Links #119

Lea Verou on inline conditionals in CSS. Lots of interesting developments in the works for CSS these days.

Stitch People’s realistic hair cross-stitch techniques book. Cool.

John Durham Peters’ research techniques. “Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive, rotate crops, take a weekly Sabbath, go to bed at the same time, exercise so hard you can’t think during it, talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old, take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries), step outside of the empire of the English language regularly, look for vocabulary from other fields, love the basic, keep your antennae tuned, and seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., use guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt).” I especially like the dictionary reading recommendation and need to make time for that more often.

Elan Ullendorff on an eighteenth-century map of Spain. Five hundred maps, actually. Delightful.

Madiba K. Dennie on how constitutional originalism is a dangerous, disingenuous ideology. “Originalism observes that white supremacy dominated the country’s past and reasons that it must also dominate the country’s future.”

Melissa Price’s English monarchy book. Enjoyed the design of this.

Caroline Cala Donofrio’s list of 40 things she needed to hear. Several good recommendations here, particularly the New Yorker one.

Ambuj Tewari on recent advances in machine learning helping computers to recognize smells. Cool.

Alexander Obenauer on the interfaces with which we think. I like the idea of decomposing computing into smaller blocks that aren’t wrapped in monolithic apps. Seems like a great concept, allowing for more interesting composition.

Sara Saljoughi on how to get unstuck. Yep. This has worked for me.

Rob McCormick on building flexible, fluid websites rather than using breakpoint-based media queries. (Since there’s always going to be a large variety of different browser sizes.) At some point I’d like to do this with this site.