Xavi Ruiz showing where people in Europe live in apartments vs. houses.
Sarah C. P. Williams on a new inverse vaccine that could treat multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and other autoimmune diseases. Oh, I hope this works out.
Benj Edwards on AI-generated spiral village. Cool. And trippy.
Abbey Interrante on a coronal mass ejection recorded by the Parker Solar Probe. The video is fascinating.
The Tree Projects, photographing super tall trees.
Max Read’s literary history of fake texts in Apple’s marketing materials. Ha.
TypeScript Origins: The Documentary. I still haven’t watched any of these, though I’ve been meaning to. (Video isn’t really my thing.)
University of Liverpool archaeologists have discovered a manmade wooden structure dating from 476,000 years ago. “Expert analysis of stone tool cut-marks on the wood show that these early humans shaped and joined two large logs to make a structure, probably the foundation of a platform or part of a dwelling.”
Carson Gross on view source. Yep.
The Linotype Book Project, “documenting the journey of Doug Wilson while he researches, writes, and documents the history of the Linotype and its outsized impact on printing, journalism, and society.” Looks interesting.
The State of HTML survey is now open. By the same people who do the State of JS and State of CSS surveys.
Imba, a full-stack web programming language. I don’t think I’d use it, but it’s an interesting idea.
Thomas Kole’s renderings of Tenochtitlan, a 3D reconstruction of the city as it might have looked in 1500. Cool.
Mike Crittenden on farming your gut, so to speak. From a quote in the post: “Consider your gut microbiome as a farm and your microbiota as your own personal farm animals, then decide what to feed them to optimize their diversity, stability, and health, and optimize production of beneficial signaling molecules that affect our brains.”
Jason Kottke on Nikola Faller’s artistic leaf raking. Cool.
Josh Collinsworth on Tailwind. I wouldn’t mind never having to work with Tailwind again, honestly. I like real CSS.
Ed Nawotka on Bookshop.org’s plans to expand into ebooks. Ooh. This is very intriguing.
Danilo Campos on how it’s easier than ever to build hardware these days.
Jennifer Champoux in BYU Studies on the Book of Mormon Art Catalog. I was particularly interested in the section on production patterns over time.
Ted Bushman & Kristin Perkins in The Season on weird Latter-day Saint art. I’ve thought about going in this direction, but I don’t know, I don’t think it’s me. (But I’m fine making non-religious weird art and hope to do more of that soon.)
Steph Ango on files over apps. “File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.” Agreed.
Robin Sloan on what a wizard would read. “I believe it is time, instead, for creative investigations of decency, virtue, and goodness. If that sounds boring: yes! That’s why the project is needed! Let’s learn how to render complex and compelling the characters who are trying their best to live correctly — and sometimes, gasp, even succeeding.”
Font Bakery, a command-line tool for validating font quality. Nice.
Cindy Blanco on words shared in all languages.
Steven Johnson on the return of the progress city along with Victor Gruen and Walt Disney. Interesting. This reminded me that I need to read Jane Jacobs.
NOAA on an unidentified specimen found on the bottom of the ocean. “While we were able to collect the ‘golden orb’ and bring it onto the ship, we still are not able to identify it beyond the fact that it is biological in origin.”
Bun 1.0 has been released. I haven’t actually used it on anything yet, but whenever I next work on a command-line JavaScript project, I plan to.
Sonia Fernandez on reading large letters through walls via Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi has a surprising amount of other uses.
Jennifer Ouellette on scientists figuring out how to write in water, using micron-scale pens.
Matthew Inman on creativity. Vulgar as always with The Oatmeal, but some good points.
Roger Pimentel on the plan of salvation. Food for thought. This is part three of three.
Lincoln Michel on writing for your best readers. I need to remember this.
Maxime Heckel on raymarching.
VÉgA Vocabulary of Ancient Egyptian site. This is really well done. Highly recommended if you’re studying Middle Egyptian. (Though the orthography of the name is admittedly a little awkward.)
A year both slow and fast.
This week held four first anniversaries for me. Because we realized on a Tuesday that my dad had disappeared but we didn’t find him until that Friday after days of searching, the shape of the week is burned into my brain. We also have the calendrical anniversaries, where he went missing on the 13th and we found his body on the 16th (today).
