Damian’s notes

The solution to Britain’s constitutional woes is not convening a constitutional court and rewriting the constitution from scratch, since that will never happen and in any case ground-up rewrites are notoriously risky. Better to concentrate on patching the existing system instead. It urgently needs it.

Given the brief of an alien alphabet for use in a children’s hospital, British type designer Jeremy Tankard put the work in to make something splendid replete with a fictional history and two styles (corporate Sans and informal Hand).

The Fonts in Use web site has been running for 10 years now, detailing almost 17,000 uses of fonts in the real world.

Beth Moon’s 14-year quest to photograph ancient trees has taken her across the world. Some of her subjects grow in isolation, on remote mountainsides, private estates, or nature preserves; others maintain a proud, though often precarious, existence in the midst of civilization.

So much front-end work these days is spent making forms less useable. The weirdly animated label of the Material Design text-input fields perhaps the exemplar of taking something people understand and making it less understandable for the sake of shiny effects.

Too much of my time is spend spinning between mobile Safari, 1Password, iCloud Keychain passwords, and the password-reset forms of websites I use and eventually giving up after a couple of cycles. Too many sites use fancy pants JavaScript UI that silently fails to authenticate on my phone. Too many sites impose stupid restrictions on passwords that are less safe than the generated passwords I use use.

Ancient art found in the Amazon forest is 12,500 years old and has pictures of extinct megafauna

News reporter normally about worrying things so here by way of antidote are 99 good news snippets.

I have friends who have swum in the River Thames or Isis daily since summer at least and post pictures of themselves sitting grinning in their swim bags. Here’s an article about wild swimming considered as a bio hack.