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An alphabet of still-undiscovered names across the style spectrum It’s the ultimate baby name treasure: an undiscovered name. As name styles shift and expand, these hidden gems become harder and harder to find. But we’ve uncovered a trove. Each of these 78 girls’ names is genuinely rare. None appear in the current list of the top 1000 names for American girls. Some are antiques that have yet to return to …

Last week marked one year at Microsoft for me, and what an unexpected adventure it’s been! I thought I was coming in to lead a a stable of popular, but well-trodden web properties, and I ended up getting to work on a whole lot more, including Windows, Bing Chat, and the company’s biggest bet in years: Copilot. “The Handshake” — Designed with Love, in Puget Sound I usually write a …

“Does that look straight to you?”By Will McPhail at the New Yorker.(Thanks, Russell)

The Estonia disaster of 1994, in which a Baltic Sea ferry sank and hundreds of people lost their lives, symbolizes a problematic phenomenon in Swedish society: faith in the state. This event has raised deep questions about the limits of trust in state institutions, especially in Sweden, a country known for its strong faith in state institutions.The immediate reaction to the disaster and the subsequent investigations showed that many Swedes, …

Over recent months, I’ve not spent too much time reading ‘the news’. There’s a lot going on in the world and have found that on a day-to-day basis, ignorance is bliss, but I do want to dip my toe in the water every now and again. I especially have no mental space right now for “breaking news” of events happening on the other side of the planet – just give …

UI = f(data)(state)

This note is mostly for myself - Digger is built for a userbase of 1 - you are welcome to fork and copy it, but I am not proposing to support it. About eighteen months ago I released a small tool to pull annotations from Diigo into local Markdown notes. With version 0.5.0 (released yesterday) there is now also a basic capability to pull annotations from Hypothes.is. To upgrade: get …

I didn’t write a yearnote last year, which is a shame, as it was an eventful year, with being promoted to Director at dxw, my extension being completed and finishing Murmuration and running it at 3 festivals. But this one has been a bit calmer, so I have the time to write one. Sorry you just get to hear about the chill years. The Job I started my new job …

Every now and then, I see someone post their latest and greatest set of CSS resets. Here’s mine: @layer reset { *, *::before, *::after { box-sizing: border-box; } body { margin: unset; } button, input, textarea, select { font: inherit; } img, picture, svg, canvas { display: block; max-inline-size: 100%; block-size: auto; } @media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) { *, *::before, *::after { animation-duration: 0.01ms !important; animation-iteration-count: 1 !important; transition-duration: 0.01ms !important; …

patgavin:Former Bethlehem Steel siteSteelstacks, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Yep, that’s it: I like painting with watercolors. As a hobby. As a student, I thought hobbies were lame. Because: why be a hobbyist when you’re developing a skill that you can get really good at? Surely the old masters weren’t painting as a hobby? Drawing (and barely any painting) became something I only did as part of design. I had another thing that started as a hobby: photography. A …

In this somewhat different post, I am hosting the long-running Carnival of Mathematics. First I’ll talk about 223 (the issue number) and then I’ll round up some mathematical posts from December 2023. It’s primetime we talk about 223. First of all, it is a lucky prime, to which it is unknown if there are infinitely many. To write the number 223 as the sum of fifth powers requires 37 terms, …

A look into the books I read in 2023, the goals I set and how I did.

Untethered. Photograph of a milkweed seed. We planted milkweed on our deck this summer to attract butterflies. At the end of the season, I saved their seed pods so we could plant them again next year. When the pods dry and split, their seeds explode out, and float freely through the air on these little puffs. While beautiful, this makes them difficult to photograph! The slightest motion, even the natural …