A nanostructured immunosensor measures IL-6 concentrations as low as 0.5 pg/mL.

A new bio-imaging technique can simultaneously identify, visualize, and quantify long-lived actinides within tissue samples.

Inexpensive inkjet printers and scanners enable big advances in the small world of UTLC.

UPLC/FTICR MS provides detailed metabolic signatures of Chilean red wines, which can be distinguished by vintage, vineyard of origin, production year, and quality.

Analytical electron microscopy-empowered by advances in electron optics and detectors-is poised to radically transform our understanding of the complex phenomena arising from atomic and electronic structure in materials chemistry.

The Editor reviews the types of recommendation letters a researcher may be asked to write.

Analytical chemists devise methods to confirm foods are what they claim to be.

Raman spectroscopy, phase contrast microscopy, and optical trapping are combined to gain information with high temporal resolution.

Chemists launch research efforts to probe aerosols from Eyjafjallajokull's eruption.

A lab-on-a-chip approach to cell counting and analysis could become an inexpensive, disposable, and rapid point-of-care diagnostic tool.

An instrument with a microfluidic platform generates DNA profiles within hours so police can quickly check crime records.

Monitoring personal exposure to the pollutant ozone becomes possible for the first time with the development of a miniaturized ozone monitor.

When you think of a pattern library (or design system), what analogy comes to mind? Lego? If I had a Lego piece for every time somebody used Lego as a pattern library analogy, I’d be able to build the Death Star.

Lego is pretty awesome but also difficult to replicate a design without detailed piece-by-piece instructions.

Someone hands you a box of Lego and tells you to build an interface and that it has to look like the rest of the site. What are the chances that you’ve built something that is technically consistent with what others have done? Did you use two 4x2 bricks, or one 4x2 and two 2x2 bricks? Did you use green bricks or yellow bricks?

Lego gives you plenty of options but very little consistency.

In reality, pattern libraries usually hit an upper limit of around 100 components. Salesforce’s Lightning has 85 components. Shopify’s Polaris has 90. Anything more than that and interfaces become unwieldy. Each component is something that the designer has to design, the developer has to build and maintain, the user has to learn to use.

The combinations with which these components fit together are also limited. A Toast message is generally only going to appear in one or two places within the interface.

Tetris, on the other hand? A limited set of pieces that fit together in a particular set of ways. Sometimes you screw it up and it looks a bit wonky. Other times, when it all comes together, magic happens!

Now that’s the best analogy ever.

It’s been an interesting year, to say the least. Started a new job. Left that job. Ended a relationship. Have a newfound affinity for Islay Scotch. (Those last two things aren’t related, surprisingly.) Throughout this tumultuous year, there has been adventures to many amazing restaurants around the world.

The main goal was to continue on the quest to eat at 50 of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants before I turn 50. Last year, I managed to make it to 10 restaurants. This year, I went to 17 restaurants on the list. That means I’m over the halfway point of this crazy challenge in just under two years.

This year kicked off with a trip to London in January where I came down with a severe bout of something viral and was bedridden for a bit. Not quite fully recovered, I stupidly went to the four restaurants I had reservations at: The Clove Club, Lyle’s, The Ledbury, and Dinner by Heston Blumenthal.

In April, a trip to Peru was to include three restaurants on the list. We went to Maido and Astrid & Gaston. Sadly, we couldn’t get reservations to Central due to some confusion with the online booking site. Instead, we went to its sister restaurant, Kjolle, which ended up being amazing. Like, how is this restaurant not on the list itself?!

In May, we made a road trip out of it, driving to Zwolle, in the Netherlands to go to De Librije. After an amazing meal and stay at the attached hotel, we drove to Ghent, Belgium for a brief stay to go to Hof Van Cleve.

Midway through the year, the 2019 list came out, adding Atelier Crenn and Benu from San Francisco to the list. Benu was visited the year prior, so I took the easy win.

Side Challenge

I had a secondary goal of going to every Michelin 3-starred restaurant in the Bay Area. This included Saison, Benu, Quince, and Coi in San Francisco—all of which I had been to in 2018. There is Manresa down in Los Gatos (which I also went to in 2018), The Restaurant at Meadowood (also visited in 2018) up in Napa Valley, and the French Laundry that is also up in Napa Valley. In 2019, Michelin added SingleThread and Atelier Crenn to the ranks of 3-star restaurants.

That means, I had three restaurants to go to to complete the side quest. It also meant adding one more to the 50 list. In July, I went to Atelier Crenn, SingleThread, and French Laundry in a single weekend.

