Casey Ydenberg

I gave a talk earlier this week about how much I liked working with Fresh, but I ran a bit short on time and didn't talk about what brought me to Fresh in the first place. This seems like a good place to go into it, because the motivation for trying out Fresh was building this website! This website is in part an attempt to explore technology solutions for data-rich blogging and journalism on the web.

Rebuilding my website on the Fresh framework

In April,

 The Economist

proposed a new metric for measuring the climate impact of food. The motivating factor was that while most plant-based foods are "better" for the environment that most meat-based ones, they also contain fewer calories and less protein, and therefore more of them are needed to make up a full meal or diet.

The Banana Index: Interactive

Header image: John William Waterhouse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A lot of people smarter than me have been sounding the alarm about the potential threat that AI poses for some time, and I have chosen to ignore it. Until recently, I had never had a conversation with an AI that sounded even halfway plausible.

Consulting the Oracle

So, what are we going to do about Facebook? It has been clear for at least five years now, or should have been, that the status quo is untenable, not least because the era of social media seems to have degraded our ability to have grown-up conversations about important problems, and one of those problems is social media itself.

The Case Against Facebook from Evolutionary Biology

When my kids were babies, sometimes it felt like a one-hour trip to the store required more planning than an expedition to Antarctica. We had a diaper bag we packed with all the things we thought we might need, but it was the

 way

it was packed that mattered. Diapers and wet bags and wipes have to be accessible so they need to go at the top. So does a bottle of milk and a spit rag.

You Might Need Redux

It’s almost forgotten now, but “Generation X” - a term now used to describe people born between 1965 and 1980 - was originally the title of a novel. Vancouver author Douglas Coupland wrote the novel and coined the phrase to describe what it felt like to be alive at a certain time in a certain point in your life.

A novel about what the Internet feels like

When I began working a freelancer last year, I knew I wanted to use an agile approach to build apps for my clients, even if they were small projects. As there are limited resources for agiling independently, I thought I would write about my experience for others to use. First of all, some terms.

Being Agile as a Freelancer

I gave a talk recently extolling the virtues of PouchDB and how you can use it build web experiences that feel very much like native apps. In short, with PouchDB you can give users app-like experiences with no login, and that store data while offline. And yet they still have the best feature of web app: they can found with a URL.

Why the Frontend Keeps Getting Harder

It is the Flat Earthers that finally gave me pause. Not the hypothesis itself. In the spectrum of likely possible realities, I put "flat earth" in between a world sitting on the back of turtle and a direct, causal relationship between Nicolas Cage movies and swimming pool drownings. Is there, however, something virtuous in the skepticism that allows one to persist in the belief that the world is flat?

Conspiracy Thinking is Not Skepticim

In much of the developed world right now, it is possible to attend a movie but not a university lecture. This is the sort of insane fact we've gotten used to over the past few months, the sort of thing that makes us shake our heads for a moment, acknowledge that money talks, and move on with our lives.

Our Public Discourse About COVID-19 is Completely Idiotic

In React is the new Dojo, Alex Russell argues that React's days as king among front-end frameworks are limited if it doesn't increase its circle of appeal outside of specialists who have the patience to learn all of the tooling that comes with it.  As he puts it:  Of all the holy wars in the web community, this has been one of the hardest for me. On the one hand, I was attracted to coding for the web in the first place because of the openness of

On React's Barrier's to Entry

One of the side effects of working with redux is that it forces you to think about your application in terms of state instead of thinking in terms of user workflow. While state might seem like an implementation detail, with experience it becomes more a part of the design process, allowing us to accurately predict "sad path" situations that may arise when the app is in a particular state.

Thinking in State: The Tao of Frontend Development

The oldest gene we possess carries the information to make something called the 5S RNA, a component of the ribosome. This molecular machine is responsible for translating a DNA sequence into a protein sequence. The reason this is critical is that chemical properties of DNA are pretty simple: it's more or less just a carrier for information.

In the beginning was the code and the code gave life and the code was life

Knowledge does not come from nothing. It can only come from reason, from experimentation, or from preexisting knowledge.

War is peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery [citation needed]

One of the most predictable trends in the ecology of humans is that as countries become wealthier, fertility rates decline. This means that even as mortality rates plummet and most people can expect to live into old age, the population of a country stabilizes and may even begin to shrink. The population of the world has been increasing exponentially for centuries. This period is now at an end.

