McKnight, Scot, author

Sugirtharajah, R. S. (Rasiah S.), author

Sugirtharajah, R. S. (Rasiah S.), author

King, Karen L., author

Robinson, William E. W. (William Edmond Whiddon), author

Knapp, Robert C., author

Wright, N. T. (Nicholas Thomas), author

Archer, Kenneth J., author

Wire, Antoinette Clark, author

Nir, Rivḳah, author

Wright, Arthur M., author

Tyson, Paul G., author

Riches, Tanya, author

Wink, Walter

Russell, Andrea, author

This week UCL have updated their homepage with a new design that I translated into XHTML, CSS, and Javascript.

UCL will gradually be updating other parts of their website as they move forward. You can read the UCL blog post about their new homepage and the history of the UCL homepage.

I was responsible for producing the XHTML, CSS, and Javascript that makes up the templates for this redesign. The members of UCL’s Web Services team then integrated the templates (and modified them as required) into their CMS.

This morning hundreds of ladybirds were flying through the air and massing on the white walls of the house. I managed to get a few clear macro photographs.

The sun was shining and the ladybirds seemed to be attracted to anything white. I stuck a white T-shirt on and headed outside. Pretty soon I was covered in them and could pluck them from my shirt to get some close ups using my little Canon IXUS 60.

At some point a ladybird took off just before I tried to photograph it and I decided I’d try to capture that moment. A few minutes later I’d worked out that I could prompt one of the insects to walk up my finger like the stem of a flower, that they’d take off when they reached the tip, and that they took up a distinct posture just before their wing-case shot open.

The speed at which they prepare to take off, open their wings, and fly away is so quick that I just had to take the shot as soon as I saw a ladybird get into the “take-off position” and hope that I reacted fast enough to get a picture of the open wing-case.

The following is an interesting extract from Straw Dogs by John Gray (pp. 109–116) discussing some of the differences between Western and Taoist philosophical traditions.

The fetish of choice

For us, nothing is more important than to live as we choose. This is not because we value freedom more than people did in earlier times. It is because we have identified the good life with the chosen life.

For the pre-Socratic Greeks, the fact that our lives are framed by limits was what makes us human. Being born a mortal, in a given place and time, strong or weak, swift or slow, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, suffering tragedy or being spared it – these features of our lives are given to us, they cannot be chosen. If the Greeks could have imagined a life without them, they could not have recognised it as that of a human being.

The ancient Greeks were right. The ideal of the chosen life does not square with how we live. We are not authors of our lives; we are not even part-authors of the events that mark us most deeply. Nearly everything that is most important in our lives is unchosen. The time and place we are born, our parents, the first language we speak – these are chance, not choice. It is the casual drift of things that shapes our most fateful relationships. The life of each of us is a chapter of accidents.

Personal autonomy is the work of our imagination, not the way we live. Yet we have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. New technologies alter our lives daily. The traditions of the past cannot be retrieved. At the same time we have little idea of what the future will bring. We are forced to live as if we were free.

The cult of choice reflects the fact that we must improvise our lives. That we cannot do otherwise is a mark of our unfreedom. Choice has become a fetish; but the mark of a fetish is that it is unchosen.

Animal virtues

The dominant Western view…teaches that humans are unlike other animals, which simply respond to the situations in which they find themselves. We can scrutinise our motives and impulses; we can know why we act as we do. By becoming ever more self-aware, we can approach a point at which our actions are the results of our choices. When we are fully conscious, everything we do will be done for reasons we can know. At that point, we will be authors of our lives.

This may seem fantastical, and so it is. Yet it is what we are taught by Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, Descartes, Spinoza and Marx. For all of them, consciousness is our very essence, and the good life means living as a fully conscious individual.

…

Western thought is fixated on the gap between what is and what ought to be. But in everyday life we do not scan our options beforehand, then enact the one that is best. We simply deal with whatever is at hand. …Different people follow different customs; but in acting without intention, we are not simply following habit. Intentionless acts occur in all sorts of situations, including those we have never come across before.

Outside the Western tradition, the Taoists of ancient China saw no gap between is and ought. Right action was whatever comes from a clear view of the situation. They did not follow moralists – in their day, Confucians – in wanting to fetter human beings with rules or principles. For Taoists, the good life is only the natural life lived skillfully. It has no particular purpose. It has nothing to do with the will, and it does not consist in trying to realise any ideal. Everything we do can be done more or less well; but if we act well it is not because we translate our intentions into deeds. It is because we deal skillfully with whatever needs to be done. The good life means living according to our natures and circumstances. There is nothing that says that it is bound to be the same for everybody, or that it must conform with ‘morality’.