Thomas Keller, of the French Laundry, was a consultant on the movie Ratatouille, which set my expectations high. I really wanted them to serve the dish from the movie, but sadly, it didn’t happen. The meal was still wonderful, though.

Side challenge completed.

Autumn

I wanted to make another big jump for the 50 list. Getting a restaurant here or there just wasn’t going to cut it. There are five restaurants on the list in Paris. I managed to snag reservations at four of the five to be within three days of each other: Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée, Arpège, Alléno Paris au Pavillon Ledoyen, and Astrance. (I seemed to have forgotten about Septime, which is unfortunate.)

Paris is also where I learned of a whisky speakeasy hidden under a sake bar. Absolutely amazing. I already want to go back.

Last year, for Thanksgiving, we took Kitt’s parents to Copenhagen to have dinner at Geranium. This year, we took them to Barcelona. Disfrutar and Tickets were the primary targets, inching us further along the Fifty quest. Barcelona is a hotbed of molecular gastronomy. It was home to elBulli, run by Ferran Adria, well known as the creator of culinary foam. Former chefs from the restaurant started Disfrutar. Ferran’s brother, Albert, has since created a collection of restaurant within a stone’s throw of each other including Enigma and Pakta, which we also managed to get reservations to.

Enigma ended up being the most interesting of the bunch—and maybe the most challenging, too. Dishes included hare brain and squid head. There was also some foie gras, which I personally enjoy. Enigma was fascinating as it moved us through six stations and about 30 courses of food, including a speakeasy at the end.

One last Fifty adventure of the year was a trip to Buenos Aires for Don Julio, a steakhouse, and Tegui, a more “traditional” upscale restaurant with a tasting menu. Of course, I discovered that there’s a Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants list that’s done by the same people who do the World’s list. As such, I made reservations for Mishiguene and Chila.

Mishiguene was a neat experience. It’s very casual but they did a tasting menu that was filling and flavourful. The portions were huge and felt like it could’ve fed a table of four. Chila ended up being the highlight of the trip with great service and amazing dishes. I felt like it deserves to be on the World’s 50 Best.

Ending the year past the halfway mark on the 50 by 50 adventure was very satisfying—and very filling.

Side Adventures

The side adventures have been a lot of fun, too.

With frequent trips to Portland, I’ve tried to get to many of the nice restaurants there and have been delightfully impressed. A return visit to Le Pigeon, for example, wasn’t as gut-busting as the first time I went but was still delicious. I’ve also been to DOC, Beast, Coquine, and Nodoguro. Not to mention the love I have for Bamboo Sushi.

Canada has its own Top 100 list with a handful of restaurants right here in Ottawa: Atelier, who’s head chef once worked at Alinea in Chicago; Riviera; Stofa; and Fauna. Atelier is definitely the fanciest of the bunch but I prefer the slightly more casual experience at the other places. Fauna has been consistent both times I’ve gone. Not on the list are places like Whalesbone and Aperitivo, which were also quite good. It’s nice to see Ottawa’s food scene expand.

Next Year

2020 will bring many more food adventures as I attempt to get to another 15 restaurants or so on the way to completing the 50.

Completing the second half of this adventure gets harder as the restaurants are fewer and farther between.

I already have reservations to Noma, which has returned to Copenhagen after being closed for a couple years. I’m hoping to also do a side trip to Maaemo in Oslo and Frantzen in Stockholm around the same time, which will require short flights from city to city.

I’d like to get to Tokyo, which has three restaurants on the list. Maybe add on an extension to Hong Kong to do the two restaurants there.

Probably the most ambitious will be planning out the possibility of two other trips.

One, to northern Italy. There are three restaurants: Le Calandre, Piazza Duomo, and the venerable Osteria Francescana. But there’s also Hisa Franko that’s a two and a half hour drive to the east, in Slovenia; and Mirazur, that’s a three hour drive to the west, in France. A one or two week road trip through the north of Italy sounds incredible.

The other, equally ambitious adventure, would be a trip to northern Spain, split between Bilbao and San Sebastian, to go to Asador Etxebarri, Nerua, Mugaritz, Elkano, Azurmendi, and Arzak.

Were I able to pull off all four of these trips as desired, I’d be at 46 of the 50 restaurants by the end of the year. Crazy.

Those would be amazing trips, for sure. At the same time, part of the fun of trying to tackle this list is heading off to places I haven’t been before—especially in out-of-the-way places. Hof Van Cleve, sitting out in the middle of rolling green hills, took me to a place I never would’ve picked. Trips to Lima and Buenos Aires were also new adventures to cities and countries I hadn’t been before.

