It’s not about collecting talent, it’s about building a team.

– Bill Belichick

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Artwork by Tomothée Bart

Dense Discovery
Dense Discovery
 

Welcome to Issue 27!

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This week I’ll keep my intro short, but I want to remind everyone that this Friday, March 15th, is the day of the Global Climate Strike, inspired by Swedish student Greta Thunberg. In Australia and around the world tens of thousands of students will walk out of the classroom to stand up for their future and demand decisive climate action by politicians. The strike is not just for students, so I encourage you to join in – maybe even with your entire office. Check the map to find your nearest rally and spread the word please. ✌️ – Kai

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Fundraise with Confidence

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Apps & Sites

Tempad →

Markdown notes app

If you love writing in Markdown you’ll love Tempad, a notes app for Mac and iOS built around the markup language. It’s completely free, which usually makes me a bit suspicious. A great-looking app, nonetheless.

Tayl →

Create a podcast from your reading list

What a neat idea: send all the articles or blog posts you’re too busy to read to Tayl and it’ll compile them into an audio version. You then simply subscribe to your very own podcast to listen in any time.

Avataaars →

Avatar generator

Need some user avatars for your next design? With this little generator you can create illustrated avatars by the click of a button.

Shortcuts.Design →

Shortcuts directory

A simple directory of shortcuts of your favourite design and development apps, wrapped in a lovely design itself.

 

Idle Knowledge

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Icon by Dinosoft Labs

The weight of the internet

How heavy is the internet? In 2011, physicist Russell Seitz got to the bottom of that question. For data storage and transfer to happen on any device you need electrons. And while these particles aren’t exactly massive, they do have weight: approximately 9.1 x 10^-31 kg. Take that and apply it to an ordinary email, which comes in at about 50 kilobytes, or 8 billion electrons. Sounds like a lot but only comes in at two ten-thousandths of a quadrillionth of an ounce. Seitz scaled this up to determine the weight of all internet traffic (in 2011) and got 50g, or the weight of one strawberry. (Source)

 

Goods & Accessories

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Anicorn Series 000 →

The ‘hands-free’, battery-free watch

This watch shows time based on a unique concentric disc system instead of hands. Beautiful Swiss typography and automatic Japanese movement that requires no battery makes the Anicorn a pretty unique timepiece.

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Magabolt →

Magsafe is back

Miss the ol’ Magsafe? This tiny connector turns your USB-C Macbook charger plug into a Magsafe-like plug that easily dis/connects.

 

Overheard on Twitter

Twitter is wild because the dumbest people are like “Mayhaps you have slandered me with that ad hominem” and the smartest people are like “my dog is a chonky boi”.

@shvartacus

 

Food For Thought

The Simple Joy of ‘No Phones Allowed’ →

Read

Thought-provoking observations by a person who went to a ‘no phones allowed’ Jack White gig: “The effect was immediately noticeable upon entering the concert bowl. Aside from the time-travel-like strangeness of seeing a crowd devoid of blue screens, there was a palpable sense of engagement, as though – and it sounds so strange to say it – everyone came just so they could be there.”

Silicon Valley’s inequality machine →

Read

I have to admit that I’ve become a real fanboy of Anand Giridharadas. In this conversation with TechCrunch he takes on Silicon Valley: “We live in an age of staggering inequality, that is fundamentally about a monopolizing of the future itself. The winners of our age, the people who manage to be on the right side of an era of precipitous change and churn, have managed to build, operate, and maintain systems that siphon off most of the fruits of progress to them.”

We should treat algorithms like prescription drugs →

Read

How we deal with drugs (legislation, testing, licensing,... ok, maybe not pricing) could give us a clue on how to handle algorithms: “Both algorithms and drugs can have an enormous impact on human lives – the trick is in balancing the benefits and risks.”

 

Aesthetically Pleasing

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A beautiful identity for a Stockholm-based interior design and carpenter firm with a custom typeface at its core.

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Syddharth Mate creates short, looping animations of letters and numbers.

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A series of aerial photographs of the capital of Catalonia, by Márton Mogyorósy

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Suisse Int’l is one of my favourite sans-serif typefaces, quintessentially Swiss (duh!), and on par with Univers and Helvetica.

 

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The Week in a GIF

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Email us the URL to your favourite GIF and we might feature it here in a future issue.

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