A very well-read journalist today told me that Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future In This Century–On Earth and Beyond by Martin J. Rees, a superbly smart Cambridge professor, is making the rounds of political and economic circles. I read the review in this Sunday’s New York Times and the book seems so profoundly bleak and odd that I need to just quote from the Times reviewer, Dennis Overbye. Mr. Rees is certainly worried about global warming, WMD, and the threat of biological disaster, but it’s the scientitically mind-numbing ones that bother me most. Oy, my heart sinks as I write but this is important (all quotes are from NYT):
‘Engineering advances could lead to the creation of intelligent self-reproducing nanoparticles that could eat us and every other living thing on Earth, reducing the biosphere to what Eric Drexler, one of the pioneers of nanotechnology, calls ”gray goo” — the subject of a recent thriller, ”Prey,” by Michael Crichton.’
‘Certain physics experiments might be even more catastrophic, Rees reports. In principle they could disturb space-time itself, causing the laws of physics to twitch into a new form, like water suddenly freezing to ice, destroying our atoms and everything else. Since we lack a ”battle-tested” theory of what happens at very, very cold temperatures, he says, we would have been right to be worried when a metal bar — part of an apparatus to detect gravitational waves, ripples of space-time predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity — was recently cooled to near absolute zero, making it what Peter Michelson of Stanford University called ”the coldest large object in the universe.”’
‘MORE recently, physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory calculated the odds that a planned experiment, in which atomic nuclei would be accelerated to collide at high speeds, might cause all the matter in the earth to collapse into exotic dense particles called ”strangelets,” extinguishing life, among other things. The risk came out to about one in 50 million. That sounds good, and the experiments commenced without tragedy, but Rees takes no comfort in that, pointing out that the results of the calculation can also be expressed as saying that 120 people might be expected to die from the experiments. Not even the most ambitious physicist would advocate accepting such a price for scientific knowledge.’

I thought I was so cool by subscribing to Salon and by reading more and more content on the Web. Then today, for the life of me, I couldn’t find a very well-written article about creating Favicons (those odd little customized icons you see in your browser’s address line next to its address, unless you use a Mac and IE 5.2 like me) in some Mac magazine, which I think is May 2003’s MacAddict, a hit or miss magazine that is British in is approach to using and thinking about Macs and which makes my skin slightly crawl for some reason that I do not know.

Today, I updated my operating system software (to 10.2.6) and I had to restart the computer. A few seconds later, up popped that fine gray Apple logo with the spinning clock beneath. My daughter looked up, pointed at the monitor, and said “app” and it was both a miraculous and scary moment. Miraculous because she can now associate real objects with their symbolic equivalents. Scary because early branding has just occurred and I realize that there are far worse companies out there seeking to influence her growing mind and emotional development.

Although there are conflicting reports as to the amount of artworks actually returned to Iraq’s art institutions (it appears that most has been found), I’m still fascinated by the so-called “looting” that happened there under U.S. eyes. In fact, I’m less interested in the fact that U.S. troops did absolutely nothing to prevent or apprehend folks from taking the art. I’m much more fascinated by the fact that Iraqi citizens, in their hour of delight or anger, went to the institution of art to recapture the works that they obviously felt were rightfully theirs.
In the 1980s and some of the 1990s, many art critics and curators attempted to make an argument that art must be “recaptured” or “re-purchased” or “re-claimed” by the community or those outside of the traditional governing infrastructures that hold art in its place. This movement, which I admittedly agreed with to some extent, believed that the commodification of art and its place in the hegemonic order needed to be subverted or relieved or perhaps overturned. I wonder (out loud now) if Iraqis didn’t do just that — they took the artwork that they believed is theirs, and used it for their own needs, goals, and symbolic purposes. Did the Iraqis beat us cowardly Americans to it? Or, rather, are art institutions really the governors of our cultural heritage and does all of this lend less credence to our museums and more to the critics aforementioned? Or, on the other hand, if the “looting” was an inside job, were those people who organized the stealing of artworks part of a new order of thief that we could see in the West at some point?
Moreover, where are the “radical” art critics and curators who argued for the literal and symbolic recapture of artwork now that we’ve this activity happen under U.S. watch? What do they have to say? I’m on the lookout but I’m open to the possibility that we’ve turned a corner in our relation to art, art history, and the ownership of aesthetics.

