Dan Jones

In Japan, where 27.3% of the population is 65 or older, elderly women are committing petty crimes like shoplifting in order to go to jail to find care and community that is increasingly denied them elsewhere. Japan’s jails are becoming nursing homes.

Why have so many otherwise law-abiding elderly women resorted to petty theft? Caring for Japanese seniors once fell to families and communities, but that’s changing. From 1980 to 2015, the number of seniors living alone increased more than sixfold, to almost 6 million. And a 2017 survey by Tokyo’s government found that more than half of seniors caught shoplifting live alone; 40 percent either don’t have family or rarely speak with relatives. These people often say they have no one to turn to when they need help.

Even women with a place to go describe feeling invisible. “They may have a house. They may have a family. But that doesn’t mean they have a place they feel at home,” says Yumi Muranaka, head warden of Iwakuni Women’s Prison, 30 miles outside Hiroshima. “They feel they are not understood. They feel they are only recognized as someone who gets the house chores done.”

All photos by Shiho Fukada. The first photo is of Mrs. F, aged 89, who stole “rice, strawberries, cold medicine”. She says: “I was living alone on welfare. I used to live with my daughter’s family and used all my savings taking care of an abusive and violent son-in-law.” The woman in the second photo recounts:

The first time I shoplifted was about 13 years ago. I wandered into a bookstore in town and stole a paperback novel. I was caught, taken to a police station, and questioned by the sweetest police officer. He was so kind. He listened to everything I wanted to say. I felt I was being heard for the first time in my life. In the end, he gently tapped on my shoulder and said, ‘I understand you were lonely, but don’t do this again.’

I can’t tell you how much I enjoy working in the prison factory. The other day, when I was complimented on how efficient and meticulous I was, I grasped the joy of working. I regret that I never worked. My life would have been different.

I enjoy my life in prison more. There are always people around, and I don’t feel lonely here. When I got out the second time, I promised that I wouldn’t go back. But when I was out, I couldn’t help feeling nostalgic.

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In a recent interview at SXSW, YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki said the company planned to use information from Wikipedia to counter misinformation in YouTube’s videos. In the NY Times, John Herrman wrote about the potential burden of a massive company like Google leaning so heavily on a relatively small non-profit organization like Wikipedia.

Then there’s the issue of money. As important as Wikipedia may be to some of the richest companies in the world, it is, in financial terms, comparatively minuscule, with a yearly budget of less than $100 million — a rounding error for big tech. (It should be noted that Google has made one-off contributions to Wikipedia in the past and includes the Wikimedia Foundation in a program through which it matches employee donations, which netted the foundation around $1 million last year.)

A few years ago, I wrote about financially supporting Wikipedia.

I consider it a subscription fee to an indispensable and irreplaceable resource I use dozens of times weekly while producing kottke.org. It’s a business expense, just like paying for server hosting, internet access, etc. — the decision to pay became a no-brainer for me when I thought of it that way.

I also called on other companies to support Wikipedia on a recurring basis:

Do other media companies subscribe to Wikipedia in the same fashion? How about it Gawker, NY Times, Vox, Wired, ESPN, WSJ, New York Magazine, Vice, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post? Even $500/month is a drop in the bucket compared to your monthly animated GIF hosting bill and I know your writers use Wikipedia as much as I do. Come on, grab that company credit card and subscribe.

Wikipedia is a shared online resource that we all would sorely miss if it went away, people and companies alike. We should all pitch in and support it.

At the end of 2017, Google introduced Files Go, an Android app that helped users to free up space and quickly share files while offline with people close by. The app has been well-received, and users save an average of 1GB of storage space when using Files Go. True to its nature, though, Google isn’t letting Files Go fall by the wayside, and is utilizing user feedback as it works to improve the app.

Three major improvements are arriving with the latest update to Files Go. Most important is the addition of a search bar that brings in Google’s best search features, including instant results, autocomplete, and filters. Users can now quickly search for specific files on their phone, even while offline, using Google’s invaluable search technology.

Files Go also finds duplicate files and suggests their removal to users. But now, users will have an opportunity to see where the duplicate files are located before they delete them, making it easier to know what changes are being made.

Finally, Google Photos is now integrated with Files Go. When Google Photos backups photos, Files Go will now suggest that users remove those files from their phone’s storage.

