I did it for two reasons:

1. I wanted to create a nice, unambiguous demonstration of how one might use it.
2. The thing needed a useful FAQ section.

So that’s that. Have a look!

via Jeremy Keith

The subject matter is completely fascinating, but I’m especially awed by the presentation. This is what a science textbook looks like in Tomorrowland.

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.)

Drawbacks

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.

So what’s it good for?

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.

Uh. Yeah! Me neither! (You’d probably have to be some sort of idiot to make things that complicated, right?)

Anyway. I’m smarter now. Go get it!.

• Introducing Riser

  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.)

• The Thread Needler 2.0

  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.

• A Redesigned Portfolio

  Third, I recently spent some time rebuilding my portfolio page. Have a look!

I lived and worked in a California ashram for 3 months with Ricky Williams, who in 2004 retired from his Hall of Fame track NFL career to pursue other interests. [. . .] I was there, at his request, to capture the scene as it unraveled and to tell Ricky’s story. To tell the Truth.

1. Pamphilon directed Run Ricky Run, an episode of ESPN’s 30 for 30

So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your turn.

Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy. Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.

It’s got something for everyone – stunning HD footage, Sagan’s dulcet tones, his boundless uplift. Just watch ‘em, already!

See also: the way I seem to return to Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art every 6 months.

How can you not be brought up short when a congresswoman is shot after she’s been targeted on a campaign map with a cross-hair? It’s the feeling you’d have if you told somebody, “Oh, drop dead,” and then two days later he keeled over with a fatal heart attack. Not that you caused it or even for a moment wished it, but all of a sudden your words are rumbling with their literal meaning.

Regardless of how you feel about the furor surrounding the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords, this is a really good piece by Fresh Air contributor Geoff Nunberg.

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.

1. A marvel, to be sure. But not orderly enough for my purposes