I learned today that there are perhaps about 30 or 40 Jews in Iraq at this time, most of them living religiously underground. This is an incredible commentary on the resiliency of Sephardic Jews living under Arab rule, which since 1948 has been all but impossible. Before the founding of Israel there were about 100,000. It’s possible that this is one of the oldest living communities of Jews in the world — 2,700 years. Their future, like that of all Iraqis, is pretty uncertain but I wonder if the Jews’ fate is more sealed now than ever.

I was exposed tonight to one of the worst and most scary pieces of bad primetime entertainment I’ve ever seen: FOX Broadcasting Company’s show called Mr. Personality. It’s truly terrible but I wonder if I’m the only person in the U.S. who hasn’t yet seen it.
Here’s a synopsis:
1. The show looks as if they hired Stanley Kubrick to design a show in which colorfully masked men date a beautiful woman who apparently can see beyond the mask to the horrendous personalities lurking beneath.
2. The music and the sets looks like they were designed by The Bachelor’s ugly step-sister — it’s all creepy-weird music and cold, sad-looking nouveaux riche manse.
3. The men all drink a lot and seem to really relish their full-face masks.
4. Monica Lewinksy “hosts” the show by sitting on the couch with the bachelorette making small talk about the men who are filmed behind the scenes. Oh, she also reads off an index card during the choosing ceremony. Here’s what it says about her on the Fox website (no joke): “Monica Lewinsky graduated from Lewis and Clark College in 1995 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Psychology. Raised in Los Angeles, Lewinsky currently lives in New York City and is considering a future career in law.” Wha’?
5. You can download printable mask posters on the website as well. No, I’m serious.

Everyone’s talkin’ about Seth Godin’s new book Purple Cow, which I only read parts of and which will be delivered to me momentarily by a pleasant man in a truck. I’m not sure if it’s all that, but I do know that if you buy the book before Thursday, May 15th, Seth will send you the PDF free — just go to Seth’s Blog to find out more. I’m all for free PDFs but here’s what one might do with that cool document once he sends it to you (with apologies to the Surrealists who are increasingly on everyone’s mind as well these days):
1. Use Acrobat to cut it up into 120 individual pages and send it back to him in 120 emails.
2. Read it straight through and be the first person to ever read 120 pages on a monitor in on sitting.
3. Follow his advice and get rich.
4. Sell it on eBay, which is not cool in any way at all.
5. Change every instance of “cow” to “woc” and see where you end up.

My dad was one of the millions of folks that bought a Chrysler K-car in the early 1980s. The car was the worst piece of junk that Detroit every created — the thin metal hood, the tinny speakers, the half-applied paintjob, the underpowered engine, the fake dashboard. Now along comes this crazy-looking Chrysler 300C, which is really and truly beautifully designed. It has all the exterior artfulness of a 1930s sedan and the look of a really mean, though less elegant, Bentley.
I’m sure I’ll never own one. But I find it very interesting that Detroit (and also Germany) are releasing more expensive, larger, and better engineered sedans as the American economy ostensibly continues to stink (meaning less buyers) and SUVs continue to stall (meaning more buyers).

My friend and colleague Ravi SIngh has redesigned his site to even better reflect his ongoing interests, such as photography, design, weblogs, and application development. I’m always interested in seeing the organic evolution of Web design through the microscope of personal sites. Inevitably, there seems to be a design trend toward orderliness and stability, with a lot of logical interface design placed in for good measure. It’s as if all interfaces, from television to mobile phones to software to websites, are converging and design standards are being borne out. Is this a good thing? And how can we know? What are the new criteria for strong interface design? (I know you cannot answer these questions here online but I may implement a commenting board sometime soon.)

Boy, I hate it when bloggers post pathetic links touting their status on the Web, mostly because having status on the Web is akin to being alive.
Be that as it may. Hereforth is Alexa’s listing of the 45 sites that posted links to MANOVERBOARD.com. And even more egomanically, here is the listing of the cool sites that link to Deckchairs on the Titanic. I am so sorry. This won’t happen again.