A visual breakdown of demographic changes to come in this century

There's a strange moment that occurs during passionate arguments between close friends, romantic partners, or coworkers when two sides with deeply dug opposing trenches suddenly realize that they agree - almost - about everything at issue. When the key realization is that the two sides differ not so much about the facts, as the paradigm by which they approach those facts.

Reacting badly

Front-end frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation are reviled among some front-end developers for creating bloated CSS and for making every site look the same. However, much of this hatred focuses on the use of the use of the framework as a "drop-in" CSS (and JavaScript) file.

What I want from a React UI framework: Intentions and skins in the presentation layer

Of all my regular stops for data-vis design, Our World in Data is probably my favourite. Unlike (for example) FiveThirtyEight, which keeps complex graphics and news articles on different parts of the site, and unlike news sites which embed data graphics as iframes, OWID has a unique approach to mixing graphics and prose.

Improving the user experience of overcrowded scatterplots

A very common topic of questions on data visualization forums concerns responsive charts. In this post I will use an example of responsive chart design to illustrate the key issues when confronting this problem, outline the framework of a general solution, and show a bit of general-purpose code. The principles should be applicable to any frontend framework (React, Vue, Svelte). I'll use d3 throughout, but no prior d3 expertise is necessary.

Responsive charts: a case study

Overall inflation seems to be cooling, but the costs of food and housing continue to soar across Canada. In October 2023, food inflation was still nearly double the overall inflation rate, and the federal governement began steps to stabilize prices through regulation of the major grocery chains. Exactly what items are behind the increased price at the register depends on where you live.

The complex story of food inflation in Canada

The wall came down, and about a month later the first episode (season 1, IMDB 8.2) of

 The Simpsons

aired on the Fox network. For 34 years the show has been locked in a kind of strange timewarp, with characters who never age, while the world around them has changed to be almost unrecognizable.

The Simpsons: An analysis of IMDB ratings by season

One of the best things about React is that it manages to combine almost-real JavaScript with an intuitive way to interact with the DOM. Whereas in a templating language you need a new vocabulary to have conditional statements, in JSX you can do things like: {props.visible &amp;&amp;

Functions as Props: Describing a thing by what it can do

Living Pixel

The oldest gene we possess carries the information to make something called the 5S RNA, a component of the ribosome. This molecular machine is responsible for translating a DNA sequence into a protein sequence. The reason this is critical is that chemical properties of DNA are pretty simple: it\'s more or less just a carrier for information. Proteins on the other hand, have astoundingly complex chemistry: they can synthesize or break down sugar, create pigments to give us a specific hair colour, give us or prevent cancer. In short: everything.

DNA and protein present the grandmother of all chicken-and-egg problems: one simply cannot exist without the other. DNA depends on specific proteins to replicate, while protein cannot replicate at all and depends on DNA to make more copies of itself. The answer to this apparent paradox comes from the intermediary between these two: RNA. RNA carries information in the same way as DNA, but is someone less stable and more prone to error. However, it can also do a limited amount of the fancy folding-and-chemistry that proteins can. It can be - in the right circumstances - both word and action.

Life has exactly one requirement: information capable of making copies of itself. At some time in the very distant past, a molecule that was likely RNA or something related to it, carried the exact chemical properties needed to spam copies of itself. It was both word and action. As this molecule made copies which sometimes contained errors, it became increasingly sophisticated, and the word and action functions eventually became abstracted out to more specialized subcomponents.

This history appears to be repeating itself. The physical world is hard to deal with, but once the process of translating simple signals into pixels, robotic movements, or 3D objects becomes codified, the signals can rapidly become more and more complex. Eventually, they become sophisticated enough that the it defies naive logic: how can the mere expression of language actually **do** something? And yet the language needed to turn a sperm and egg into a human being requires orders of magnitude less code than the micro-SD card in your phone.

There\'s an unsettling corollary to all this, which is: what happens when software becomes too sophisticated for our human brains to grasp it? Biology certainly exists in this space: most scientists working in the field study only a tiny part of a grand system, or an immensely simplified model of a complex system. Arguably software already exists in this space, as programmers tend to work only at the very top of a rickety pile of abstractions.

The truly disturbing part is that life becomes more sophisticated through *random* change and selection of minute improvements. Programmers think of themselves as smart, but even random change, followed by selection (forking, community growth, adoption of technology by the masses) ought to be enough for software to move forward. Merges are even a kind of sex, allowing improvements that occur in different places to find each other. Will we get to the point where we simply write tests and let the computer randomly generate solutions until it finds the optimal one? (Now, that\'s TDD for you). Is it inevitable?