As such, the places that excite me are places like Bangkok, Moscow, and Istanbul.

Onwards

Who knows what, exactly, the new year will bring. I just consider myself lucky to be this far along this journey and hope the new year brings many new adventures.

As the clock turns over an arbitrary time boundary that marks one year from the next, many reflect on their past and make promises of change for the future.

Not one to want to feel left out in such reflecting, I, too, have made promises for the year (and, really, years) ahead. Well, one in particular: be more creative.

Being more creative was purposely vague so as to leave numerous avenues in which to pursue that creativity. Web design and development is assuredly a given, as that’s well within my wheelhouse of skills. Tangentially, I’ve been working to improve my photography and photo editing skills, turning that work into one web project or another. More writing. And cooking.

Each new channel of exploration has become a new way to spend money. There’s a name for this: The Diderot Effect.

The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption which leads you to acquire more new things. As a result, we end up buying things that our previous selves never needed to feel happy or fulfilled.

Photography is fun. Surely, I’d have better photos with that particular camera. Or the latest iPhone. Or that new lens. Y’know, I really need a better camera strap. And a new shoulder bag. Maybe a backpack for particular trips to carry all this gear.

Cooking is fun. Let’s give sous vide a go. I need the plastic tub that is especially designed for the wand. And the wire mesh to hold the food off the bottom. And a cast iron pan would really be better than my 10 year old teflon pans. Oh, and a blow torch for post-bath Maillard reactions. (And maybe try my hand at a crème brûlée while I’m at it.)

Making coffee is fun. Yes, I must have the double boiler espresso machine. And grinder, of course. And knock box. And some lovely cups to go with it.

Oh, I’ll tell you with a straight face that I’m a modern minimalist man but I have a knack for filling up my home with all the latest gadgets in pursuit of something to fill my spare time. In my effort to produce more, I end up consuming more.

Maybe in an effort to be more creative, I should be more creative in accomplishing my goals without all the gadgets.

Right after I buy this thing I need for the kitchen.

It’s April 2019. We’re in Lima, continuing the journey of going to the world’s 50 best restaurants. There are 3 restaurants on the list here in Lima: Astrid & Gaston, Maido, and Central.

It looked like there was availability for all three restaurants and so we booked flights and hotel and then went to reserve the restaurants.

A&G was fine. Maido was great. Central, however, turned out to be full. Turns out, the reservation site for Central shows availability for all of their restaurants and not just Central.

Well, that’s unfortunate. With everything else booked, I added my name to the waiting list. Worst case, we’ll arrive at the restaurant in hopes of any last minute cancellations.

Nothing opened up.

With an evening free, we make the 45 minute walk over enjoying the quiet evening through one neighbourhood to the next until we arrive in Barranco, just as Central is set to open, pleading for a table. No luck. But they had availability at Kjolle. We could have a drink at the bar, Mayo, while we wait for our table.

Fine.

Mayo

As we sat at the bar waiting, they prepared us a drink. The cocktail looked elaborate with a dash of spice on the top placed with precision. It was presented with a platter of inspiration, where we could see the spices used in the drink. The presentation was amazing.

The drinks take some time to prepare—I think we waited for about 15 minutes. I wondered what that place would be like on a busy evening with 100 people all waiting for their drinks.

Dinner

We hadn’t quite finished our drinks when we were escorted to our table on the second floor of the compound. And compound is probably the best way to describe the three restaurants and training facilities surrounded by a high wall. Kjolle, itself, is divided into two sections separated by a glass wall. We’re sat at a table at the back, in a room with a half-dozen tables.

Stunningly, as the place filled, it didn’t get louder. In fact, by the end of dinner, we noticed we couldn’t overhear a single conversation from any other table. The noise management was superb (and most welcome)!

I don’t think I’ve ever been emotionally moved by a plate of potatoes before. The tubers tart was divine. The potato flavour wasn’t too strong. It wasn’t too sweet. It was a perfect combination of taste and texture.

The bread was delicious. The crust was flavourful and tasty with the whipped butter and salsa served with it.

The last two wine pairings were fantastic.

There wasn’t a disappointing dish the whole way through, along with some exceptional ones.

I walked away with a mix of emotions. Happy to have enjoyed such a wonderful meal, sad that we weren’t able to go to Central, curious about how good Central would be, and excited to plan a return to Lima.

If you find yourself in Peru, come to Lima, and enjoy some of the world’s most amazing food at Kjolle.

You’re working on a project and in it you see a button. It looks like a button, it acts like a button. It is a button. It is a <button>. It is a .button.

But is every <button> a .button? Is every .button a <button>?