In Taoist thought, the good life comes spontaneously; but spontaneity is far from simply acting on the impulses that occur to us. In Western traditions such as Romanticism, spontaneity is linked with subjectively. In Taoism it means acting dispassionately, on the basis of an objective view of the situation at hand. The common man cannot see things objectively, because his mind is clouded by anxiety about achieving his goals. Seeing clearly means not projecting our goals into the world; acting spontaneously means acting according to the needs of the situation. Western moralists will ask what is the purpose of such action, but for Taoists the good life has no purpose. It is like swimming in a whirlpool, responding to the currents as they come and go. ‘I enter with the inflow, and emerge with the outflow, follow the Way of the water, and do not impose my selfishness upon it. This is how I stay afloat in it,’ says the Chuang-Tzu.

In this view, ethics is simply a practical skill, like fishing or swimming. The core of ethics is not choice or conscious awareness, but the knack of knowing what to do. It is a skill that comes with practice and an empty mind. A.C. Graham explains:

The Taoist relaxes the body, calms the mind, loosens the grip of categories made habitual by naming, frees the current of thought for more fluid differentiations and assimilations, and instead of pondering choices lets the problems solve themselves as inclination spontaneously finds its own direction. …He does not have to make decisions based on standards of good and bad because, granted only that enlightenment is better than ignorance, it is self-evident that among spontaneous inclinations the one prevailing in the greatest clarity of mind, other things being equal, will be best, the one in accord with the Way.

Few humans beings have the knack of living well. Observing this, the Taoists looked to other animals as their guides to the good life. Animals in the wild know how to live, they do not need to think or choose. It is only when they are fettered by humans that they cease to live naturally.

As the Chuang-Tzu puts it, horses, when they live wild, eat grass and drink water; when they are content, they entwine their necks and rub each other. When angry, they turn their backs on each other and kick out. This is what horses know. But if harnessed together and lined up under constraints, they know how to look sideways and to arch their necks, to career around and try to spit out the bit and rid themselves of the reins.

For people in thrall to ‘morality’ , the good life means perpetual striving. For Taoists it means living effortlessly, according to our natures. The freest human being is not the one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonising over alternatives, he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must. Such a human has the perfect freedom of a wild animal – or a machine. As the Lieh-Tzu says: ‘The highest man at rest is as though dead, in movement is like a machine. He knows neither why he is at rest nor why he is not, why he is in movement nor why he is not.’

The idea that freedom means becoming like a wild animal or machine is offensive to Western religious and humanist prejudices, but it is consistent with the most advanced scientific knowledge. A.C. Graham explains:

Taoism coincides with the scientific worldview at just those points where the latter most disturbs westerners rooted in the Christian tradition – the littleness of man in a vast universe; the inhuman Tao which all things follow, without purpose and indifferent to human needs; the transience of life, the impossibility of knowing what comes after death; unending change in which the possibility of progress is not even conceived; the relativity of values; a fatalism very close to determinism; even a suggestion that the human organism operates like a machine.

Autonomy means acting on reasons I have chosen; but the lesson of cognitive science is that there is no self to do the choosing. We are far more like machines and wild animals than we imagine. But we cannot attain the amoral selflessness of wild animals, or the choiceless automatism of machines. Perhaps we can learn to live more lightly, less burdened by morality. We cannot return to a purely spontaneous existence.

Taking a “mobile first” approach to web development poses some challenges if you need to provide a “desktop” experience for legacy versions of IE. Using a CSS pre-processor like Sass can help.

As of Sass 3.2, there is another way of catering for IE, described by Jake Archibald.

One aspect of a “mobile first” approach to development is that your styles are usually gradually built up from a simple base. Each new “layer” of CSS adds presentational adjustments and complexity, via CSS3 Media Queries, to react to and make use of additional viewport space. However, IE 6/7/8 do not support CSS3 Media Queries. If you want to serve IE 6/7/8 something more than just the base CSS, then you need a solution that exposes the “enhancing” CSS to those browsers.

Popular existing options

An existing option is the use of a CSS3 Media Query polyfill, such as Respond.js. However, there are some drawbacks to this approach (see the project README), such as the introduction of a JavaScript dependency and the XHRing of your style sheets, which may introduce performance or cross-domain security issues. Furthermore, adding support for CSS3 Media Queries is probably not necessary for these legacy browsers. The main concern is exposing the “enhancing” CSS.

Another method, which Jeremy Keith has described in his post on Windows mobile media queries, is to use separate CSS files: one basic global file, and an “enhancing” file that is referenced twice in the <head> of the document. The “enhancing” file is referenced once using a media attribute containing a CSS3 Media Query value. This prevents it being downloaded by browsers (such as IE 6/7/8) which do not support CSS3 Media Queries. The same file is then referenced again, this time wrapped in an IE conditional comment (without the use of a CSS3 Media Query value) to hide it from modern browsers. However, this approach becomes somewhat cumbersome, and introduces multiple HTTP requests, if you have multiple breakpoints in your responsive design.

Getting Sass to help

Sass 3.1 provides some features that help make this second approach more flexible. The general advantages of the Sass-based approach I’ve used are:

1. You have full control over how your style sheets are broken up and reassembled.
2. It removes the performance concerns of having to reference several separate style sheets for each breakpoint in the responsive design, simply to cater for IE 6/7/8.
3. You can easily repeat large chunks of CSS in separate compiled files without introducing maintenance problems.

