Amateur Mathematicians Find Fifth ‘Busy Beaver’ Turing Machine | Quanta Magazine

The mathematics behind the halting problem is interesting enough, but what’s really fascinating is the community that coalesced. A republic of numbers.

Write Alt Text Like You’re Talking To A Friend – Cloud Four

This is good advice:

Write alternative text as if you’re describing the image to a friend.

Social, I love you, but you’re bringing me down

Posting in a space I control isn’t just about the principle anymore. It’s a kind of self-preservation. I want to preserve my attention and my autonomy. I accept that I’m addicted, and I would like to curb that addiction. We all only have so much time to spend; we only have one face to maintain ownership of. Independence is the most productive, least invasive way forward.

The Website vs. Web App Dichotomy Doesn’t Exist | jakelazaroff.com

Amen!

If there’s one takeaway from all this, it’s that the web is a flexible medium where any number of technologies can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways.

The other side of egoism | A Working Library

Mandy takes a deep dive into the treatment of altruism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

Space Elevator

Scroll up to the Kármán line.

The one about AI - macwright.com

Writing, both code and prose, for me, is both an end product and an end in itself. I don’t want to automate away the things that give me joy.

And that is something that I’m more and more aware of as I get older – sources of joy. It’s good to diversify them, to keep track of them, because it’s way too easy to run out. Or to end up with just one, and then lose it.

The thing about luddites is that they make good punchlines, but they were all people.

The Splintered Mind: The Black Hole Objection to Longtermism and Consequentialism

Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it.

GB Renewables Map

A lovely bit of real-time data visualisation from Robin:

It’s a personal project created at home in Wales with an aim to explore and visualise renewable energy systems. Specifically, it aims to visualise live generation from renewable energy systems around Great Britain and to show where that generation is physically coming from.

50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World - IEEE Spectrum

A profile of the Xerox Alto and the people behind it.

Why the super rich are inevitable

The interactive widgets embedded in this article are excellent teaching tools!

99 Good News Stories From 2022

A look at back at what wasn’t in the headlines this year.

Bunny Fonts | Explore Faster & GDPR friendly Fonts

A drop-in replacement for Google Fonts without the tracking …but really, you should be self-hosting your font files.

How Florence Nightingale Changed Data Visualization Forever - Scientific American

The design process in action in Victorian England:

Recognizing that few people actually read statistical tables, Nightingale and her team designed graphics to attract attention and engage readers in ways that other media could not. Their diagram designs evolved over two batches of publications, giving them opportunities to react to the efforts of other parties also jockeying for influence. These competitors buried stuffy graphic analysis inside thick books. In contrast, Nightingale packaged her charts in attractive slim folios, integrating diagrams with witty prose. Her charts were accessible and punchy. Instead of building complex arguments that required heavy work from the audience, she focused her narrative lens on specific claims. It was more than data visualization—it was data storytelling.

CSS { In Real Life } | Writing Useful Alt Text

Another post prompted by my recent musings on writing alt text. This time Michelle looks at the case of text-as-images.

Just How Long Should Alt Text Be? | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks

Prompted by my recent post on alt text, Geoff shares some resources on the right length for alt attributes.

City of Women London

City of Women encourages Londoners to take a second glance at places we might once have taken for granted by reimagining the iconic Underground map.

I love everything about this …except that there’s no Rosalind Franklin station.

The Year in Cheer

192 more stories of progress from 2021.

99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2021

Some welcome perspective on healthcare, conservation, human rights, and energy.

Kagi Search

A new search engine (and browser!) that will have a paid business model.

Between this and Duck Duck Go, there’s evidence of an increasing appetite for alternatives to Google’s increasingly-more-rubbish search engine.