Over the last 250 years, our skulls have morphed in dangerous and troubling ways.

Nasal passages and jaws are narrowing, overbites are becoming more extreme, palates are rising, skulls are shrinking. The result is less face to fit everything into, meaning crowded dentition, breathing problems, and potentially insufficient space for growing brains. It could even be a root cause of elevating asthma rates, joint pain (particularly in the young), and allergies, whilst sleep disruption caused by narrow air spaces is already well documented at causing anxiety, depression, and behavioural disorders in people of any age.

Narrowing of facial features, in particular, seems linked with industrialisation; less-industrialised nations suffer from these issues less and the anthropological record show these conditions to be incredibly rare throughout human history. From about 250 years ago, morphological changes away from a consistently "broad, straight, wide" skull shape seems to have accelerated. One possible reason is the sudden introduction of bottle-feeding and soft "baby" food that may cause our chewing muscles to underdevelop. Environmental pollutants are a second potential factor (obviously).

The impact is most serious in children. Studies cited have shown links with sleep issues in young kids can reduce their functional abilities by the equivalent of two years (!) and result in lower average lifetime earnings. It increases mood swings and makes kids cranky, less able to focus, retain information, or be creative. It's also a key risk factor in childhood obesity.

Parents know sleep is important, but they rarely realize how proper sleep relies on a wide dental arch, tongue on the roof of the mouth, and long lower jaw.

Treatment using centuries-old techniques has positive results:

Within a month, Micah’s sleeping improved and his behavior transformed. Previously, he cried at doctor’s appointments, balked at going to school, acted cranky, and hid behind his mom around guests. Now, he smiles freely and runs up to his grandparents for hugs.

Useful website for generating meta tags, Open Graph tags, Twitter cards, and JSON-LD snippets.

On the face of it, Lbry is a YouTube competitor based on privacy and community. You can tip creators directly, but otherwise it basically works as you'd expect, only with fewer features (no subtitles, for example). They're also proud freedom of speech advocates. Which might explain why their homepage at time of browsing included conspiracy videos, Bitcoin pyramid schemes, and men's rights activism. It does appear to have quite a few educational YouTubers (MinutePhysics and XKCD are both advertised on the home page, though searching Minute Physics got me a top hit of a conspiracy video dissecting an MP vid, above the actual channel content).

To be clear, I support any competition for huge industry juggernauts like YouTube. If that is done in an open manner that embraces the distributed web and respects user's rights, all the better. I may have been left a little cold by Lbry, but I want to keep an eye on it and hope it goes somewhere interesting (hence making the note).

Noah explains what it's like working in web design with colour vision deficiency (CVD). Gives a great overview of what CVD covers and why some people can see more/fewer colours than the average person; basically it boils down to whether you have all three (or four!) kinds of cones in your eye and if they have greater/lesser sensitivity, allowing them to understand a wider/narrower range of wavelengths. It can also be caused by brain signal interference and other cognitive phenomena.

This means that those colors in the spectrum effectively “drop out,” but since the light is still there, the brain translates it into a color based on peripheral data picked up by the other cones, combined with its brightness level.

Our cones are split between short, medium, and long wavelengths, but their exact calibration is determined by a lot of nuanced genetic and environmental variables. What's more, other biological variance impacts the light that ever reaches the cones:

The lens and cornea physically block very short wavelengths; it’s why we can’t see ultraviolet light directly, even though we have the sensor capability.

Which is why people who lack lenses (or have them removed as part of cataract surgery or other vision corrections) can see UV to some extent.

When something is only conveyed with color, that’s a gap where information can get lost on a large group of people.

Form factors are important. If colour is a major signal/indicator in a design (e.g. a traffic light) then there should be a secondary signal. That could be iconography or animation or, as with traffic lights, just always being a specific order i.e. form.

Color can enhance the message, but shouldn’t be the messenger.