It’s been an easier week than I anticipated. A thin layer of sadness spread over everything, yes, but I expected copious bouts of sobbing and generally not being able to function. Those expectations were almost certainly skewed; a full emotional repeat of the actual week wasn’t ever going to happen. Part of me also suspects that I’ve finished processing and have digested the tragedy into backstory, but I don’t have a good read on whether that’s accurate. What I do know, though, is that reading has been harder this past week; I barely eked out ten pages on Wednesday.
A few months ago I worked with someone on a collaborative art-related project that was due to be released next month. He had expressed interest in attending my art shows, so I emailed him near the end of last month to let him know about my I Lexi show at Writ & Vision. I realized this past Wednesday that I never heard back from him. He’d used his work email (the project was through his employer), so I wondered if perhaps he’d been laid off. I googled him…and immediately ran into his obituary. He’d been dead five days when I emailed him. Further digging revealed that he took his life. Oof. Sad and awful. That discovery cast an extra death-haunted tint on the day.
Last week I learned that my dad killed himself during National Suicide Prevention Week. I’m sure it had nothing to do with my dad’s choice of timing, but the irony is not lost on me.
As we gathered at my dad’s gravesite this week, I realized the typeface I used on the headstone (Literata) is the same typeface I use on my site. (Till the next redesign, anyway.) I don’t think I was conscious of that when I designed the stone; I was more concerned about choosing a typeface that was readable and had thick enough strokes for the engraving.
Here we are one year later and I’m still not done with the administrative side of the estate. Should get there in the next week or so, though. Crazy how long it takes.
Last but not least, thank you to all of you who’ve reached out this week to let us know you’re thinking of us. It’s meant a lot to us.
Matt Stevens on old-looking book covers for movies. Love these. So good.
Paul Butler interviews Bastien Dolla about Rayon, the collaborative architecture design tool. Found this interesting.
Matt Bell on training your weaknesses and lessons from running that apply to writing. “I’ve given dozens of craft talks about novel writing since Refuse to Be Done came out, and one of the most reliably reassuring things I tell people in those talks is that the task on any given day of writing a novel is never to write a novel. A day’s work might be a scene or a chapter; it might be a paragraph or a sentence; it might be outlining or research.”
Tiny News Collective. “We support the voices historically excluded from media and media ownership by providing tools, resources and community of learning to help people build sustainable news organizations that reflect and serve their communities.” This is great.
EmNudge’s Watlings, educational exercises for learning WAT (WebAssembly Text Format), similar to Rustlings and Ziglings. Looking forward to working through these.
2023 State of CSS results. I mostly check this for the features section, to see what I haven’t yet heard about (like line-clamp).
Matthias Ott on reading with your fingers. I do this sometimes when I want to read faster. Works fairly well.
Siderea on issues with the HTML ordered list element. “I start with a single HTML tag and end with the downfall of civilization. Not joking.” Some really good points here.
Jason Kottke on Adeline Harris’s 19th-century autograph quilt. Fun.
Spectrolite, a macOS app “for making colorful risograph prints and zines and books more easily.” I don’t have a risograph, but the posterization UI is cool and the imposition functionality looks helpful for booklet/zine printing.
The Flux manifesto. “We founded Flux to make atoms as malleable as bits. We want to take the hard out of hardware, to make it as easy for a teenager to build an iPhone as a website. We want to unleash the latent human potential held back by the high barriers to creating breakthrough physical products. We want to accelerate technological progress by making it possible for anyone, regardless of background or resources, to bring their best ideas to life in physical form.” It’s a corporate manifesto so take with a huge grain of salt, but the idea is interesting. Democratizing hardware creation is intriguing.
Eliot Peper on how to become a better conversationalist. “But sometimes when someone asks you a question, they don’t really care about the answer. What they actually want is for you to tell them something interesting.” A take I haven’t heard before.
Open house begins for Bangkok Thailand Temple. Lovely to see this. It feels like it hasn’t been that long since I was on my mission hoping Thailand would get a temple, and now here we are.
Anton Howes on making historical sources available. “Just as in the sciences it is considered good practice to make one’s data available, in history it should perhaps be a requirement to upload to some public repository the photographs or transcriptions of any cited archival sources that are not otherwise freely accessible online.” 100%.
Statecraft, a newsletter by Santi Ruiz and Jake Leffew about how successful government initiatives happened. “We think these interviews can serve as roadmaps for readers trying to get big hairy things done in the public sector, and illuminate the inner workings of government for the policy-curious. We also think they’re tremendous stories.”