Let’s take a look at some very specific examples:

We essentially have three different types of buttons:

1. Image-only buttons (the next/previous paddles)
2. Text-only buttons (the cancel link)
3. Like, actual buttons

On most projects, I see developers choose to identify all of these as the same component: the .button.

As a result of trying to shoehorn everything under the umbrella of a single component, we run into a lot of style overrides. The default style is the actual button. And then text buttons need to strip away all those styles. And image buttons have other constraints like handling hover and active states of the images.

1. .button--image
2. .button--link
3. .button

Different Patterns, Different Components

Just because the HTML under the hood is the same, doesn’t mean we need to use the same class for everything. Since we have three different types of buttons, we should identify them as such.

1. .image-button
2. .link-button
3. .button

Or whatever name you want to come up with. (Naming things is hard.)

With each clearly defined, there is no need to override styles to add or takeaway styles applied by other button styles. This simplicity results in less complexity and possibly even less code by not having to override existing styles.

AKA, how I set up my Sony DSLR to use as a webcam.

Unless you’ve only just woken from a months’ long coma and the first thing you decided to do was read my blog, you’re likely aware of (waves arms around) this quarantine. I’ve been home and isolated for two months now. Fun times.

As a result, I’m in a lot of Zoom calls. As a result, I’m envious of the few people with their fancy camera and mic setups. As a result, I decided to do something about it.

First, here are a list of articles of what other people have done to get this going:

• Dan Mall’s setup
• Jesse Gardner’s setup
• Matt Stauffer’s setup

Read them? If so, you may notice as I did that every single one of them use the Elgato Camlink. It’s a hardware dongle that allows you to plug in your camera via HDMI and it’ll be recognized as a webcam.

Cool cool cool cool. Here’s the thing: everybody and their grandmother have clearly read the same articles and ordered themselves the Elgato Camlink. As such, they are sold out everywhere. If you’re in the United States, it seems some people have still been able to get their hands on them. Up here in America’s Hat (i.e. Canada), I couldn’t find them anywhere.

I had pretty much resigned myself to living with the Mac’s FaceTime camera. Is that so bad?

Well, then I came across a YouTube video that perfectly describes how to setup a Sony DSLR as a webcam using a piece of free software called CamTwist.

Awesome!

Well, kinda sorta. It’s a clunky setup that requires me to fire up my camera, then fire up Remote, then fire up CamTwist, then fire up the remote streaming tool of choice.

Except, when I opened up Zoom, it wasn’t recognizing the CamTwist webcam. (Skype seemed to work fine but everybody is using Zoom these days.) Everything I was finding on the web was telling me to downgrade to a previous version of Zoom to allow this to work.

Turns out, as Zoom tried to fix a bunch of security issues, they decided to lock out any unsigned webcams. (This is explained in this Reddit thread.) CamTwist is 10 year old software and isn’t signed. As such, it doesn’t get recognized. To solve this problem, you need unsign Zoom so that it’ll allow unsigned webcams. This feels icky but it worked and since we’re dealing with a global pandemic at the moment, unsigning an app seems like the least of my worries.

Per the instructions in the Reddit thread, you’ll need to have Xcode installed and then you’ll be able to run this line of code:

codesign --remove-signature /Applications/zoom.us.app/

Just like that, you’re in business.

Now, like I said, it’s not ideal. You can’t minimize the Remote app or the webcam doesn’t work. You can’t use Spaces or the webcam doesn’t work. You don’t want to resize the Remote app or CamTwist will show the wrong thing. Remote resets its height and width every time its opened, so best not to mess with it at all.

On the upside, CamTwist is studio software, so you can play with effects and text overlays and even cut between multiple video feeds, if you’re feeling overly ambitious.

So, while not perfect, it’ll do.

Twenty-one billboards dotted around the UNESCO World Heritage city of Vilnius feature photographs of men, women and children wearing masks as part of a ‘Mask Fashion Week’.

The Men’s Milan Fashion Week set for June will be postponed to mid-July and presented in purely digital format with photos and video to avoid the risk

Location Media Resources Collection

Call No. PZ3 .Q22535 2017

Location Media Resources Collection

Call No. PZ3 .H34622 2016

Location Media Resources Collection

Call No. PZ3 .D52538 2017

Edition 初版.

Location Circulation Collection

Call No. PN5370.R45 G85 2016

Publisher 東京 : 東京国立近代美術館, 1991.

Location Circulation Collection

Call No. PN1993 .I645 1989

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Stwertka, Albert, author

Warner, John (John T.), author

Smith, Janice Gorzynski, author