What Would Happen If A Baseball Were Thrown At The Speed of Light?

After about 70 nanoseconds the ball arrives at home plate. The batter hasn’t even seen the pitcher let go of the ball, since the light carrying that information arrives at about the same time the ball does. Collisions with the air have eaten the ball away almost completely, and it is now a bullet-shaped cloud of expanding plasma (mainly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen) ramming into the air and triggering more fusion as it goes. The shell of x-rays hits the batter first, and a handful of nanoseconds later the debris cloud hits.

A new weekly post from XKCD providing answers to reader-submitted questions. So incredibly great; make sure you read the whole thing (there’s also a second answer about guessing on the SAT, which was equally enjoyable).

A Dao of Web Design

Everything I’ve said so far could be summarized as: make pages which are adaptable. Make pages which are accessible, regardless of the browser, platform or screen that your reader chooses or must use to access your pages. This means pages which are legible regardless of screen resolution or size, or number of colors (and remember too that pages may be printed, or read aloud by reading software, or read using braille browsers). This means pages which adapt to the needs of a reader, whose eyesight is less than perfect, and who wishes to read pages with a very large font size.

and:

Firstly, think about what your pages do, not what they look like. Let your design flow from the services which they will provide to your users, rather than from some overarching idea of what you want pages to look like. Let form follow function, rather than trying to take a particular design and make it “work”.

Incredible that, 12 years after this article was written, we continue to contend with these same issues.

Media Queries Become a W3C Recommendation

Very good news. I’m also excited about some of the proposals for CSS4; checking on whether the device has a hardware versus software keyboard and whether it can use the :hover pseudo-class could go a long way in targetting mobile browsers with more relevant styles without targetting specific devices.

Responsive Images

Mat Marquis on A List Apart:

We all serve a higher goal: to make the web accessible, usable, and delightful for all. Whatever their stance on img set or picture, I’m certain everyone involved is working toward a common goal, and we all agree that a ”highest common denominator” approach is indefensible. We simply cannot serve massive, high-resolution images indiscriminately.

Time is Existence

Try replacing the word “time” with the word “existence.” Or think of “time” as a linguistic scapegoat, sacrificed in substitution of this truth: we can not spend time, waste time, or invest time … We can only spend, waste, or invest our existence.