Generalise, don't specialise: why focusing too narrowly is bad for us

"The 10,000-hour rule says intense, dedicated practice makes perfect – at that one thing. But what if breadth actually serves us better than depth? By Let’s start with a couple of stories from the world of sports."

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Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek

"Researchers at Norway's Polar Institute fitted the young female with a GPS tracking device and freed her into the wild in late March last year on the east coast of Spitsbergen, the Svalbard archipelago's main island."

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Former Mozilla exec: Google has sabotaged Firefox for years

"A former high-ranking Mozilla executive has accused Google of intentionally and systematically sabotaging Firefox over the past decade in order to boost Chrome's adoption."

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"For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclus... : Hacker News

"This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up."

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On the Rise: Single-Person Households

"The other week The Wall Street Journal had a fascinating article on the rise of single-person households and how companies are offering and redesigning products to better meet the needs of individuals rather than those of, say, a family of four."

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For Snook

"‪Happy to chat about this. There’s an obvious disclaimer that there’s a cost to css-in-js solutions, but that cost is paid specifically for the benefits it brings; as such it’s useful for some usecases, and not meant as a replacement for all workflows. ‬"

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Organically farmed food has a bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed food, due to the greater areas of land required.

"But they don't take into account the environmental impact of fertilizer production and runoff. Nope. This is specifically limited to "climate impact" rather than something like "environmental impact". A simpler, more limited, less nuanced metric to be sure."

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​Organic food worse for the climate

"Organically farmed food has a bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed food, due to the greater areas of land required. This is the finding of a new international study involving Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, published in the journal Nature."

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Beijing’s Nuclear Option

"As China’s power has grown in recent years, so, too, has the risk of war with the United States."

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Loop quantum gravity

"Loop quantum gravity (LQG) is a theory of quantum gravity, merging quantum mechanics and general relativity. It is a theory of discrete, quantized units of spacetime because, according to general relativity, gravity is a manifestation of the geometry of spacetime."

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Measuring the "Filter Bubble": How Google is influencing what you click

"Over the years, there has been considerable discussion of Google's "filter bubble" problem. Put simply, it's the manipulation of your search results based on your personal data."

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Building a Simple Virtual DOM from Scratch

"I gave a live-coding talk last week at the Manchester Web Meetup #4. I built a virtual DOM from scratch in less than an hour during the talk. It was the most technically complicated talk that I have ever given by far. The video of my talk is uploaded here."

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A SpaceX Delivery Capsule May Be Contaminating the ISS

"In February 2017, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted through low clouds, pushing a Dragon capsule toward orbit. Among the spare parts and food, an important piece of scientific cargo, called SAGE III, rumbled upward."

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The Obama Record on Deportations: Deporter in Chief or Not?

"Barack Obama was famously labeled “deporter in chief” by critics in the immigrant-rights community, even as enforcement-first advocates accused his administration of being soft on unauthorized immigrants."

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Vehicle Miles Traveled

"In recent quarters, Andre Harboe has been doing good work in our office on creating and using some unique, or offbeat, economic indicators, or at least in terms of regional or state economies."

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Oregon’s Energy Intensity and Household Spending

"Energy costs can have big impacts on the economy. This has certainly been the case historically with the 1973 oil crisis and U.S. recession being a prime example. More recently we can observe the impact of gas prices on American automobile purchases."

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A Netflix Web Performance Case Study

"tl;dr: There are no silver bullets to web performance. Simple static pages benefit from being server-rendered with minimal JavaScript. Libraries can provide great value for complex pages when used with care. Netflix is one of the most popular video streaming services."

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Driven by South’s Past, Black Women Seek Votes and a New Future

"AMERICUS, Ga. — Lorena Barnum Sabbs thought the past really was past. Born 67 years ago in a segregated hospital, she was arrested when she was 11 for trying to integrate the local movie theater and locked in a stockade for several days without beds, working toilets or running water."

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The Glimmer Binary Experience

"A bit over a year ago, Ember.js got a major overhaul. In a tight collaboration between LinkedIn engineers and the open source community, we replaced Ember’s rendering engine with a new library, Glimmer VM, that improved performance and significantly reduced the size of compiled templates."

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Higher-Order Components

"A higher-order component (HOC) is an advanced technique in React for reusing component logic. HOCs are not part of the React API, per se. They are a pattern that emerges from React’s compositional nature."

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