These features are now rolling out to Files Go users. Drop a comment down below and let us know what you think of them!

Today Google announced Google Play Instant, a way for Android users to try games before downloading them. But that’s not the only Google Play-related change that’s coming.

Google has confirmed that it will roll out video ads in the Play Store. The ads will roll out in beta “over the next few months”, so it may be some time before you see any on your device.

The good news is that these videos will not autoplay as you scroll through the Play Store, with Google describing them as “click-to-play video ads”.

Video ads aren’t likely to be super exciting for most people, but it looks like Google is planning to test them in a way that shouldn’t be too annoying. Not only will they not autoplay, but the video ads will clearly be labeled as ads, so you’ll know exactly what you’re looking at.

I'm extremely excited to announce that the Vue Cookbook is officially in beta! For the past few months, the Vue team has been writing, and editing and accepting PRs from the community to build a new section of our docs called the Cookbook. Each recipe stands on its own, meaning that recipes can focus on one specific aspect of Vue or something that integrates with Vue, and do a small deep dive into that subject. We can then include more complex examples, combining features in interesting ways.

One of my favorite parts of the cookbook is the Alternative Patterns section of each recipe. Usually when people write blog posts or document something, they're also selling you on the concept that they're explaining. In the cookbook, we strive to consider that we're all building different kinds of applications and websites, and thus a variety of choices will be valid, given divergent scenarios. The cookbook spends a little time in each recipe weighing the tradeoffs, and considering when one might need another path.

For advanced features, we assume some ecosystem knowledge. For example, if you want to use single-file components in Webpack, we don’t explain how to configure the non-Vue parts of the Webpack config. In the cookbook, we have the space to explore these ecosystem libraries in more depth—at least to the extent that is universally useful for Vue developers.

This section will continue to be in development! We have more recipes that we're writing, we're still accepting PRs, and the more community involvement, the richer a resource it becomes! I hope you enjoy it and find it useful.

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Google Pay launched earlier this yearas a combination of Android Pay and Google Wallet, and now the service is adding support for transit tickets.

Google announced that beginning today, Google Pay can handle transit tickets. However, that new feature is only available in Las Vegas, Nevada, with that city’s monorail system. Google did confirm that more cities and rail systems will be added to the mix soon, but wasn’t able to go into any specific details just yet.

For those in Las Vegas who want to keep their transit tickets stored digitally on their phone, they will need to buy their tickets from the computer or from their phone directly, then save them into Google Pay. Once the transit ticket is saved into the digital wallet, ticket holders only need to hold up their phone up to the contactless readers located at monorail station turnstiles.

Google Pay will also show you your ride history and nearby monorail stations (there are only seven stops in Las Vegas).

Are you looking forward to hosting your transit ticket on your smartphone?

Using Beanie Babies, Chicken McNuggets, and the comedy talents of Keegan-Michael Key, John Oliver tries to explain the wild world of Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency, the latter of which he describes as “everything you don’t understand about money combined with everything you don’t understand about computers”.

My favorite part was the explanation of how difficult hacking the blockchain is: “[like] turning a Chicken McNugget back into a chicken”.

This was very hard to keep watching after Oliver started detailing cryptocurrency scams and charlatans trying to take advantage of people. One of Oliver’s targets, Brock Pierce, was actually canned from the company he co-founded after the segment aired.

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Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh took a telescope around the streets of LA and invited people to look at the Moon through it. Watching people’s reactions to seeing such a closeup view of the Moon with their own eyes, perhaps for the first time, is really amazing.

Whoa, that looks like that’s right down the street, man!

I often wonder what the effect is of most Americans not being able to see the night sky on a regular basis. As Sriram Murali says:

The night skies remind us of our place in the Universe. Imagine if we lived under skies full of stars. That reminder we are a tiny part of this cosmos, the awe and a special connection with this remarkable world would make us much better beings — more thoughtful, inquisitive, empathetic, kind and caring. Imagine kids growing up passionate about astronomy looking for answers and how advanced humankind would be, how connected and caring we’d feel with one another, how noble and adventurous we’d be.

I didn’t get to follow National School Walkout Day as closely as I wanted to yesterday, but I just wanted to say on the morning after that I am very much in support of these kids, very proud of them, and deeply ashamed that ours is a country that has to regularly lean so hard on some of our most vulnerable members of society to get people and politicians to react to gross social injustice.