Trello has a neat feature where colour labels can also have explicit background patterns, like zigzags and dots.

You can Shift + Click any colour in dev tools to cycle through colour formats. Super useful!

It's baffling to me that colourblindness has been something that has been used against Noah to skip him for promotion or reject his progression at work. Sigh. Still, I've definitely been guilty of the hundred-questions approach to finding out someone was colour blind (sorry Sam) so will need to internalise that.

As of February 2020, 86.3% of home pages tested had insufficient contrast. So, what does that mean? It means that the information on those sites is not being conveyed equally, to everyone.

I like that I can bring a singular perspective to the table and a voice for others like me; I am able to offer insights that others don’t necessarily have.

Pine is an interesting tool for curating information. It acts as a feed reader, importing content from RSS, Atom, mf2 etc. That means you can subscribe to Tumblogs, YouTube channels, subreddit feeds as well, then get all of that information presented as a timeline. The gimmick is that the service also operates as a Medium-like blog platform, allowing you to quickly curate information, right posts, and publish them all in one place. Plus it obviously hooks into the webmention API and allows you to like, comment etc. from a variety of other platforms and display them in Pine. Interesting stuff.

CSS variables (aka CSS custom properties) do not have access to the cascade. That means they can't fall back to earlier rules, so if your variable is invalid, the browser will simply unset that property. Huh. Jeremy explains the logic behind why this needs to be the case but it's still interesting. I understand that dynamically generated variables should probably work this way, but on initial render I'm still surprised it doesn't hold on to the current cascade value whilst it checks the variable and just fall back to that if the variable is invalid.

But if I store the background colour in a custom property, I can no longer rely on the cascade.

Manuel wanted to see how a new site he'd built worked on the updated Nokia 3310, which rocks a paired-down version of Opera Mini (yikes!). The answer? Surprisingly well, thanks to some clever fallbacks:

• If no JS, use a DuckDuckGo search query instead (very neat) using the type="module" trick;
• Allow grid to work with just one column;
• Use <picture> with both WebP and JPEG options.

Not so sure about the lazy loading implementation but otherwise solid tips.

You can do things with CSS variables that are not possible with JS.

Josh breaks down why and how you can use CSS variables more easily in React, specifically using styled-components. Honestly it feels a little terrifying how much is needed just to get basic browser functionality to work...

It’s almost impossible to make a list of all the things I didn’t have to worry about yesterday. We need to work overtime to make that true for more people.

Turns out it's pretty simple to rename any branch in Git. Scott has a full step-by-step guide, but there are a few pointers:

git branch -m master main
git push -u origin main

Then just go into your GitHub settings for the repository and change the root value under branches. You're done 👍

Like a lot of people, at the start of lockdown I ended up trying out a seemingly endless stream of video-chat services. For the most part, Zoom seems to have become the de facto standard, but during the brief moment that House Party was knocking around my friend group I wondered aloud whether a mashup of Habbo Hotel and House Party wouldn't make sense. Specifically, in large groups Zoom becomes unwieldy and makes conversation difficult; it forces everyone to have the same purpose.

Since then, I've seen a lot of people talking about how they miss the serendipitous conversations that office spaces enable, as well as the "water cooler chat". Again, it feels like a virtual office space, that you can navigate a la Habbo Hotel as an avatar, but which individuals would communicate via proximity-triggered video chat felt like a potential remote "fix" for these kinds of interactions. Sure, walking your avatar over to the kitchen isn't going to be that natural, but you get the idea.

Well, Online Town looks like it's trying something along those lines. You create a room, drop-in, and walk around as an avatar. As you get close to people, they appear on video squares and you can hear what they're saying. I hope that conversations become "louder" as you get closer, so you can effectively eavesdrop as you walk around. For me, that feels like a potentially quite interesting model for fully online social gatherings. Perhaps in an alternate universe where Google Glass was a runaway success, we could now be looking at integrations where literally going to your kitchen at home moved your avatar to the virtual "water cooler" and anyone else in there popped-up on your heads-up display. Personally, I think that would be quite interesting to try.

