LATEST ADDITIONS

I told no one about this, I swear, yet everyone seems to know. Word spreads like vermin. All eyes are up to the ceiling. As we walk down the halls of our Madison Avenue office, we hold a suspicious and trembling view of the dirty gray panels which hang, tentatively, above us. We are wary and watchful, cautiously anticipating the sudden fall.

"You've taken on a design challenge and come up with a solution that's been widely admired and won you accolades. But a year or so later, you realize you made a mistake. There's something horribly wrong with your design. And it's not just something cosmetic — a badly resolved corner, some misspaced type — but a fundamental flaw that will almost certainly lead to catastrophic failure. And that failure will result not just in embarassment, or professional ruin, but death, the death of thousands of people.

"You've taken on a design challenge and come up with a solution that's been widely admired and won you accolades. But a year or so later, you realize you made a mistake. There's something horribly wrong with your design. And it's not just something cosmetic — a badly resolved corner, some misspaced type — but a fundamental flaw that will almost certainly lead to catastrophic failure. And that failure will result not just in embarassment, or professional ruin, but death, the death of thousands of people.

On deadline? Need statistics to back up your project? Here's what you need.

Drinking vessels of antiquity.

Richard Ouzounian wishes Samuel Beckett a happy centeniary. Well, if it's Beckett we're talking about, "happy" isn't precisely the word we want&mdash;and Beckett was all about <I>le mot juste</I>.

If you were sending a shout out to an alien species, what would you say? Here's what Cosmic Call sent via a 70m telescope in the Ukraine. Let's hope our fellow sapient species are brighter than I am&mdash;I had to click through to the translation.