evolve over time: first, because it must respond to changes in its environment, and second, because your…
⚠️ Tap or click any image to enlarge Perhaps the biggest surprise about Apple’s new map is how small it is: Four years in the making, it covers just 3% of the U.S.’s area and 4.9% of its population: But don’t let its size fool you—it’s a dramatically different map from before, with a staggering…
E very friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, 1 you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.” They…
You’ve been asked to design a profile screen for a mobile or web app. It will need to include an avatar, a name, a job title, and a location. You fire up Sketch or Figma. Maybe you pull out your drafting pencil or head straight to markup and CSS. What’s your go-to fake name? Regardless of your…
In Finland, people whose sickness is linked to certain buildings fear being labelled as mentally ill, while scientists search for evidence that their condition is ‘real’. In early September 2011, when the weather in Finland had begun to turn its back on summer and trudge towards winter, a woman…
Meadow Lane is a happy place to be at the moment. Notts County are in the running for promotion back to League One and everyone is pulling in the same direction. Under Kevin Nolan their progress on the pitch has been relatively serene and, with the backing of the local businessman Alan Hardy, the…
My Brexit epiphany took place outside the Dun Cow Inn on a bleak January evening some 18 months after the referendum. To escape the heavy rain and dark grey skies over Sedgefield I was about to take refuge in the cosy-looking gastropub when I noticed a plaque attached to its outside wall. “Rt Hon…
90 Minutes Right before the 2014 Men’s World Cup started in Brazil, the United States Soccer Federation (U.S. Soccer) unveiled a new brand look that made extensive use of my typeface United . They used it for their website, fleet graphics, luggage tags and pretty much everything except the team’s…
When Robert Frank finally sat down to divine his seminal photography book, “The Americans,” he had to sift through more than 28,000 images. In Frank’s vast collection were snapshots of an America that had rarely before been caught on film: snaps of Manhattan cowboys sitting atop garbage cans, snaps…
V6: Color A new approach to one of my biggest design weaknesses, using basic color theory, HSL, and Sass. 27 Feb 2018 This is the third post in a three-part series about my site’s 2017 redesign. In my work as a designer, color has never been my strong suit. I often try to avoid dealing with it…
When you walk down the traffic-clogged streets of New York City, often considered to be one of the most liveable cities in the world, you might notice something about the cyclists. About 80% of them are men. But if you wander down to the banks of the Hudson River, where there is a protected…
After my Loop Better talk at PyGotham 2017 someone asked me a great question: iterators are lazy iterables and range is a lazy iterable in Python 3, so is range an iterator? Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of the person who asked me this question. I do remember saying something along the…
Next post Previous post I was shocked—shocked!—to see people disagree with my last post . I was even more shocked to learn about bizarre omission in the HomePod software. I decided to dig into the many ways you can set timed alerts on your Apple devices and how the alert systems vary from device to…
The latest edition of the excellent History Of The Web newsletter is called The Day(s) The Web Fought Back . It recounts the first time that websites stood up against bad legislation in the form of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), and goes to recount the even more effective use of blackout…
The Good Room This talk was given on February 15, 2018 at Substans in Bergen, Norway. I’m a designer, but writing is another important part of my practice. Most of what I’ve written focuses on making the case for a cohesive and generous philosophy for how we design technology: it must not only look…
Everything Easy is Hard Again This talk was given on October 12, 2017 at Mirror Conf in Braga, Portugal, and again on February 9, 2018 at the Awwwards Conference in Berlin. This past summer, I gave a lecture at a web conference and afterward got into a fascinating conversation with a young digital…
The User Experience of Design Systems On Google’s Material Design and the Templatization of Digital Products This is a transcription of a keynote given at UX Camp Copenhagen in May, 2017. Thanks so much. Tries to tell joke . I’d like to thank the organizers for inviting me to come and speak. I’ve…
How America’s infatuation with World War II has eroded our conscience This comic is an adaptation of Chris Hayes’ piece ‘The Good War on Terror’ first published by In These Times in 2006. Numbers have been updated. The Nib is going independent! Become a member today to support us publishing great…
Get the book! The Inclusive Components book is now available, with updated and improved content and demos. Carousels (or 'content sliders') are like men. They are not literally all bad — some are even helpful and considerate. But I don't trust anyone unwilling to acknowledge a glaring pattern of…
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