James Fallows has an good piece in this month’s Atlantic Monthly (teaser only online to non-subscribers, alas). Yesterday’s events in the UK make it a great piece.

Fallows argues that the “war” on terror should be declared over because of the successes the US and its allies have had (dispersing al-Qaeda, foiling plots, etc) but mostly because calling this protracted struggle a war plays right into terrorists’ hands.

Perhaps worst of all, an open-ended war is an open-ended invitation to defeat. Sometime there will be more bombings, shootings, poisonings, and other disruptions in the United States. They will happen in the future because they have happened in the past (Oklahoma City; the Unabomber; the Tylenol poisonings; the Washington, D.C.-area snipers; the still-unsolved anthrax mailings; the countless shootings at schools; and so on). These previous episodes were not caused by Islamic extremists; future ones may well be. In all cases they represent a failure of the government to protect its people. But if they occur while the war is still on, they are enemy “victories,” not misfortunes of the sort that great nations suffer. They are also powerful provocations to another round of hasty reactions.

Hasty reactions. A good tagline for what will surely ensue after yesterday’s anti-terrorism victory. Boing Boing chronicles the new idiocy:

Check out this article from Asheville, NC. “Maya Leoni, who is held by Angela Perez, cries as her mother, A.J. Leoni, pours the last of her drink into the receptacle while in line for the security checkpoint at the Asheville Regional Airport.”

POUR IT INTO A RECEPTACLE? Don’t you think that some of these potentially explosive liquids might be more dangerous when, I don’t know, mixed in a big vat in the middle of an airport?

Christ, why don’t they just have people put their liquids into a big bonfire?

If we overreact to this plot — tremble, retrench, withdraw, not think — it will be little better than if the bombs had gone off.

To tide you over until the next meal.

Voting on panels for next year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference is open. Remember this is purely a popularity contest and that I will send you a postcard from Austin if you vote for my panel. (Note that the list of available panels randomizes itself on load to prevent giving precedence to those near the top. Lovely!)

The woman who cuts my hair has no e-mail address. She can only be contacted via MySpace. Now, I don’t profess to understand what the hell is going on at MySpace, but this seems a bit extreme no? Also, the name she uses in the salon isn’t her real name. The salon gives hairdressers fake names to ensure that they are mutually distinct enough not to be confused over the phone during appointment-making. Persona in MySpace; persona at work.

Propelled by Digg and del.icio.us, the LEGO mosaic post was shooting all over the ‘tubes last week. Off to the bandwidth races!

During this deluge Holly posted a link to a similar project of hers, effectively puncturing a hole in the bottom of the tub and flooding her site too. And what a site it is. Cracks me up. Hollyrhea: highly recommended.

Books that, when released, I’ll dump what I am reading at the time for: The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers and The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. (Oh, anybody know what Neal Stephenson is up to?)

And lastly, to the terminally dorky I ask: Why is there no way to convert an RSS feed to a webcal feed? C’mon people.

Almost exactly two years ago I had a true bonding experience with my son watching a garbage truck in front of our house dump its whole load on the street to try to figure out what piece of trash inside it was on fire. Garbage men, policemen, firefighters, and a bulldozer: does it get any better than that?

Well, apparently it does. I have just learned that the small town in northwestern Illinois where my parents have a home is host to — wait for it — a demolition derby using farm combines. Let me apply some formatting to that: a demolition derby using farm combines. And not just any combines but decrepit, rusty-blade-whirling junkers ready to be auctioned off as scrap. Forget summer in the city. I want to see this rural answer to robot wars. Can you imagine the carnage? How onlookers don’t get pierced with shrapnel I have no idea. I am willing to risk it.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the establishment of my primary e-mail address . Maybe not such a big deal, but I wonder how many people are using the same address and account after a decade. I don’t mean aliases or forwarding services, I mean the actual account tied to an address. Where would you even find stats on this?

Mindspring, by the way, was a small ISP founded in Atlanta in 1994. It was acquired by Earthlink six years later. I’ve always liked the Athena reference.

You may be wondering if the baby has come yet or not. The answer is no and the reason is obvious. Vito the Fetus (the in uteronym) is waiting to come later today. In fact, it is waiting just long enough for us to shove the kids off to their grandparents for the long weekend and to settle down to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary in some semblance of peace. Yes, today marks one decade since my girlfriend Robyn had the striking lapse in reason of saying “I do” when posed the fateful question. So now, as we wait for the birth of our child and the next “happiest day of our lives” I’m reminded of that first happiest day ten years ago. I thought I knew then how lucky I was, but of course that’s silly. Only looking back on what a special woman, amazing wife, and devoted mother Robyn has become can I even begin to compute the staggering odds against me finding someone so perfect.