Knowledge does not come from nothing. It can only come from reason, from experimentation, or from preexisting knowledge. Yet throughout the history of our civilisation, those in positions have power have claimed access to greater versions of knowledge, whether through divine revelation, or through being \"like, really smart.\"

There is a battle as old as time: between an objective reality which can be queried, and an infinitely malleable one which can be invented. And it is one and the same as the battle between freedom and authoritarianism. Free and fair elections, freedom of the press, checks and balances on executive power \... all of these are wonderful things, things we may take for granted in the 21st century, and things that are essential for healthy democracy. **But all of them are secondary to freedom of thought.** If a tyrant can convince his subjects to believe what he wants them to, none of those other things matter. We need only think about the subjects of Oceania in George Orwell\'s \"1984\", who could be convinced to believe any truth, no matter how absurd, no matter how it contradicted whatever else they believed or had been told to believe previously.

On the flip side, when a population rejects its ruler\'s version of the truth, that ruler\'s days are numbered. In the latter days of communism in Poland, citizens turned their television sets to the windows of their home during the daily Soviet-sponsored newscasts. The message was: we reject you and your propaganda, and we are letting the world know.

This is nothing new. It predates the inclusion of \"post-truth\" in the Oxford English Dictionary, Brexit and Donald Trump, Brietbart and fake news, by thousands of years. It is the conflict between Galileo and Pope Urban VIII, between Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, the conflict with authoritarians in the 20th century, and with religious extremists in the 21st. But now I and all those who value freedom of thought above all else, need to watch very, very carefully: perhaps for history repeating itself, perhaps for something new.

I have watched the US election closely, first with amusement, then disdain, then alarm and finally acceptance, as a bona fide conspiracy theorist was elected as President of the United States. He has falsely claimed that Barack Obama is secretly a Kenyan Muslim, that climate change is hoax created by the Chinese, that his political opponents were involved with the Kennedy assassination or are actively working with international cabals of bankers to undermine American sovereignty, that an election that looked like it was about to defeat him was rigged. After he won that election, he lashed at those calling for recounts or audits while at the same time claiming that he would have won by more if \"millions\" hadn\'t voted illegally. He has flirted with the anti-vaccine movement. Just today, his press secretary made easily falsifiable statements about the crowd sizes at the inauguration and the counter-protests in Washington. He has never attempted nor seemed to think it was important that he provide any evidence whatsoever for these apparently extraordinary claims. The ability to believe seemingly contradictory truths fits Orwell\'s \"doublethink\" to a T.

Americans - supposedly - vote on character, Canadians on issues. As a Canadian, I have trouble caring about whether he was a successful businessman or inherited his empire from his father, that he\'s had three wives or even that many of his business ventures were little more than elaborate scams leveraging his personal brand. I could even forgive his apparent admission of sexual assault if he really appeared to be a qualified candidate, as Canadians appeared to forgive Rob Ford\'s drug use if they otherwise believed in his politics. But there is no clearer indication to me that American voters are flirting with disaster than Donald Trump\'s flagrant disregard for objective reality. His \"policies\" are nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to acknowledge a fictitious reality (already believed-in wholesale by millions): where trade deals screw American workers, where \"hard working\" means \"white\", where immigrants run rampant committing violent crime, where middle America is becoming poorer because of a gravy-train delivering their tax dollars to coastal elites and minorities, where their country is weakened by weak-kneed politicians cuckholded by foreign leaders. This alternative reality is undeniably racist, but racism is not even its biggest problem. Its biggest problem is that it is fake: disguising complex problems as ones that can be pinned on scapegoats, and thus easily solved.

One thing is for sure: Trump is something different. I lived in America through the 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections and now, living 600 km from the border, I have never been so afraid. I remember well the disheartening re-election of George W. Bush in 2004: how he could lie impunity about Iraq and get away with it. But this is way, way beyond that. No one could really check Bush\'s claims, but Trump\'s lies are easily falsifiable and yet, *61 million Americans don\'t seem to care.*

To my mind, this is the line that cannot be crossed. Acknowledge the legitimacy of the election. Respect the office, if not the man. Celebrate the peaceful transition of power. But never, ever recant on reason, on deduction, on the need for verification and falsification. The rallying cry for Liberalism in 2017 should be from the pages of Wikipedia: \"citation needed\".
