Proposed, for 70 Years of Independent India.

I love stolen glances at other designers’ workspaces/screenshots. There were plenty from The Church of London in their LWL: Black Swan video. There was one on Flickr with twin monitors; one artboard and the other with panels expanded. Here is mine from a two-day-sprint-to-finish on this 36 pager for QA. Bonus: appropriately christened workspace.

The way we represent ourselves online has devolved from the quirky, personalised, HTML webpage-homepage of the 90s to the somewhat modular but still strange presence of a MySpace page, to the completely formatted and market-friendly presence of a Facebook page… What we’ve done is [we have] moved from personal, human, open-ended self-expression to completely market and computer-friendly, regimented and conformist expression. And that is because we have turned the net from a venue for self-expression to a way to render ourselves up onto the market.

Douglas Rushkoff, from Stare Into The Lights My Pretties

Also, zverina.com, the quirky, HTML home to an email newsletter I willingly receive and look forward to.

First, it aims our focus at the root cause of Anthropocenic climate change – an accelerated mode of existence that is impossible without fossil fuels. Indeed, I might amend Aldo Leopold’s land ethic of 1949: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.’ It is wrong, Illich and I would argue, when it moves faster than the speed of a bicycle. If we found ways to eliminate inefficient acceleration, we would lessen the snarged victims of the world, but there would also be some obvious beneficial cascading effects.

Gary Coll writes on the ethics of roadkill and our need for speed. (Aeon, Link)

People’s History is turning out to be a gem. I am treating it like a template more than a definitive history textbook (apparently just the way Zinn prescribes it).

If there are necessary sacrifices to be made for human progress, is it not essential to hold to the principle that those to be sacrificed must make the decision themselves? We can all decide to give up something of ours, but do we have the right to throw into the pyre the children of others, or even our own children, for a progress which is not nearly as clear or present as sickness or health, life or death?

—  Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

Such a beautiful lens to look at most pragati versus the people debates that end up in fruits of development checkmates.

Reading this in conjunction with Stallman’s Guardian column (A Radical Proposal to Keep Your Data Safe. See link. ) where he tells us how honouring people’s data is a trait to be built into systems with the power to abuse it:

The basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect certain data, if its basic function can be carried out without that data.

It is the Blahg over at Rivendell that usually copy-pastes bare links into articles, letting readers choose to—painstakingly—copy-paste them back into address bars. The last few times I visited those links I was glad Mr. Petersen ignored basic usabilty wisdom to make such a low-noise statement on the virtue of effort(?).