For the rehearsal dinner ten years and one day ago I created a video of photos, music, and hilariously terrible on-screen graphics using two VHS decks and a 75MHz Gateway PC. We watched it again today. For one, it was way too long. I don’t know what the hell the audience was thinking while I stood up there and narrated, but each of the photos was on-screen for like 10 seconds. Interminable. Get this clown off the stage. But the really funny thing is that in the course of dubbing the tapes I screwed up somehow and spliced in a Home Shopping Network channel audio feed. This wasn’t heard at the dinner because my audio tape was separate from the video (high tech synching involved me signalling to my brother to press play on the deck across the room — I’m so ashamed), but watching it again with the HSN audio was truly surreal. Basically HSN 1996 sounds different in no way from HSN 2006. Still hawking the same crap with the same plastic enthusiasm. The dubbed video was a crazy blend (dare I say mashup) of nostalgia and hucksterism.

That last line may have seemed like an ironic comment on marriage, but no. Now if you will excuse me, we have to prepare for Vito who would like nothing more than to share a birthday with our anniversary.

One of the best things about not travelling is settling back into the warm embrace of routine. There I said it. Though the over-routinized make up a huge part of the IT geek pool and though they suffer my lighthearted mockery for it, I will admit here, now, that there is something to be said positively for having a bit of routine in one’s life. For example, going to the bathroom. Now, this may have something to do with my work in China where toilets aren’t — how to say — well, they aren’t toilets at all. Being back in my office in Chicago reminds me how much I love the facilities here. So, having spent some time getting to know them again, I am reminded that others too have very predictable behaviors, especially as they relate to Human Bathroom Interaction (HBI). Here, then, are the gross (ahem) categories into which I put my colleagues, all male, obviously:

The Bold Enterer – This is the guy who slams the bathroom door open and forcefully strides in as though he were The Law come to confront some poker-playing desperado in a dusty saloon. Or perhaps he’s just being strong and willful in case some executive is washing his hands and might take notice of his initiative.

The Stall Jiggler – This is the guy who won’t take no for an answer when he encounters a locked stall door. Buddy, if the door doesn’t give way on the first pull that means there is someone in there. To continue to try to obtain entrance suggests that you know the throne is occupied and causes one to worry about your motives. Back off.

The Spy – Perhaps the opposite of the Jiggler is this guy, who stealths about in the bathroom peering through cracks, looking under stall walls, and generally thinking he is a lot more sly than he is as he seeks to ascertain availability. What’s needed maybe is a red light-green light availability indicator, ala airplane lavatories and old-time Catholic confessionals. And speaking of confessions …

The Chatter – I’m sorry, but I simply don’t approve of cell phone conversations while you are relieving yourself. Do you think the other party can’t hear? Do you think I can’t hear? The sad part is that most of the discussions aren’t personal in nature at all. This guy is carrying on business. While crapping. This is not right.

Mr. Efficient – This is the guy who speeds into the bathroom (not boldy, just hastily), targets the first open stall, and has performed his transaction and washed up in not more than 90 seconds. This man has a goal and he accomplishes it. Task checked off the list. He’s most likely a project manager.

The Turnabout – This is the guy who seeks privacy above all else. He’s related to The Spy but the moment he learns that the stalls are not completely empty he turns on his heel and heads out or, amusingly, stops to wash his hands — surely a communication to the other fellow in the stall saying “you think I left because you were here, but in fact I came in only to stretch my legs and wash up.” Yeah, right.

Any others that I’m missing?

The Interactive portion of the venerable culture festival known as South by Southwest concluded this week. I was there for much of it before departing for a somewhat hellish two days in Beijing (“East by Far East “). The event was one nerdgasm after the next. “Digital creatives” from all around crowded panels, keynotes, and the hallways to suckle the free wifi and listen to how They Too Could Be Web 2.0 or how they could design the next community app. In fact the conference was a great example of a community simultaneously inhabiting the virtual and physical realms. Attendees in the audience chatted in giant IRC rooms that corresponded to the individual panels often with the speakers on the platform chiming in backchannel or replying in the real world. As this was my first SXSW I can’t compare to previous events, but people told me this time it was more entrepreneurial in flavor, less tools-based. Sure, there were panels on CSS, but mostly topics were on community and startups or abstract concepts like convergence, a buzzword on which I blathered.

The best part by far of course was meeting people. Networking and beer-drinking is built right into the conference proceedings. You have to love that after-event parties are listed in the program. And attendees were genuinely interested in talking. You never quite knew who you’d be standing next to. Chances were high he or she had just sold a company to Yahoo or Google, but you know, so what? So might you soon. The Austin tech scene was well represented. So was the Chicago scene, such as there is one — and that pleased me. Chicago design mavens Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners and Jason Fried of 37Signals delivered the opening keynote and basically entreated the crowd to drop complexity, focus on creative entrepreneurship and then wait for the money to pour in. The crew from Threadless was there too, a great example of doing just that. (Maybe there’s a chance for a Chicago company-funded party next year along the lines of Seattle’s South by Northwest bash? South by Midwest?)

