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Via Ars Technica: An old adage states that a frog will jump out of boiling water, but can be boiled alive if placed in cold water that is heated at a slow pace. Apparently, the process of making amphibian soup is not entirely unlike the process of cooking up a new web standard. Citing limited adoption of XHTML, Internet innovator and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ringleader Tim Berners-Lee says HTML must be reinvented through a process of incremental change that will build on the existing standard. READ

The Book by 37 Signals, GettingReal, is now available for free online. Via 37 Signals: Want to build a successful web app? Then it’s time to Get Real. Getting Real is a smaller, faster, better way to build software. READ

Via Experience Dynamics: They have a poster of this diagram available for purchase.

Via Brown Battery Studios: I’ve been working on a couple of CSS layouts in the past few weeks and really got into using comments full blast. I also found some more interesting uses for CSS comments, aside from the usual authoring information and section markers. Most of you are probably doing these already, but I wanted to share them, anyway. MORE

Via BBC: Planet Under Pressure is a six-part BBC News Online series looking at some of the most pressing environmental issues facing the human race today. We are a successful breed. Our advance from our hominid origins has brought us near-dominance of the world, and a rapidly accelerating understanding of it.

Scientists now say we are in a new stage of the Earth’s history, the Anthropocene Epoch, when we ourselves have become the globe’s principal force.

But several eminent scientists are concerned that we have become too successful – that the unprecedented human pressure on the Earth’s ecosystems threatens our future as a species. MORE

Via BBC: The planet’s natural resources are being consumed faster than they can be replaced, according to the WWF. If current trends continue two planets would be needed by 2050 to meet humanity’s demands.

Lifestyles and the consumption of resources vary wildly from country to country. On average each person needs 2.2 global hectares to support the demands they place on the environment, but the planet is only able to meet consumption levels of 1.8 global hectares per person. READ, Read Planet Under Pressure

Via Ynews: Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality, and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular republics. Science education – and hence the whole future of science in this country – is under threat. Temporarily beaten back in a Pennsylvania court, the ‘breathtaking inanity’ (Judge John Jones’s immortal phrase) of ‘intelligent design’ continually flares up in local bush-fires. Dowsing them is a time-consuming but important responsibility, and scientists are finally being jolted out of their complacency. For years they quietly got on with their science, lamentably underestimating the creationists who, being neither competent nor interested in science, attended to the serious political business of subverting local school boards. Scientists, and intellectuals generally, are now waking up to the threat from the American Taliban. MORE, Digg thread

How absurd it is, that in this day and age most of humanity still clings to primitive beliefs of the supernatural – accepting the products of science that make up our world, while stubbornly rejecting its methods when interpereting it. Via Wired: “We find ourselves, this very autumn, three-and-a-half centuries after the intellectual martyrdom of Galileo, caught up in a struggle of ultimate importance, when each one of us must make a commitment. It is time to declare our position.” MORE

Via Smash Magazine:

Fonts

• CSS Font and Text Style Wizard
  Use this wizard to experiment with font and text styles and generate sample CSS style source code.
• Em Calculator
  Tool for calculating pixel font sizes to ems.
• text sizing – up the garden path

  264 Screenshots

Forms

• Accessible Form Builder
  Generate XHTML-compliant accessible forms quicky and easily
• CSS Form Code Maker
  Generates ‘Colorful Box Layout’ For Forms
• JotForm

  Web Based WYSIWYG Form Builder

Layout

• CSS Creator
  Live CSS Cascading Style Sheet Layout generator for your web site
• CSS HTML PHP Website Template Maker
  This PHP – HTML – CSS template generator creates a two column layout with both a header and a footer….
• Firdamatic

  Firdamatic is an online tableless layout generator that allows you to create and customise layouts easily…

• Free CSS Template Code Generator
  Maker for 3 Column Layout (tableless)
• Layout-o-Matic
  Generates tableless CSS layouts at the touch of a button
• QrONE CSS Designer
  Online CSS Generator
• Scriptomizers

  A CSS stylesheet generator

• The Generator Form v2.90
  CSS Source Ordered Variable Border 1-3 Columned Page Maker

Formatters and Optimizers

Via Digg: Richard Dawkins made an appearance on The Colbert Report last night to talk about his new book, “The God Dellusion”. I hate being reminded that the majority of humanity is still stuck on the primitive ideas of religion. The human brain is such a magnificent work of nature, and yet we still use it like children most of the time it seems. If there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, we must look so silly. I wish logic and reason were not so hard to find on earth.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

READ