When Europe lost Latin as a shared communication tool, it was a new Babel Tower: Europeans couldn't understand each other any longer except within the boundaries of their national states. Not surprisingly, people who don't understand each other tend to resort to war to sort out conflicts. But Europeans also tried to replace Latin with some non-verbal tools: one was music. It is a long story that needs to be told from the beginning.

Standing out, rather than fitting in, could in fact be the smarter route to success. A phrase coined in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2014, the “red sneaker effect”, revealed we confer higher status and competence on mavericks versus conformists.

So we often perceive someone wearing clothing that deviates from the norm in professional settings as having higher ability, rank and respect than colleagues who conform to dress codes.

This is because diverging from the norm signals you have autonomy and can bear the cost of nonconformity – even if it costs you your job.

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But she found that in collective cultures,such as East Asia and Latin America, people prefer norm followers as leaders, because they may prioritise organisational goals over their own.

Prior to 2017, all W3C standards were free for anyone to implement, allowing free/open browser developers to create their own rivals to the big companies' offerings. But now, a key W3C standard requires a proprietary component to be functional, and that component is under Google's control, and the company will not authorize free/open source developers to use that component.

Les écrans flexibles ne sont plus l'apanage des smartphones dernier cri. Louis Vuitton a présenté ce vendredi deux prototypes de sacs à main connectés. Le premier modèle offre deux écrans légèrement incurvés pour épouser la forme ronde du sac, tandis que le deuxième présente un total de quatre écrans apposés sur la célèbre toile monogramme de la griffe.

La technologie utilisée par Louis Vuitton, présentée au salon Vivatech, a été développée par Royole - une start-up chinoise dont le siège social est en Californie - pionnière avec une poignée d'autres fabricants (notamment Samsung et Huawei) sur le marché des smartphones avec écran pliable ou flexible.

WhatsApp, which is used by 1.5bn people worldwide, discovered in early May that attackers were able to install surveillance software on to both iPhones and Android phones by ringing up targets using the app’s phone call function.

The malicious code, developed by the secretive Israeli company NSO Group, could be transmitted even if users did not answer their phones, and the calls often disappeared from call logs, said the spyware dealer, who was recently briefed on the WhatsApp hack.

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NSO’s flagship product is Pegasus, a program that can turn on a phone’s microphone and camera, trawl through emails and messages and collect location data.

NSO advertises its products to Middle Eastern and Western intelligence agencies, and says Pegasus is intended for governments to fight terrorism and crime.

But mostly to spy on people said governments don't particularly like, of course.

The goal of this article is to provide a historical context of how JavaScript tools have evolved to what they are today in 2017. We’ll start from the beginning and build an example website like the dinosaurs did — no tools, just plain HTML and JavaScript. Then we’ll introduce different tools incrementally to see the problems that they solve one at a time. With this historical context, you’ll be better able to learn and adapt to the ever-changing JavaScript landscape going forward. Let’s get started!

According to Google’s own Page Speed Insights audit (which Google recommends to check your performance), the AMP version of articles got a performance score of 80. The non-AMP versions? 86. Mind you, the AMP versions are hobbled - unauthorised javascript interaction is forbidden by Google, so you can’t vote or comment in place - it’ll kick you to the full version of the page. This is the fruit of weeks of labour converting the site: a slower, less interactive, more clunky site.

I have just learned that a song from my music side project Wretched Saints, which doesn't even have a website yet, is now out on Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/track/5x2uix7nbFyuBVf9az8PyE?si=Wx-6J3Y5SaWQFYZMSkwimw

If you're not a Spotify user, here's an older version of this song on Soundcloud:

They tell me the song is also available on Itunes and Deezer but I don't use those services so what do I know.

This is the jazz piano site of Doug McKenzie. It contains many downloadable video files in WMV format and midi files of live played songs.

The reason why purple and violet look similar to us is because they stimulate our cones in a similar way, but most other animals don’t share the same types of cones and “post-processing”. This means that to other animals, purple and violet may look completely different!

Now imagine a violet flower petal with a purple pattern on it. Depending on the particular shades, this pattern might be completely invisible to us, while many other animals could see it as clearly as we can see an orange pattern on green background.