The weight of rain

When I’m looking at data, I’m looking for little “Aha!” moments that I can point to, and say “Look here, something happened,” and then try to explain. Often those small moments can help lead a reader into the graphic, or help to explain the whole. And then he switches over to Mars Rover and Kepler …

The Amen Break

This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the “Amen Break,” a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music — a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Everything …

Facebook’s Paper photo tilt feature in HTML5

Possible thanks to the Device Orientation Events. Facebook’s Paper photo tilt feature in HTML5 →photoTilt Demo →photoTilt Source (GitHub) → Did you know that this doesn’t work on a Retina MacBook Pro, but does on the previous MacBook Pro model? It’s the Sudden Motion Sensor which affords orientation detection, yet one cannot find that sensor …

You might not need jQuery

If you’re developing a library on the other hand, please take a moment to consider if you actually need jQuery as a dependency. Maybe you can include a few lines of utility code, and forgo the requirement. If you’re only targeting more modern browsers, you might not need anything more than what the browser ships …

PHP Augmented Types

/** * @param int $a * @return float[] */ function foo ($a) { echo “You passed in the integer $a”; return [$a * 1.0, $a * 2.718]; } Augmented Types simply provides a way of enforcing argument and return types on function calls in PHP. It parses a given function’s type information from phpDoc-style type …