As a guy from IBM, perhaps the former paragon of complexity, I was pleased to be mostly taken on my own merits. It usually doesn’t happen that way. There’s a kind of stigma of respect when I normally tell people I work for the ‘BM. It is almost always positive, mind you, but the fact I work for IBM often overpowers anything I might offer individually. Not at SXSW. People didn’t much give a shit. I liked that. Hell, Craig Newmark of craigslist told me he worked for IBM for 17 years prior to quietly changing the world. See there’s hope.

OK, no more compass puns. That’s my direction anyway. Oh god, jetlag delirium.

Sitting in an afternoon panel at SxSW today I started a post on how I thought my panel in the morning went. I was thinking, gee, it would be nice to have a transcript when I looked up – literally to the guy sitting in front of me – and goddamn but he had one up on his screen.* I asked where he got it. He said, “Oh this is my site. I type fast.” And that is the essence of SxSW.

My panel? Oh it was on a concept that I didn’t really agree with. In fact, neither did my co-panelsts, David Pescovitz of Boing Boing and David-Michel Davies of the Webby Awards. Standing in line as we waited for our credentials a staffer looked at the title of our panel “Convergence and Transformation: A Whole New Creative World” and said quite disdainfully “What in the hell is that?” I shrugged. Sometimes that’s the best panel to be on though.

It was actually a lively discussion. The consensus from the panel was that it is not technology that is converging – tools diverge and proliferate to suit new tasks, after all – but that there is such a thing as convergent experience and in fact human beings crave experiences that unite, filter, and simplify – the more so in the face of multiplying tools, features, and media.

My particular take on the issue was to suggest that designers draw lessons from evolutionary biology. At the species level and above life does not converge at all. And in the rare case that it does – as with the horse and the donkey – it yields infertile life forms. There’s no convergence below the species level either, but there is certainly recombination, genetic in this case, which you might think of as a simultaneous divergence and convergence. A philosophy of recombinant design, I offered, is one where experiences are allowed to emerge by virtue of the remixability of your offering. Or, put differently, recombinant design is design as if your goal was to make designers of your customers. Consumer-as-producer, DIY media. Not terribly novel, I admit, but then no one threw me off the dais either.

[*} Not verbatim. I talked a lot more and made a lot less sense in reality.

SxSW 2006 is less than two weeks away. This will be my first trip to the fest/conference/party excuse, though in certain ways both my professional and family center of gravity is in Austin (OK, one of my centers of gravity).

Because the speakers and bands and screenings simply won’t provide enough stimulus some folks have created the SxSW Interactive Playpen. Done wrong it could be as grimy and soulless as the free building areas of LEGO stores; done right — and there’s no reason to believe it won’t be done right — it could be a hell of a lot of fun. Can’t wait.

Oh, I’m also a panelist on the first day: Convergence and Transformation. That’ll be fun too. Bring some LEGO blocks.

Fellow Chicagoans Jason Fried and Jim Coudal are the keynotes.

Gonna be there and want to meet up? Let me know:

I’ve had some amazing moments of social serendipity lately. Call it the “small world” phenomenon or six degrees of separation minus most of the degrees, but frankly it is a bit odd. And, even though I’ve recently joined LinkedIn to explore my network of professional contacts once-, twice-, and thrice-removed, technology hasn’t contributed at all to what’s been going on.

Last week at the Special Olympics basketball tourney I wrote about I met a mom of one of the participants, a woman named Alison Leland. She was reading the New York Times in the bleachers so, this being middle-class Texas, I immediately knew she wasn’t like most of the other families there. Turns out, Ms. Leland is the wife of the late Texas congressman Mickey Leland. I only knew a bit about Mickey Leland: the causes he championed, the foes he made, the way he died. Forward a few days to New York City where I was meeting with some of the staff of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture and where, just for conversation’s sake, I mentioned this small world encounter with Ms. Leland. The team looked at me and said, “You know, the idea for this museum was Mickey Leland’s.” Hmm, small world.

This week I also learned about a computer scientist doing some interesting work in Arabic machine translation who one of my colleagues holds in very high regard. Her name is Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, a distinctive name to be sure and one that rang a bell. Now, I’m not certain of the connection, but it seems that she must be related (daughter?) to Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the father of population genetics, author of the seminal History and Geography of Human Genes, and mentor of IBM’s globetrotting co-principal on the Genographic Project Spencer Wells — a project of which I am a part. Genetic forensics, indeed!

Then last night. A friend of ours lent my wife a book she loved to help us in our struggle to find a name for our third child, due in May. It was called The Baby Name Wizard by Laura Wattenberg. This of course is also the name of the much-lauded online app (also known as NameVoyager) from last year that dynamically maps the popularity of names over time and which was created by Martin Wattenberg, Laura’s husband, and an IBM colleague of mine. I had no idea there was a book to accompany the site.

What does this prove? If the connections between the pairs of people and myself in each of these examples was a little less random it might suggest a widening professional circle. But two of the three pairs intersect my personal life too.

Oh, how I’d love this web visualized. Martin, are you listening?