ARTS & FARCES internet

ESRD

Swiss researchers have demonstrated that they could remove toxins and pathogens from blood by using nanomagnets. The system can reportedly remove substances of different size and weight from whole blood in minutes.

James Hipwell continues his “Life on the waiting list” series of columns for the Guardian. I find his second graf especially poignant: “I had a thriving career back then, but once a serious illness takes grip, your ambitions shrivel up. Your mental energy is directed not on professional advancement but on mere survival. In some ways, it is liberating to have been cast out of the race.” While I totally agree with the mental energy diverted to survival bit, I’m trying desperately to remain in the race. Later in the piece, Hipwell writes, “[d]ialysis becomes the focus of your life, and however much you deny it, you are defined by your illness. Again, 10 years in and I’m struggling to not focus on dialysis and not be defined by my kidney failure. One thing puzzles me: Hipwell seems to be woefully uninformed about paired organ donation and is intent on receiving a kidney from his wife.

Internet

I never thought Mark Simonson would license Proxima Nova for use on the web. Or, more correctly, at least he wouldn’t be one of the first of the leading type foundries to do so. But he has—through TypeKit. For US$50 per year. OK, TypeKit, you’ve got my attention. Don’t like the subscription or third-party hosting? Fontspring also has Simonson’s Proxima Nova for a US$224 license.

Media

Erin Carlyle, writing for City Pages, lands a pretty good get revealing that Nick Coleman has lost his fellowship at St. John’s University for his opinionating in the Star Tribune. Coleman was just finishing up his first year as senior fellow at St. John’s Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement—Coleman was the center’s first fellow. He also writes a weekly opinion column for the Star Tribune. Two pissy St. John’s alumni took issue with Coleman’s opinions and worked to get him ousted. But the pissy alumni were also donors, so Coleman had to go. St. John’s sent Coleman notice via the post, not bothering to talk with him. Twin Cities media reporter David Brauer summed the situation in a brief tweet: “Hey St. John’s: it’s the GENE McCarthy fellowship, not the JOE McCarthy fellowship.” Nick Coleman, like Gene McCarthy, actually had a point of view.

Politics

Holy smokes, Anthony Weiner (D-New York) goes off on obstructionist Republicans blocking the 9/11 health bill in the US House of Representatives. Outbreaks like this, while seen as unprofessional to some, are way past due on more than a few pieces of pending legislation in the US Congress.

Publishing

Martin Belam’s “HTML5 for journalists” is a really nice reference for the pieces of HTML5 markup about which journalists need to know. The new semantic tags may not be as flashy as <canvas> and <video>, but they’re just as important.

Sustainability

I lived in Marin County before Cyra McFadden began writing The Serial for Pacific Sun. Even then Marin was a special place, inhabited by individuals who were thinking—and insisting on living—30 years in the future. The Marin Energy Authority derives a full 75 percent of its energy from renewable sources and charges less than for energy derived from natural gas and nuclear. One of the key’s to sustainable energy’s success in Marin is the county’s forward-thinking “non-restrictive tariffs allowing unlimited solar development” including oversized rooftop installations and selling back excess generated power to the grid.

User experience

HTML5, CSS3, and related technologies are a lot closer to reality than you many think. Test your browser for HTML5 support. Safari 5.0.1 scores 208 (out of 300) + 7 bonus points. The Mac version of Google Chrome 5.0.375.125 scores 197 + 7 bonus points. The Mac version of Firefox 3.6.8 scores 139 + 4 bonus points.

Kevin M. Hoffman has a very useful article about kickoff meetings at A List Apart. The second half of the article, “Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings,” breaks new ground in bringing the traditional architectural design studio to the kickoff meeting: Repeated iteration of sketching, evaluation, modeling, and testing to approach a design goal. There’s not enough time for the modeling and testing phases, so Hoffman suggests a workable process for sketching and critiquing ideas. Hoffman’s design studio process is based loosely on Todd Saki Warfel’s Prototyping. Need more? check out Hoffman’s Good Kickoff Meetings website.

Whitney Hess discusses life as a user experience designer: “I am a human bake pad.” In her article for A List Apart, “No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas,” Hess writes, “If you don’t know anything that no one else on your team knows, then it’s probably time to walk away. But if you do, it is your duty to assert that capability and share your knowledge for the betterment of the final product.” Clients and employers may sign my checks, but my first responsibility is to the users. That’s hard to get across to the check-writers, but Hess is bluntly adamant: “As people who create stuff with the hope that other people will use it, it is outright cowardly for us to protect ourselves before defending the needs of our users.” Very highly recommended.

If you use Safari 5.0.1 as your main web browser and you make websites, go download Panic’s Coda Notes right now. It allows you (or your clients) to annotate web pages and send the annotations via email. The emails go through Panic’s servers, but they promise to delete them when successfully sent.

User experience experts beginning to noodle around with CSS3 should probably take a look at Randy Jensen’s CSS3 Generator. It’s pretty nifty: You give it the CSS3 declaration and it gives you the code along with a preview and a legend of which browsers support what you’ve created.