33 articles, videos and podcasts that helped us make sense of issues big and small.
Collectively, they tell the story of a year that was confusing and exhausting in many ways. They are pieces that helped us understand what was happening and what we were feeling (plus, yes, a healthy dose of serendipity and nerdiness we could all very well use this year).
Shows images of the globes from different perspectives and gives background information about data and process.
The Gaia hypothesis reimagined by one of its key sceptics.
The notion that the Earth itself is a living system captured the imagination of New Age enthusiasts, who deified Gaia as the Earth Goddess. But it has received rough treatment at the hands of evolutionary biologists like me, and is generally scorned by most scientific Darwinists. (…) I’ve got a confession though: I’ve warmed to Gaia over the years.
There's Always More History.
Why Vim Uses hjkl and why JavaScript months start from 0.
Relevant: if-then-else had to be invented.
The Feedback Fallacy.
The first problem with feedback is that humans are unreliable raters of other humans. Over the past 40 years psychometricians have shown in study after study that people don’t have the objectivity to hold in their heads a stable definition of an abstract quality, such as business acumen or assertiveness, and then accurately evaluate someone else on it.
Relevant: The Basecamp Guide to Internal Communication.
Coronavirus: global lockdown in infographics – Comparing national restrictions.
Here, we visualised the project’s data to reveal which nations applied the longest and most stringent lockdown regimes between 1st January and 1st September 2020 – and compared those measures against the severity of the pandemic in each country, in terms of cases per million people.
Zoom and gloom.
How empathy and creativity can re-humanise videoconferencing.
Sitting in a videoconference is a uniformly crap experience. Instead of corroding our humanity, let’s design tools to enhance it.
A curated list of mostly free and open source alternatives to proprietary software and services.
A letter from a Lebanese woman.
Stop normalizing tragedy just because it doesn’t affect YOU.
Tragedy and pain, loss and fear, that is not normal and it must never be normal. Not anywhere.
The future for general-purpose computing.
We need to remain vigilant, and resist these power grabs masquerading purely as benevolent security measures.