Buzzfeed has a great roundup of action from around the country, including 16-year-old Justin Blackman, who was the only one to walk out at his school…and ended up with millions of people supporting his efforts online. The Atlantic’s In Focus has gathered 35 photos of the walkout from around the nation.

Say you're trying to pull off a design effect where the corner of an element are cut off. Maybe you're a Battlestar Galactica fan? Or maybe you just like the unusual effect of it, since it avoids looking like a typical rectangle.

I suspect there are many ways to do it. Certainly, you could use multiple backgrounds to place images in the corners. You could just as well use a flexible SVG shape placed in the background. I bet there is also an exotic way to use gradients to pull it off.

But, I like the idea of simply taking some scissors and clipping off the dang corners. We essentially can do just that thanks to clip-path. We can use the polygon() function, provide it a list of X and Y coordinates and clip away what is outside of them.

Check out what happens if we list three points: middle top, bottom right, bottom left.

.module {
  clip-path: 
    polygon(
      50% 0,
      100% 100%,
      0 100%
    );
}

Instead of just three points, let's list all eight points needed for our notched corners. We could use pixels, but that would be dangerous. We probably don't really know the pixel width or height of the element. Even if we did, it could change. So, here it is using percentages:

.module {
  clip-path: 
    polygon(
      0% 5%,     /* top left */
      5% 0%,     /* top left */
      95% 0%,    /* top right */
      100% 5%,   /* top right */
      100% 95%,  /* bottom right */
      95% 100%,  /* bottom right */
      5% 100%,   /* bottom left */
      0 95%      /* bottom left */
    );
}

That's OK, but notice how the notches aren't at perfect 45 degree angles. That's because the element itself isn't a square. That gets worse the less square the element is.

We can use the calc() function to fix that. We'll use percentages when we have to, but just subtract from a percentage to get the position and angle we need.

.module {
  clip-path: 
    polygon(
      0% 20px,                 /* top left */
      20px 0%,                 /* top left */
      calc(100% - 20px) 0%,    /* top right */
      100% 20px,               /* top right */
      100% calc(100% - 20px),  /* bottom right */
      calc(100% - 20px) 100%,  /* bottom right */
      20px 100%,               /* bottom left */
      0 calc(100% - 20px)      /* bottom left */
    );
}

And you know what? That number is repeated so many times that we may as well make it a variable. If we ever need to update the number later, then all it takes is changing it once instead of all those individual times.

.module {
  --notchSize: 20px;
  
  clip-path: 
    polygon(
      0% var(--notchSize), 
      var(--notchSize) 0%, 
      calc(100% - var(--notchSize)) 0%, 
      100% var(--notchSize), 
      100% calc(100% - var(--notchSize)), 
      calc(100% - var(--notchSize)) 100%, 
      var(--notchSize) 100%, 
      0% calc(100% - var(--notchSize))
    );
}

Ship it.

See the Pen Notched Boxes by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

This may go without saying, but make sure you have enough padding to handle the clipping. If you wanna get really fancy, you might use CSS variables in your padding value as well, so the more you notch, the more padding there is.

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As part of their issue on race, National Geographic asked historian John Edwin Mason to dive into their archives to examine the magazine’s past coverage of people of color, both in the US and abroad. What he found was not pretty.

What Mason found in short was that until the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers. Meanwhile it pictured “natives” elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages — every type of cliché.

Unlike magazines such as Life, Mason said, National Geographic did little to push its readers beyond the stereotypes ingrained in white American culture.

“Americans got ideas about the world from Tarzan movies and crude racist caricatures,” he said. “Segregation was the way it was. National Geographic wasn’t teaching as much as reinforcing messages they already received and doing so in a magazine that had tremendous authority. National Geographic comes into existence at the height of colonialism, and the world was divided into the colonizers and the colonized. That was a color line, and National Geographic was reflecting that view of the world.”

Some of what you find in our archives leaves you speechless, like a 1916 story about Australia. Underneath photos of two Aboriginal people, the caption reads: “South Australian Blackfellows: These savages rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings.”

A laudable move, particularly for a publication owned by Rupert Murdoch.