The basic idea is to produce two versions of your compiled CSS from the same core code. One version of your CSS includes CSS3 @media queries and is downloaded by modern browsers. The other version is only downloaded by IE 6/7/8 in a desktop environment and contains no CSS3 @media queries.

To do this, you take advantage of the fact that Sass can import and compile separate .scss/.sass files into a single CSS file. This allows you to keep the CSS rules used at any breakpoint completely separate from the @media query that you might want it to be a part of.

This is not a CSS3 Media Query polyfill, so one assumption is that IE 6/7/8 users will predominantly be using mid-size screens and should receive styles appropriate to that environment. Therefore, in the example below, I am making a subjective judgement by including all the breakpoint styles up to a width of 960px but withholding those for any breakpoints beyond that.

The ie.scss file imports numerous other files, each containing a layer of CSS that builds upon the previous each layer of CSS. No CSS3 @media queries are contained within the files or the ie.scss file. It then compiles to a single CSS file that is designed to be served only to IE 6/7/8.

// ie.scss

@import "base";
@import "320-up";
@import "480-up";
@import "780-up";
@import "960-up";

The style.scss file imports the code for each breakpoint involved in the design (including any beyond the limit imposed for legacy versions of IE) but nests them within the relevant CSS3 @media query. The compiled version of this file is served to all browsers apart from IE 6/7/8 and IEMobile.

// style.scss

@import "base";
@media (min-width:320px) {
    @import "320-up"; }
@media (min-width:480px) {
    @import "480-up"; }
@media (min-width:780px) {
    @import "780-up"; }
@media (min-width:960px) {
    @import "960-up"; }
@media (min-width:1100px) {
    @import "1100-up"; }

The resulting CSS files can then be referenced in the HTML. It is important to hide the ie.css file from any IE-based mobile browsers. This ensures that they do not download the CSS meant for desktop versions of IE.

<!--[if (gt IE 8) | (IEMobile)]><!-->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/style.css">
<!--<![endif]-->

<!--[if (lt IE 9) & (!IEMobile)]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/ie.css">
<![endif]-->

This Sass-enabled approach works just as well if you need to serve a basic style sheet for mobiles without CSS3 Media Query support, and prevent those devices from downloading the CSS used to adapt the layout to wider viewports. For example, you can avoid importing base.scss into the ie.scss and style.scss files. It can then be referenced separately in the HTML.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/base.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/style.css" media="(min-width:320px)">

<!--[if (lt IE 9) & (!IEMobile)]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/ie.css">
<![endif]-->

You’ll notice that I didn’t wrap the style.css reference in a conditional comment to hide it from legacy versions of IE. It’s not necessary this time because the value of the media attribute is not understood by legacy versions of IE, and the style sheet will not be downloaded.

In different circumstances, different combinations of style sheets and media attribute values will be more appropriate.

Summary

Even if you want to don’t want to use any of the Sass or SCSS syntax, the pre-processor itself can help you to write your CSS in a “mobile first” manner (with multiple breakpoints), provide a “desktop” experience for IE 6/7/8, and avoid some of the performance or maintenance concerns that are sometimes present when juggling the two requirements.

I’m relatively new to using Sass, so there may be even better ways to achieve the same result or even to prevent the inclusion of IE-specific CSS unless the file is being compiled into a style sheet that only IE will download.

The industrial hub faces a massive shortfall in revenues amid growing cost of combating the pandemic

Of the 1,089 new cases, Mumbai accounted for 748, with a cumulative tally of 12,142. With 75 new cases, Pune district’s tally has risen to 2,537.

Bhopal, by comparison, has so far reported 679 cases and 24 deaths, with 354 patients, or more than half of those infected, having recovered.

Two prominent medical experts — AIIMS director Dr Randeep Guleriya and Dr. Manish Suneja — flew into Ahmedabad on Friday following instructions from the Home Minister to guide local doctors

Major chunk of cases reported from Gurdaspur, Tarn Taran districts

43 cases from Ganjam district; State’s total mounts to 271

"We don’t want anything from the government. We just want to be dropped home," says a migrant worker from Chhattisgarh.

They say it violates Centre’s directive

Bandipora tops the list with 134 cases, followed by Srinagar at 129

This has been the highest spike in the number of cases in the State in a single day, taking the number of cases to 1,678

All 1,111 passengers underwent thermal screening at the station before departing for Basti in U.P.

Rupa Rani Bhuyan, assistant professor of Mangaldoi College, was held for “misbehaving” with the police and “obstructing” them from investigating cases against her

State health officials are planning extensive tests

Briskin, Alan, 1954-

Drake, Matthew, author

Plenert, Gerhard Johannes, author

Stegmann, Juan Pablo

Caudle, Gerrie