Links #101

David Epstein’s interview with Cal Newport about slow productivity. This was good and has been in my thoughts the past few days. For me, the part that stuck out most was the idea of obsessing over quality. I often default to more of a utilitarian “get it out the door, it’s good enough” mode, which is often fine, but I like the idea of slowing down and spending time obsessing over quality.

Elie Mystal on how the Supreme Court is antidemocratic. “The Supreme Court must be made to pay a price—a political, institutional, professional price—for its ongoing political thuggery lightly disguised as jurisprudence. Its members will never stop acting like the only nine Americans who matter until we stop them from doing that. And the only way to stop them is to limit their power, their budgets, and their unearned belief in their own supremacy.” I’m no SCOTUS expert, but I agree. The current state is not ideal.

James on how blogging, as a format, encourages incomplete stories. I like this idea. Messy, WIP, thinking in public, iteration. To me, that’s more interesting than only publishing pristine, polished perfection. (Apologies for the alliteration.) (Oh snap, I did it again. In spite of the foregoing sentences, I usually try to avoid using consonance and alliteration.)

Chris Haynes on streaming HTML out of order without JavaScript, using Declarative Shadow DOM. Intriguing, especially now that both Safari and Firefox have added support for Declarative Shadow DOM.

The opening paragraphs to Goodstein’s States of Matter textbook. Ha. More dark humor in textbooks, please.

Infographic on who lived when. Found this interesting, especially across different areas.

@Hugo_Book_Club on dystopian fiction. There’s…a lot of truth to this.

Per Brinch Hansen’s memoirs of programming. Haven’t read this yet but it looks interesting.

Matt Webb’s Galactic Compass app. I finally installed this and have used it a couple times, which has been fun. I love how it takes something ordinarily invisible (at least during the day and in the city) and makes it accessible. For example, I hadn’t ever thought about how it changes over the course of the day. Obvious in hindsight, sure, but now I have a better, more grounded sense of the earth’s rotation than I did before.