otrops: jeff van campen's personal blog

Over at 3quarksdaily, Sam Kean uses the question Will the Manhattan Project Always Exist? as the jumping off point for an interesting thought experiment. Along the way he tackles the innate fragility of all of our documents (digital or otherwise) and our tendency to dismiss the innovations and technological achievements of the past.
Paradoxically, [...]

In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik reviews Louis Begley’s “Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters”.
The Dreyfus affair matters, he believes, because we have, in the past decade, made our own Devil’s Island and hundreds of new Dreyfuses—the Dreyfus affair matters because we’re still in the middle of it.
Gopnik’s review is a fantastic reminder of just how [...]

I read my feeds on my daily commute to work. Over the past month, I’ve been experimenting with various RSS readers on the iPhone. I have yet to find the perfect feed reader. I have, however, tried three of the most popular iPhone RSS readers — Byline, Newsstand and NetNewswire — and thought I’d [...]

We are Colorblind is a growing collection of patterns and tools to help designers, developers and others create websites that are accessible to those who are color blind.
The main takeaway is to use something other than color to convey information.
I suspect there will be a few people who would like the pie chart [...]

Yesterday, Sam Ruby reported that Microsoft is sponsoring SVG Open. I had to read his very short post several times to make sure I’d read it right.
I have no idea if this means that we’ll no longer need to use workarounds like SVG Web or chameleon files to get Internet Explorer to support SVG. At [...]