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So much font awesomeness.
Brett Terpstra’s “Ultimate Markdown editor wish list” -
Byword is great right now, but some of these features outlined by Brett Terpstra would make it really great. I especially like the footnote insertion idea, and I’ll have to try it out in the Blogsmith Bundle on TextMate.
Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy -
A bunch of tiny frustrations, and a bunch of tiny successes. But they added up. Even something which seems like a tiny, inconsequential frustration affects your mood. Your emotions don’t seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the quality.
Little details add up, and that’s why it is crucial to be get them right.
Why Digital Pagination Works -
As someone who teaches literature and language every day, processing time can be a huge factor in a reader’s ability to internalize and apply information. Pagination can be helpful in doing so with digital content.
Pagination is almost crucial when reading really long articles. To me, it gives a sense of progress and a less tedious process by replacing a huge series of long swipes by quick taps.
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When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.
I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
” — Steve Jobs (via Hypercritical)“ah, astronomy; where waiting for research material to fall out of the sky is a viable strategy” — Elizabeth Lovegrove, Let’s Lasso Us Some Space Rocks: Asteroid Mining And You
“You should call it Mathematica” -
A very touching piece on the ways Steve Jobs influenced Wolfram Research.
(Side Note: I had been subconsciously avoiding most of the articles from early October 2011 in my Instapaper queue, but I’m glad that I recently made an effort to go through them all.)
Really wonderful article about art. One of the most striking points, and the one that aligns the most with my views, is that science is often carried out artistically…
The successful scientist thinks like a poet but works like a bookkeeper. He writes for peer review in hopes that “statured” scientists, those with achievements and reputations of their own, will accept his discoveries. Science grows in a manner not well appreciated by nonscientists: it is guided as much by peer approval as by the truth of its technical claims.
…and that art has scientific origins.
[…] the brain is most aroused by patterns in which there is about a 20 percent redundancy of elements or, put roughly, the amount of complexity found in a simple maze, or two turns of a logarithmic spiral, or an asymmetric cross. It may be coincidence (although I think not) that about the same degree of complexity is shared by a great deal of the art in friezes, grillwork, colophons, logographs, and flag designs. It crops up again in the glyphs of the ancient Middle East and Mesoamerica, as well in the pictographs and letters of modern Asian languages. The same level of complexity characterizes part of what is considered attractive in primitive art and modern abstract art and design.
Campanile and the Moon (Taken with instagram)