I just published a webpage for Daylight.js, the JavaScript plugin I recently released (and previously wrote about).
I did it for two reasons:
So that’s that. Have a look!
A piece of what I’m working on today:
(Updated November 22, 2011 at 8:20 PM)
You may have noticed that this blog looks a little different after the sun goes down. That’s because I’m field testing Daylight.js, a lightweight JavaScript plugin I wrote last week to calculate a user’s local sunrise and sunset. I’ve put it up on GitHub – my first repository!
You can use it to do all sorts of cool things. In this example – ripped right from the header of this blog – a “night” stylesheet is added to the page if the function night() returns true.
if (night()) {
document.write('<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://number61.net/wp-content/themes/N61/night.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />');
}
Piece of cake. There’s also a day() function that does the same thing, only, well, you know. (You can pop the hood for more fine-grained control, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.)
But there’s a drawback: Daylight works by detecting the number of hours between a user’s current time and the time at the prime meridian, so it’s only ballpark-accurate.
Consider this: though both Augusta, ME and Indianapolis, IN are in the Eastern time zone, the sun sets on Augusta about 70 minutes earlier than it does on Indianapolis. Daylight thinks in terms of time zones, so it can’t handle that level of accuracy.
Sure, I could have used the HTML5 geolocation API to determine the user’s exact longitude – by definition, the most accurate measure of the distance between a given location and the prime meridian. That produces an answer that’s good enough for a meteorologist.
But that method has its own drawback: the browser will have to ask the user for permission to use geolocation every time the user visits the site. Daylight is intended to be completely unobtrusive, so that kind of interruption is unacceptable. It would break the illusion of seamlessness. And it would really annoying. So I decided to trade accuracy for friendliness.
Sites like this one. Sites where this sort of functionality is cool, but non-essential. Use your imagination!
Like I said, it’s on GitHub. Give it a whirl if you think it might be useful.
Might as well get a few items out of my system before my ambition deserts me:
I’ve made a teaser site for Riser, the top-secret iOS project I’ve been working on. It’s coming soon, but only in the geological sense of the word. (You’ll probably see it sometime before the universe ends. Probably.)
I just put the finishing touches on a responsive redesign of The Thread Needler. It’s got a growing stable of smart, handsome writers and some of the best content around.
Third, I recently spent some time rebuilding my portfolio page. Have a look!
A week ago today, I set out to redesign Number 61.
Anybody who’s been hanging around long enough knows that the homepage tends to be dominated by an imposing 3-wide grid of floating blocks, (very) occasionally broken up by a full, centered piece.
It’s a design that has served me well these past 18 months. However, certain things about it concerned me. Mostly its rigidity – without implementing something like David DeSandro’s excellent jQuery Masonry1 plugin, any lack of uniformity among the blocks would knock absolutely everything out of whack.
Fortunately, I had an idea for something new. What you see today is that idea, (mostly) come to fruition.
It’s a pretty radical redesign. You may notice that I’ve disabled comments. Things might stay this way, for the sake of simplicity. Additional functionality, like an archive and a search field, are on the way. I’ve still got a lot of holes to fill in, but the foundation is here.
In the meantime, pretend that the broken stuff doesn’t exist.
A pretty cool redesign is imminent(ish). Sit tight!
There was always bound to be a specific point in human affairs when complexity outstripped digestibility. The debate over healthcare has ballooned to a level of complexity at which understanding the stakes requires more effort and time than average people can afford to give.
I’d like to record some thoughts about President Obama’s recent interview with Fox News Channel host Bret Baier1 before they’re lost down the memory hole.
Above all else, what struck me was Baier’s tenacious fixation on what could be called the process of healthcare reform. Which is to say, the closed-door meetings. The numbers. The kickbacks.
Baier repeatedly asked the President about particular things included in the gargantuan, 1990-page House bill, and did so in the terse insider-speak preferred by insiders and conspiracy theorists. Things like, “So the Connecticut deal is still in?” And, “OK, the Florida deal, in or out?” Obama seemed rankled by this crass oversimplification of things. So was I.
But in the wake of the so-called Cornhusker Kickback, such catchall terms have gained significant currency—especially in the cable news format, where making use of shorthand to describe incredibly complex concepts makes sense. It also makes sense in a blogging format. After all, I’ve done it here. I cannot reasonably expect a reader who has not followed the issue these past six months to understand nonsense like ‘Cornhusker Kickback.’ And I can’t spare the vertical space to treat this post as if it the very first dispatch from the center of the HCR storm.
Which is why the notion that a short television interview—an interview in which journalist and subject spent the full 19 minutes in antlers-fully-locked position—would be sufficient to explain a 1990-page bill, not to mention the flurry of developments that have emerged since HR2932 was unveiled in November, is absurd.
An example. Baier asked Obama to answer some viewer-submitted questions. Here’s one sent by Sandy Moody in Chesterfield, Missouri: “If the health care bill is so wonderful, why do you have to bribe Congress to pass it?”
A political science professor could spend a semester lecturing on such a subject, no?
