Gov.uk quantifies its design principles
I think number 5 captures the heart of building digital products:
Iterate. Then iterate again…
Iteration reduces risk. It makes big failures unlikely and turns small failures into lessons. This avoids the 200 page spec document which can turn into a bottleneck. This, again, is the core advantage of digital: we’re not building bridges — things can be undone.
Google's Bob Moog doodle
The engineering behind today’s doodle:
Much like the musical machines Bob Moog created, this doodle was synthesized from a number of smaller components to form a unique instrument. When experienced with Google Chrome, sound is generated natively using the Web Audio API—a doodle first (for other browsers the Flash plugin is used). This doodle also takes advantage of JavaScript, Closure libraries, CSS3 and tools like Google Web Fonts, the Google+ API, the Google URL Shortener and App Engine.
Gorgeous Type City by Hong Seon Jang.
Apart from the noxious fragmentation of Android vendors, devices and Samsung’s domination of the Android market, it’s frustrating to see the variations in screen sizes and proportions, especially when contrasted with iOS devices.
Source: opensignalmaps.com
Farmer resettlement after Partition
An eloquent tale of land distribution after Partition. The definition of a standard acre seems like a particularly elegant solution to an otherwise tricky decision.
Sardar Tarlok Singh came up with two measures, the standard acre and the graded cut, which dealt with these issues, and this is how:
A standard acre was defined as that amount of land which could yield ten to eleven maunds of rice. (A maund is about 40 kilograms.) In the dry, unirrigated districts of the east, four physical acres were equivalent to one standard acre; but in the lush “canal colonies” [where irrigation was strong], one physical acre was about equal to one standard acre. The innovative concept of the standard acre took care of the variations in soil and climate across the province.
The idea of the graded cut, meanwhile, helped overcome the large discrepancy between the land left behind by the refugees and the land now available to them – a gap that was close to million acres. For the first ten acres of any claim, a cut of 25% was implemented – thus one got only 7.5 acres instead of ten. For higher claims the cuts were steeper: 30% between ten and 30 acres, and on upward, so that those having more than 500 acres were taxed at the rate of 95%.
Forty year fugitive
In much of Europe, there is abiding belief in the healing power of time, and in Portugal there is even a statute of limitations for murder—in Wright’s case, thirty years. In the United States, homicide is never legally forgiven.
The drones come home
In other words, if an Air Force drone accidentally spies on an American citizen, the Air Force will have three months to figure out if it was legally allowed to put that person under surveillance in the first place.
