Damian’s notes

I enjoyed this 12-minute video by Chris Spargo about why traffic signs in the world are standardized but only to some extent, and why Ireland, situated between the rest of Europe and the USA, ended up with a system that splits the difference between the systems used in the EU and the States.

A discussion of leap-year calculations, and how the formula for the best-distributed leap years is useful for various calendar calculations, but alas! not for actual leap years.

The Axios attack exploited amongst other things our expectation that a video call will often start with a hasty software update.

Apophenia, the human tendency to see patterns in random things illustrated by Grant Snider (one of a series of random words comics).

“Simplicity is a great virtue, but it requires hard work to achieve and education to appreciate. And to make matters worse, complexity sells better.” — Edsger Dijkstra

It’s so much easier to show off a complex new solution than a simpler, better one. How can we address this?

So excited to see CSS Form Control Styling Module Level 1. In less than ten years time we will be able to style the menu drop down of SELECT elements with CSS and throw away the gigabytes of buggy JavaScript used to fake this feature for the last couple of decades.

Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering by Rune Skovbo Johansen is a really interesting stylistic shader for 3d renders where it appears to be dithered with the dots both remaining stuck to the surface but also appearing roughly the same size as each other. It looks amazing. This video demonstrates the shader and explains the clever way it is achieved.

I remember the days of server-rendered or statically rendered HTML, in contrast to the modern approach of having a giant bundle of JavaScript faking the navigation and accessibility features HTML already provides. Jim Nielsen uses navigation between separate, simpler pages to power his site’s interactivity, with the new view-transitions CSS features providing the animations between states.

Cambridge University Press has a collection of original letter punches used to make the type of the Birmingham printer John Baskerville (1707-75), and they have an online exhibition of amazing-looking high-definition scans of these artefacts.