There was a time when Obama would have relished such an opportunity. His professorial bent has been well-documented. He spent much of 2009 referencing how to bend the cost curve, and how to close the doughnut hole. But the 2010 Obama has made a return to the spirit of the bill. He has made an effort to channel the sort of anecdotal electioneering that the Republicans have made famous. Rather than force people to consider an abstract whole, Obama has chosen to ask them to simply consider themselves.
Of course, the Republicans have done the opposite. They’ve turned their focus to the trees, as it were, instead of the forest. Human misery has been displaced by budgetary paranoia.
There was always bound to be a specific point in human affairs when complexity outstripped digestibility. I believe we’ve reached that moment. The healthcare debate has ballooned to a level of complexity at which understanding the stakes requires more effort and time than average people can afford to give.2 It can no longer be unpacked or disentangled.
Where do you go from there?
In essence—and this is the point I’ve been approaching, slowly—the conflict is really over how easily the nuts and bolts of the issue have been slipped into a black box. Republican leaders have been quick to observe that the bill’s deliberations were supposed to have been televised on C-SPAN. Instead, they lament, much of it has taken form behind closed office doors.
It was a nice thought. However, considering the decentralized and often concurrent nature of such meetings, filming it all—and cutting the mountain of footage into a format understandable by human beings—would have been, at best, a logistical nightmare. At worst, it would have been impossible.
Black boxes are inherently polarizing. You either understand the appeals and shortcomings—i.e. average people do not need to replace the hard drive of their iPhone—or you reject the very notion of trusting that there are planets spinning outside the scope of your personal narrative.
Never has that juddering tension been more keenly felt than during Wednesday’s interview.
Craig Mod’s recent essay, Books in the age of the iPad—I recommended that you read the whole thing now before pushing on—raises some interesting points about the philosophical challenges and opportunities introduced by the iPad and its ilk.
I thoroughly enjoyed his insights. I’m on the edge of my seat, here, imagining how Mod’s concept of vertical chapters might be realized.
But I couldn’t help but be vexed by an offhanded remark he makes in his introduction:
As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?
We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback.We’re losing the dredge of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet.
These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.
Anyone who buys books will probably understand what he’s talking about. Even while running your eyes over the shelves at a bookstore, it’s not impossible to fantasize about which books you’d proudly keep on your bookshelf when you’re finished and which ones you’d probably resell on Amazon1—the fact that you haven’t actually read any of the books you’re judging notwithstanding.
Of course, physical dimensions are a helpful guide; he doesn’t explicitly write it, but the throwaway/airport/beach paperback is often a mass market paperback. In case you’re not familiar with the terminology, close your eyes and visualize a novel from any one of the genres—romance, science fiction, fantasy—that have always been relegated to the critical ghetto. Note the diminutive 4×7 cover, the thick binding, the cheap paper. It’s an unmistakable image.
Despite the fact that I’m just as priggishly dismissive of such books as the next guy,2 I can’t help but disagree with Mod’s assertion that they are expendable.
As is the case with TV, it’s the tremendous profits from the popular stuff that subsidizes the high-investment/low-return niche stuff. To lose mass market paperbacks—worthless or not—is to lose a large chunk of revenue. Which translates into a loss for all professional publishers and writers and a grievous blow for the ones with limited commercial appeal.
Though Mod’s publishing credentials are infinitely more impressive than my own (as in, he has actually published books), I worry that he’s mistaking ‘foundation’ for ‘dead weight’.
With large publishers scrambling to rebuild the bottom line, would it really be a stretch to imagine that a printed version of Infinite Jest—the weird, sprawling, annotated, 1104-page masterpiece—would never see the light of day? Or that a person would need to barter a kidney to get his or her hands on one?
There’s simply no telling whether an ebook model would suit the mass market format. Though Apple and Amazon will have no trouble matching the basement-level pricing scheme, one cannot look past the fact that getting them into the casual consumer’s hands will first require getting a $250+ device into the casual consumer’s hands.
It seems to me that the path of least resistance (and thus the most likely next step) will be the opposite of what Mod suggests—to send the niche publications to the ereaders and continue to sell the mass-market stuff for as long as the demand holds out.
The shortcomings of such a reality are apparent. Compiling a worthy bookshelf is, to the devoted aesthete, one of the unmatchable joys of life. Physical books can be lent to friends and colleagues, or dog-eared, or forgotten in airplane seat-backs. Losing these small things will be a bitter pill to swallow.3
There’s no questioning that the iPad will do for boutique publishers roughly what the Internet did for graphic designers and software engineers. Which is to say, in a decade, small publishers might find their thoughts drifting to how they ever got along without it. That’s the core of Mod’s essay, and I can only echo his hopes that it will become a reality.
But because the niche typically encounters tremendous resistance when it tries to cannibalize the mainstream—for the mainstream would probably rather just stop reading than read more challenging things, if forced to choose between the two—it seems a little shortsighted to cheer the possibility of a large-publisher apocalypse between then and now. There are few who would profit from it.
The following is a list with an aim is to make you a better painter or artist in general.
PRACTICE!
Draw every day all day and then some more. Get a sketchbook, use it. Use it often. Set up a space for the sole purpose of art. paint there, draw there, live there.
