Here’s a “twofer,” with a quick but insightful post by Tom Critchlow on long, carefully created pages, Holding (and scrolling) attention. Plus the great collection which prompted his post, To see what’s really going on, it helps to get close. “I’m very excited to see a new digital format that can capture attention so well. Something that encourages close reading of the details. This is the opposite of what we think of as the digital experience! Holding and scrolling my attention in an artful way.”
Adjacent to Critchlow, under something like ‘the craft of the web,’ is Russell Davies’ Useful where he explains that often, just a blog is enough. “Whenever someone asks me for coffee/chat/advice I normally end up saying random useless nonsense in the moment but then emailing a couple of days later saying "Actually, this book/quote/link might be useful for that thing you were wondering about." I have a large collection of that stuff, scattered across this blog, various google docs, Pinboard and Readwise. It's a sort of distributed commonplace book.”
For an article to be featured in Sentiers, I have to have read the whole thing with attention. Sometimes, longer reads pile up and I have to cleanup a bit, which means I’ll scan through them instead of attentively reading. All of that to say, here are some 4000+ words articles that look excellent but won’t be featured ‘cause trying to catch up.
How WordPress and Tumblr are keeping the internet weird. “CEO Matt Mullenweg on why he bets big on small companies.” ◼ Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse by Charlie Warzel ◼ The science of becoming “interplanetary”: Could humans live in the asteroid belt? ◼ In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things by Bill McKibben ◼ Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin Is Worried About Crypto's Future.
- 😍 🤩 🇨🇭 🏔 🗺 The People Who Draw Rocks. “[E]xperts in shaded relief, a technique for illustrating a mountain (and any of its glaciers) so that it appears three-dimensional. Their skills and creativity also help them capture consequences of the thawing permafrost, like landslides, shifting crevasses and new lakes.”
- 😍 📸 🔬 🍄 Macro Photos by Barry Webb Highlight the Spectacular Diversity of Slime Molds. “His macro shots magnify the often imperceptible details of small slime molds, capturing the specimen’s unique characteristics with striking detail. From the globular heads of the Comatricha nigra to the spongey forms of the Arcyria denudata, each photo unveils the diversity and intricacies of some of the world’s tiniest organisms.”
- 🇺🇦 🗺 Fascinating march towards more accuracy. Interesting to see how the @nytgraphics has changed their map symbology as the Russian war in #Ukraine️ unfolds. On Feb 26, large red arrows and an almost opaque red color shows Russian advances in Ukraine. Suggesting fast, large and controlled overtaking.
- 🇹🇷 🇬🇷 🤩 In Search of Troy. “Thanks in part to their work, most historians now believe that the city uncovered at Hisarlik is the Troy Homer wrote about, and that a war or series of wars did in fact play out between the Mycenaean Greeks and Anatolians here around 1180 B.C., at the end of the late Bronze Age.”
- Nice! Also, makes a lot more sense for this kind of modularity to be used in a DIY hobbyist kit than mobiles or computers. A Demo of Pockit, a Tiny, Powerful, Modular Computer. “It does web browsing, streaming video, AI object detection, home automation, and just anything else you can think of.”
- 🇮🇩 🚲 👏🏼 Jakarta’s Transit Miracle. “Cycling is up 500% across Jakarta (2019 to 2020), and in certain parts of the city, a whopping 1,000%. In late 2019 Transjakarta—the city’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system—hit a landmark 1M riders per day1”