In Issue No. 269, master the basics of progressive enhancement and look back in orange at the first ten years of A List Apart. Understanding Progressive Enhancement by AARON GUSTAFSON Steven Champeon turned web development upside down, and created an instant best practice of standards-based design, when he introduced the notion of designing ...

Q. Why did the semantic web cross the road? A. @#$% you! Issue No. 268 of A List Apart fine-tunes the mechanics of progressive enhancement and rethinks the assumptions of standards-based design: Web Standards 2008: Three Circles of Hell by MOLLY E. HOLZSCHLAG Standards promised to keep the web from fragmenting. But as the web ...

It is illegal to make false claims in a TV or radio commercial unless you are running for political office. If you're selling toothpaste, your claims must be vetted by legal and medical professionals. But not if you're selling a candidate. If you're selling a candidate, not only can you lie about ...

Old news for nerds: standards matter.

A hometown institution makes good. (No, I wasn't involved.)

Colorized for the masses, standardized for you.

An ode to the short story.

The novel is insatiable -- it wants to devour the world. What's left for the poor short story to do? It can cultivate its garden, practice meditation, water the geraniums in the window box. It can take a course in creative nonfiction. It can do whatever it likes, so long as it doesn't forget its place -- so long as it keeps quiet and stays out of the way. "Hoo ha!" cries the novel. "Here ah come!" The short story is always ducking for cover. The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.

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Jay Walker made a lot of money and used some of it to finance a ridiculously huge and nerdy library in his house. Wired has a tour.

The massive "book" by the window is a specially commissioned, internally lit 2.5-ton Clyde Lynds sculpture. It's meant to embody the spirit of the library: the mind on the right page, the universe on the left. Pointing out to that universe is a powerful Questar 7 telescope. On the rear of the table (from left) are a globe of the moon signed by nine of the 12 astronauts who walked on it, a rare 19th-century sky atlas with white stars against a black sky, and a fragment from the Sikhote-Alin meteorite that fell in Russia in 1947--it's tiny but weighs 15 pounds. In the foreground is Andrea Cellarius' hand-painted celestial atlas from 1660. "It has the first published maps where Earth was not the center of the solar system," Walker says. "It divides the age of faith from the age of reason."

(via design observer)

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In the US federal prison system, cans of mackerel have replaced outlawed cigarettes as the de facto form of currency.

"It's the coin of the realm," says Mark Bailey, who paid Mr. Levine in fish. Mr. Bailey was serving a two-year tax-fraud sentence in connection with a chain of strip clubs he owned. Mr. Levine was serving a nine-year term for drug dealing. Mr. Levine says he used his macks to get his beard trimmed, his clothes pressed and his shoes shined by other prisoners. "A haircut is two macks," he says, as an expected tip for inmates who work in the prison barber shop.

See also the economics of POW camps.

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Jonathan Snook looked at my recent ALA article, thought he could do it better, and so he did. I'll be using this instead from now on.

Greg and crew have done a good thing for web design RFPs.

If you were wondering about the write-up I promised regarding the Bright Creative nav animation, wonder no more.

I want to get married again after reading this (Kerry: to you, of course). Pixel art letterpress invitations? Brilliant. #

Why a magazine? Because we didn’t hear the music we wanted on the radio.

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For those indecisive evenings. Or perhaps when surf-n-turf is on the menu? #

The Unspeakable Odyssey of the Motionless Boy. "How much of our humanity are we prepared to cede to machines? This is a dilemma of the future, but it's not much of a concern for Erik Ramsey. Erik can't move. He can't blink his eyes. And he hasn't said a word since 1999. But now, thanks to an electrode that was surgically implanted in his brain and linked to a computer, his nine-year silence is about to end." [Via]

Here there be dragons. On 8 October 2008, the #1 book on Amazon.com was Christopher Paolini’s Brisingr, the third book of the Inheritance quartet. The books recount the adventures of Eragon and Saphira, the last Free Dragon, but they are hardly free from past influences. In medieval lore, dragons are man’s great foe, a monstrous version of the serpent from the garden of Eden. Raphael’s painting (c. 1506) of St. George and the Dragon evokes this idea, but dragons and their heraldic relatives, the wyverns, gained a more positive reputation over time. Look to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle for the inspiration behind Paolini's dragons, or try Dealing with Dragons, geared towards younger readers. There be dragons on bookshelves everywhere.

Aether: lonely boy befriends a mysterious monster, leaves Earth to explore the galaxy. A quick, relaxing, hypnotic, motion-aftereffect-inducing flash game. Programming/music/design by Tyler Glaiel with further art/design by Edmund McMillen.
Aether is also available as a download [direct link to zip containing both OS X and Windows versions]. It debuted in early September, being reviewed in Wired, 1up, IndieGames, Joystiq, JIG, and Kotaku.