Wes Phillips

I saw this article about a counterfeit antique coin last week and didn't give it a second thought. <I>So what?</I> I muttered. <I>It just shows scammers were ever with us.</I>

"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.

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.

I've been kicking myself for years for not saving the copy of <I>The New York Times</I> in which Hans Fantel wrote about hearing Bruno Walter's 1938 performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony.