For five years through 2018, our humanist community, the Humanist Hub*, met every Sunday afternoon at our suite in Harvard Square for fellowship, music, and a speaker. Our advisory board included luminaries of humanism such as Rebecca Goldstein, Steven Pinker, and Dan Dennett. These friends of the organization regularly spoke at Humanist Hub events.

A few days ago I wrote about scientific thinking as an antidote to intuition. Not just an alternative to it, but something like the opposite of intuition. The intentional, energy-consuming move to a systematic deliberative mode of thought is utterly different from the easy and instantaneous nature of intuition.

I've been writing and thinking about design in biology since I started Quintessence of Dust . I want to write and think about it a lot more, so in my last post I introduced my view of the concept and pointed ahead to this post, which consists of edited excerpts from some conversations at a discussion forum at the Peaceful Science site. You will find links to those conversations in the previous post.

One of the most interesting books I've read in the last few years was The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution by J. Arvid Ågren. The author explains the gene's-eye view both scientifically and historically, and I hope to write about the book sometime soon. But for now there's one point he makes that I found fascinating.

I've reviewed a few books over the years here at Quintessence of Dust , but From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris was the first book I blogged through that I was genuinely excited about reading.

Over the past month, I participated in a workshop led by Cassie Evans and Smashing Magazine called "The SVG Animation Masterclass". It was a fantastic workshop and inspires me to do more with animations for liberate science designs in the future. Watch this space, but until then, here's some things I wanted to share with you about my journey into animated SVGs.

Communicating your brand through illustration is a fantastic way to add some personality and information without relying on boring stock photography or stuffy infographics. However, creating custom illustrations and defining an illustration system is a time consuming process.

Since the first discussions about Hypergraph, accessibility has been a priority. We recently completed an accessibility audit, and while things aren’t perfectly accessible, we know where to focus our energy. I firmly believe accessibility does more for a product than expanding the pool of potential users, but also serves as an idealized baseline of design and engineering.

Cultural and individual differences of any kind should not make it harder to use software or technology in your everyday lives. Regretfully, it still very much does, as the default is that of an able-bodied white man in an overdeveloped country.

Marken- und Designrechte können bei eigenen Medien­produktionen auf unterschiedliche Weise wichtig werden: Wenn fremde Produkte darin vorkommen oder wenn man eigene Produktionen oder Gestaltungen in der Vermarktung schützen möchte.