The failed promise of Web Components.
Perusing the components on webcomponents.org fills me with anxiety, and I’m perfectly comfortable writing JS — I write JS for a living! What hope do those who can’t write JS have? Using a custom element from the directory often needs to be preceded by a ritual of npm flugelhorn, import clownshoes, build quux, all completely unapologetically because “here is my truckload of dependencies, yeah, what”. Many steps are even omitted, likely because they are “obvious”. Often, you wade through the maze only to find the component doesn’t work anymore, or is not fit for your purpose.
Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from defining each sex by the ability to do one thing: to make eggs or to make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can’t do either.
Bringing the Mona Lisa Effect to Life with TensorFlow.js.
Urban legend says that Mona Lisa's eyes will follow you as you move around the room. This interactive digital portrait brings the phenomenon to life through your browser and webcam.
Senghor, Césaire, Fanon et al.
Racism is baked into the structure of dialectical philosophy.
Hegel might have been wrong for his racist writings about Africans and others, but that doesn’t tell us anything about his speculative metaphysics. Or so the argument goes.
When it dawns upon us, the size of the crimes we committed against nature.
Researchers show conscious processes in birds' brains for the first time (via futurism.com).
By measuring brain signals, a neuroscience research group at the University of Tübingen has demonstrated for the first time that corvid songbirds possess subjective experiences. (…) “The last common ancestors of humans and crows lived 320 million years ago (…) It is possible that the consciousness of perception arose back then and has been passed down ever since.”
I only knew the babies climbing up the TV tower so far.
David Cerny’s installations in the Czech Republic.
Did a broken random number generator in Cuba help expose a Russian espionage network?
Just so I'm being honest. #SciMomJourneys pic.twitter.com/4yZMKtVxwP
— Gretchen Goldman, PhD (@GretchenTG) September 15, 2020
Eruda: Console for Mobile Browsers (via css-tricks.com).
Opening dossiers — and old wounds.
As troves of KGB documents become declassified, former Soviet nations are grappling with their not-so-distant pasts.
By putting this history online, the archivists wanted not just Ukrainians but the entire international community to draw their own conclusions about how Soviet security services sought to censor, surveil, and repress citizens of the republics.