onfocus

• Dots Gloves
  Gloves that work with an iPhone. Great idea!
• A Magical Childhood: What Should a 4 Year Old Know?
  This post is a great antidote to all of the benchmark lists you see that tell you where your child should be. [via caterina]
• Pro Webmasters : Is there any way to really ban people from a website?
  Interesting discussion about different approaches to managing an online community.
• Google Code Blog: HTML5, browsers, and books, twenty years later
  A quick behind-the-scenes look at "20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web" that explains some of the unique features of HTML5.
• 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web
  Nicely designed "book" about the Web.
• Nicolas Gallagher: Pure CSS GUI icons (experimental)
  Interesting experiment that creates web icons with pure CSS.

• Unsuck It
  Turn terrible business jargon into plain English.

• Khan Academy: Order of operations
  I'm going to try to watch one of these each day to get better at math.

• Yesterday's Papers: H. T. Webster
  Some samples of single-pane comics by H.T. Webster. Sadly, his collections appear to be out of print and there aren't any at nearby libraries.
• Perpetua: Modern Types
  Scan of the 1955 book with wonderful caricatures by Ronald Searle. [via peacay]
• Media Assassin: Why Can’t Black People Be Racist?
  "So, this is why I say white supremacy is the only functional form of racism; the only kind that actually works."
• Motivated Grammar: Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct
  "...you’re just making a fool of yourself when you go around telling users of singular they that they’re wrong, because they’re not."
• Cool Hunting: Thule K-Summit Snow Chains
  It's going to be that time of year again soon. These Thule chains look nice, but I'd rather see real people putting on chains in freezing weather in the demo, not spinning/floating CG.
• Drive-by Blogging: Kurt Vonnegut
  Eight rules for writing a short story. [via merlin]
• Obsidian Wings: Unleash Senator Wyden
  "The fundamental problems with the American health care system are all linked, directly or indirectly, to the fact that the vast majority of folks get insurance solely through their employers." Amen, and go Wyden! [via Kattullus]
• cdixon.org: Why does it matter that Twitter is supplanting RSS?
  "The problem is Twitter isn’t really open. For Twitter to be truly open, it would have to be possible to use “Twitter” without an any way involving Twitter the institution. Instead, all data goes through Twitter’s centralized service." I'm not a fan of people pushing content to Twitter like it's an RSS reader for social reasons as well, but that's probably just me.

• Wired: You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again
  "More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them..." [via schneier]
• Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think
  "Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play." [via Daddy Types]
• Superfeedr : Real-time feed parsing in the cloud for web-developers
  "Superfeedr is Real-time Feed Parsing in the Cloud." Great idea that could help build specialized aggregators. Bummed it's ATOM at the end. I'd prefer RSS.
• The Footnotes of Mad Men.
  This blog connects Mad Men episodes with advertisements and details from the time. [via kottke]

• Pink Tentacle: Low-altitude video of lunar surface (in HD)
  "In its final days before crashing into the surface of the moon on June 11, Japan’s KAGUYA explorer has been shooting high-definition footage of the lunar terrain from low altitude."
• Figures of Speech: How to Teach a Child to Argue
  A father teaches his children the ancient art of rhetoric. "It was as if I’d given them advertising immunization shots."

• Design Stencils - Yahoo! Design Pattern Library
  This Yahoo! Stencil Kit looks like a good way to mock up iPhone apps in Illustrator. [via CreativeTechs Tips]
  filed under: design, development
• Floorplanner.com
  "Buying a new home, rearranging your room, or moving into a new office? You can save time and have more fun if you lay out your ideas ahead of time." Looks like nifty web app.
  filed under: home, design
• Is Google Making Us Stupid?
  tl;dr
  filed under: education, future, google, internet, psychology
• Pulp Branding
  A web comic about branding. [via Brand New]
  filed under: marketing
• Exits: Stewart Butterfield's bizarre resignation letter to Yahoo
  The Web's favorite tinsmith resigns his post with the Yahoo Web Trust for a more pastoral way. [via waxy]
  filed under: flickr, yahoo, poetry

• Berkeley: Descriptive Introduction to Physics | Fall 2006
  Video and audio from the "Physics for Future Presidents" class at Berkeley.
  filed under: education, mp3, science

• National Park Service Interpretive Development Program
  internal documents from the National Park Service that detail how to develop National Park activities, interpretive media, and "informal" dialogue. [via sterling via IDEA]
  filed under: design, education, government

Update: Removed! I knew I should have mirrored it as soon as I saw it. I guess the National Park system doesn't want to share their methods with other competing park systems? I'd love to know more about how our National Parks are put together, and their methods could probably influence other fields. This decision is disappointing.

Update 2: huh, maybe it's just me. MojoMark was able to grab a copy of the site for me.