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An interesting piece at The Atlantic on how link rot is affecting everything.

A neat insight into the early days of CSS from Eric Meyer.

I first saw CSS in a technical writing class at umich (TC450 with Rod Johnson & Kara Heinrichs). Like Eric, I found it very exciting, but yeah, nothing actually worked.

We’re getting there.

This was no idle threat. Lysenko’s powerbase was well known: “The whole country knows of the debate taking place between Vavilov and Lysenko,” one his cronies stood up and announced at a meeting. “Vavilov will have to change his ways, because Stalin said that things must not work the way Vavilov says but as Lysenko says.” Within a few years, working with Stalin and others, Lysenko was well on the way to purging Mendelian geneticists from the ranks of Soviet science, having them fired or thrown into prison if they did not swear allegiance to Lysenko’s views. He had also, for all intents and purposes, removed all mention of Mendelian genetics from biology textbooks at every level from grade school on through university.

The Botanist Who Defied Stalin

Extend your arm out until your elbow is straight, and hold your thumb and index finger about four inches apart. That’s a little wider than a credit card. A little less than half the width of a piece of notebook paper. Got it? Cool.

Now read this.

Now look back at your fingers.

Go read Steel at MGoBlog. What an amazing story. Congrats to the 2021 Women’s Gymnasts on the first national title in school history!

William Shakespeare is credited with the invention of 1,700 words (or at least his plays are the first known printed use thereof). Jennie Alexander can be credited with just a few less – and we even left some of them in the third edition of „Make a Chair from a Tree“ (if their meanings could […]

‘Jennie-isms’ from ‘Make a Chair from a Tree’

Some developers I’ve known seem to think that being good at concurrency makes them badass. Others seem to think that senior developers must be great at concurrency, and so they should be too.

But what senior developers are good at is eliminating concurrency as much as possible by developing a simple, easy, consistent model to follow for the app and its components.

Brent Simmons on How NetNewsWire Handles Threading