Tags: times

Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In - The New York Times

A profile of the life and work of the brilliant Octavia E. Butler.

Applying pace layers to career paths | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Yes, I’m a sucker for pace layers, but I think Rich is onto something here, mapping a profession onto a pace layer diagram.

Design and long-term thinking

I like this mashup of two diagrams: Stewart Brand’s pace layers and Stephanie DiRusso’s typology of design thinking.

1loc | Favorite JavaScript single line of code

This is very handy indeed! Quick one-line JavaScript helpers categorised by type.

And, no, you don’t need to npm install any of these. Try “vendoring” them instead (that’s copying and pasting to you and me).

Our Last-Minute, Extremely Online Gift Guide - The New York Times

Chindogu gone wild.

Times New Arial

Ever wanted to set some text in 70% Times New Roman and 30% Arial? Me neither. But now, thanks to variable fonts, you can!

Y2K @ 20 - The New York Times

This is quite remarkable. On the surface, it’s a short article about the Y2K bug, but the hypertextual footnotes go deeper and deeper into memory, loss, grief …I’m very moved by the rawness and honesty nested within.

The New York City Subway Map as You’ve Never Seen It Before - The New York Times

The design history of the New York subway map.

Frank Chimero · Tweenage Computing

Frank yearns for just-in-time computing:

With each year that goes by, it feels like less and less is happening on the device itself. And the longer our work maintains its current form (writing documents, updating spreadsheets, using web apps, responding to emails, monitoring chat, drawing rectangles), the more unnecessary high-end computing seems. Who needs multiple computers when I only need half of one?

The Arrogance of the Anthropocene - The Atlantic

If, in the final 7,000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyperintelligent, built a civilization, started asteroid mining, and did so for centuries before forgetting to carry the one on an orbital calculation, thereby sending that famous valedictory six-mile space rock hurtling senselessly toward the Earth themselves—it would be virtually impossible to tell.

A nice steaming cup of perspective.

If there were a nuclear holocaust in the Triassic, among warring prosauropods, we wouldn’t know about it.

Opinion | It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning - The New York Times

The New York Times is publishing science-fictional op-eds. The first one is from Ted Chiang on the Gene Equality Project forty years in our future:

White supremacist groups have claimed that its failure shows that certain races are incapable of being improved, given that many — although by no means all — of the beneficiaries of the project were people of color. Conspiracy theorists have accused the participating geneticists of malfeasance, claiming that they pursued a secret agenda to withhold genetic enhancements from the lower classes. But these explanations are unnecessary when one realizes the fundamental mistake underlying the Gene Equality Project: Cognitive enhancements are useful only when you live in a society that rewards ability, and the United States isn’t one.

The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite - The New York Times

Machine with the strength of a hundred men can’t feed and clothe my children.

Is Tech Too Easy to Use? - The New York Times

Seams!

Of all the buzzwords in tech, perhaps none has been deployed with as much philosophical conviction as “frictionless.” Over the past decade or so, eliminating “friction” — the name given to any quality that makes a product more difficult or time-consuming to use — has become an obsession of the tech industry, accepted as gospel by many of the world’s largest companies.

Prioritizing the Long-Tail of Performance - TimKadlec.com

Focusing on the median or average is the equivalent of walking around with a pair of blinders on. We’re limiting our perspective and, in the process, missing out on so much crucial detail. By definition, when we make improving the median or average our goal, we are focusing on optimizing for only about half of our sessions.

Tim does the numbers…

By honing in on the 90th—or 95th or similar—we ensure those weaknesses don’t get ignored. Our goal is to optimize the performance of our site for the majority of our users—not just a small subset of them.

User agent as a runtime | Blog | Decade City

Ultimately you can’t control when and how things go wrong but you do have some control over what happens. This is why progressive enhancement exists.

UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right?

A wonderful—and humorous—deep dive into all things time-related.

Building a calendar sucks. Like there’s really cool shit you can do, since every calendar out there today is basically straight outta 2005, but at the end of the day you’re stuck dealing with all of the edge cases that all your dork friends have warned you about since the dawn of time. (Like literally, the dawn of time is a separate edge case you have to account for as well.)

This also contains a well-deserved shout-out to ISO 8601:

ISO 8601 is one of my favorite standards and/or RFC out there. And yes, you should definitely have a favorite.

I do have a favourite RFC—ask me about it sometime over a beer.

New Privacy Rules Could Make This Woman One of Tech’s Most Important Regulators - The New York Times

It’s kind of surreal to see a profile in the New York Times of my sister-in-law. Then again, she is Ireland’s data protection commissioner, and what with Facebook, Twitter, and Google all being based in Ireland, and with GDPR looming, her work is more important than ever.

By the way, this article has 26 tracking scripts. I don’t recall providing consent for any of them.

Apollo 17 in Real-time

Relive the final trip to the moon with Geno and the crew of Apollo 17 …(real)timeshifted by 45 years.

The Times | data viz catalogue

Data visualisations created for The Times, complete with code.