Pigments and poetry: Learning Log, Feb 2018

• Rethinking my relationship to "wasted" work: those tasks you spend a good chunk of time on, but the results go unused. It’s not a “waste” of time, it’s effort you had to put in to better see where you were going and what the best outcome should be. False starts = building up to something.
• This Twitter thread on documentFragment goes to show that the perf gains of this approach, as with most things, depends on context.
• Lemon seems like too bright a flavor to pair with chocolate, but I actually quite liked this bar by Theo.

Nice bits of internet

I'm such a sucker for found pigments; these are ochre pigments collected by Heidi Gustafson

• Project Torino is a physical programming language for children with visual impairments. It seems there’s always some cool venture at my company that I hadn’t yet heard about (this one via Rob Whiting in the web-a11y Slack).
• Frontend Case Studies
• Discovered Kim Abeles's smog plates through the Good Food podcast. Abeles puts a stencil on a dinner plate, leaves it out on the roof in LA, and lets smog sediment settle on the open spaces of the plate. She's done these for the U.S. presidents, where she leaves a plate out for a longer or shorter time depending on the president's environmental record (longer for subjectively worse records).
• Jisho is a super useful Japanese <=> English dictionary that even shows the stroke order for various kanji.

Interesting reads

• How a Library Handles a Rare and Deadly Book of Wallpaper Samples
• Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read
• My Accessibility Journey: What I’ve Learned So Far
• He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He's Worried About An Information Apocalypse. This one is good, but it’s rough. Save to read when you’re in a good state of mind.
• Why Authoritarians Attack the Arts
• The Tyranny of Convenience
• On Weaponised Design

Some gloom and doom in the reads list this month, so to bolster you in these trying times:

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

—From "The More Loving One" by W. H. Auden (via Rosie L.)