di dü!

Thousands of Bird Sounds visualized using machine learning.

Insights and ideas for techies from businesses outside of tech.

Normal people. Normal software.

Normal Software is a website about the software that powers everyday businesses. Discover the software that powers organizations outside of the tech industry, why that software was chosen, and ideas on how it can be improved.

Are Progressive Web Apps the Future of Web Development? – Presentation at WebDevCon 2017 in Berlin.

What’s next for CSS? (via github.com).

CSS Database is a comprehensive list of CSS features and their positions in the process of becoming implemented web standards.

World After Capital (via github.com).

Technological progress has shifted scarcity for humanity. When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. With digital technologies scarcity is shifting once more. We need to figure out how to live in a World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention.

A story about Orcas and Humans.

“If you pen killer whales in a small steel tank, you are imposing an extreme level of sensory deprivation on them,” one longtime researcher says. “Humans who are subjected to those same conditions become mentally disturbed.”

This is the Muslim tradition of sci-fi and speculative fiction.

Western readers often overlook the Muslim world’s speculative fiction. I use the term quite broadly, to capture any story that imagines the implications of real or imagined cultural or scientific advances. Some of the first forays into the genre were the utopias dreamt up during the cultural flowering of the Golden Age. (…) We also have the Muslim world to thank for one of the first works of feminist science fiction. The short story ‘Sultana’s Dream’ (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, a Bengali writer and activist, takes place in the mythical realm of Ladyland.

Flashing together: when fireflies meet LEDs, the result is a beautiful lightshow.

Why a moratorium on microaggressions policies is needed.

Microaggression, like most and perhaps virtually all psychological constructs, such as intelligence, extraversion and schizophrenia, is what philosophers term an open concept, characterised by intrinsically fuzzy boundaries, an indeterminate list of indicators, and an unclear inner nature. Open concepts are not necessarily problematic. To the contrary, they often allow researchers to explore a poorly understood phenomenon in an open-ended way.

Douchebag: The White Racial Slur We’ve All Been Waiting For.

I am a white, middle class male professor at a big, public university, and every year I get up in front of a hundred and fifty to two hundred undergraduates in a class on the history of race in America and I ask them to shout white racial slurs at me.

The results are usually disappointing.