Reading notes from Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution:

• The first few pages are an exceptionally accessible and interesting portrayal of geological processes and deep time. Really fantastic descriptions of strata folding and mineral deposition on the Cornish coast.
• Apparently botanists are forced to describe new species in Latin for them to be recognised (may have ceased since publication). (pg 26)
• Love the name Paradoxides paradoxissimus; translates to "the most paradoxical of paradoxes", a Cambrian trilobite species. (pg 30)
• Incredible specimens from New York with pyrite infill to limbs and antennae, finally allowing us to get an idea of how they moved. However, it was initially very hard to explain why these fossils have such good preservation; all of a particular species that seemed to live in large groups without any other creatures. Then we discovered deep-sea clams that had developed a symbiotic relationship with sulphur eating bacteria, growing the bacteria on their shells and eating it to survive. The bacteria naturally creates pyrite/iron as a waste. That's what these deep-sea trilobites appear to have done, living off bacterial farms in their own legs and on the seafloor. (pg 66)
• Trilobite eyes use perfect calcite crystals as the lens; unique in evolution and quite bizarre as a result. (pg 88)
• A great description of how vision is imbued into our language: "This shared history of vision is far from trivial. In our visually-dominated world sight is almost synonymous with understanding. We acknowledge light dawning by saying: 'I see!' The metaphor of vision suffuses our attempts to convey comprehension: we bring issues into focus, we clarify our views, we sight our objectives, we look into things. We accept the evidence of our own eyes. The conjurer turns the veracity of sight head over heels: now you see it – now you don't. (pg 88)
• The whole of chapter five is interesting in its dissection of Gould's Cambrian explosion theory. It cleanly argues (with the help of the author's own research) that cladistic analysis of the Burgess shale is able to group its denizens into clear genealogies. Far from being an explosion of forms and "endless failed evolutionary experiments", these animals show easily recognisable evolutionary affinities.
  Included in that argument are small tidbits, such as the trails found in Cambrian rocks classically attributed to trilobites (cruziana) may not be them at all, as many early arthropods had similar limb setups; also that further study of Hallucinogenia has shown it to be a velvet worm!
  (That said the last few pages are a weird summary of palaeontological gossip and bickering between Morris and Gould, with Dawkins at the edge, which doesn't really mean anything in the context of the wider book) (pg 114 onwards)
• NHM London's fossil collection likely spans an area larger than a football pitch and has four floors. That's a huge area! (pg 144)
• "It is genuinely difficult to catch the appearance of new species in the act of creation. [Much like] in a burglary, it is rare to come upon the scene with the miscreant standing there, caught red handed and carrying the swag: the subsequent mayhem is what people usually come home to." (pg 152-153)
• The sad tale of Prof Kaufmann is depressing but fascinating. He discovered a clear example of punctuated equilibrium (and understood what it was showing) a good 40 years before it's mainstream acceptance/discussion, but his ideas were lost because he published in Germany, as a Jew, days before Hitler first took power. He lost his job almost immediately, so could no longer work, and spent most of the war on the run trying to get back to his girlfriend in Sweden. In fact, we only know the tale of his life from the letters he sent that girl, and yet despite spending the entire war trying to reach her, he was ultimately caught and killed in 1940 😢 (pg 162-164)
• I've always assumed that the ancient microcontinent of Avalonia was named for it mainly being modern England and Wales (i.e. Avalon of Arthurian legend). Actually, it was named for the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland, which was the main piece of strata that linked the various locations all together! It's just a weird coincidence that it would be connected to England. Better yet, the continent's exact position during the Ordovician was proven by a species of trilobite: Merlinia! (pg 196)
• Quite bizarrely, it would appear that tardigrades are closely related to (or in fact are) stem arthropods. (pg 246)