Oh, no! The world didn’t need a Creation Museum, really

I cringed as I skimmed the Salon article – read the full version if you can stand it.

Adam and Eve frolicking with the dinosaurs? Please.

Mahalo launches alpha. Plumeria flower has got to go

The websphere is bubbling with bets on Jason Calacanis’s new “human-powered” search engine, Mahalo, which launched in alpha yesterday – what’s the point of building something that is so obviously not scaleable, what does it mean to “make judgment calls based on what’s in the best interest of [their] users” (hmm! that’s what it says in the FAQ page), is there a non-obvious business model that they’re not talking about, and so on.

I would like to make a different sort of prediction. As much as I like Hawaii and I love the smell of plumeria (frangipani) flowers in real life, I think Mahalo has chosen a hideous logo and theme for a Web site. If adoption always starts from early adopters (a tautology, I know), and beyond the geek scene (those who couldn’t care less about looks) you need some reasonably stylish people to advocate for the product and be willing to be associated with it in public, then Mahalo is off to a very wrong start, one that smells Florida kitsch and plastic shower curtains from WalMart. I am writing this from home in my 6am solitude, but I wouldn’t be caught dead trying out Mahalo in the office. So, here’s my prediction: before hitting the 10m unique visitors mark, Mahalo needs to ditch the plumeria, design a decent logo and home page theme, and get a graphic makeover by an art director with some sense of style.

Literary quote of the day: W. B. Yeats

The visible world is no longer a reality, and the unseen world is no longer a dream.

Free Hugs in Milan, Italy

Free Hugs were available yesterday, around 7pm.

I was tempted, but shied away.

How often have you had something good offered to you for free, and decided not to take it? Why?

New media, free software, and Jonathan Schwartz’s vision

You can read this post as just a plug for Sun’s OpenOffice, but I am struck by the author’s sharp vision and I’m catching a glimpse of a nobler calling than just getting his stock price back up.

Moreover, just like Jonathan Schwartz, I too still read the paper version of the newspaper.

Online Porn, GOOD Magazine, and a CUTE video

GOOD Magazine, a publishing outfit with an impossibly generic mission, has published a video to present some (unsurprising) stats about online pornography in a creative manner.

There are 11 comments about the video on the magazine’s site, and over 700 on YouTube.

A passionate discussion of what Silicon Valley feels like these days

In case you’ve missed it, here is a post by Mike Arrington on the current mood in the Valley: the discussion is just as interesting, with 150 comments in the first day or so.

The icon character of the first bubble was Po Bronson’s Nudist on the Late Shift (1999); for this one, it may well be the CEO crying on the phone to Arrington because he’s being denied TechCrunch coverage.

On Muslim headscarves and peep-toe shoes

Some personal disclosure, first: I never understood those people who feel most at ease when naked. If you sleep naked, you’re probably one of them. I’m not. I’m most comfortable when fully clothed. I like my arms to be covered by long sleeves, and my legs to be clothed in full-length trousers. I’ve been known to wear gloves about six months a year, especially when riding public transportation. For years, I could not imagine wearing sandals in public, and stuck to sneakers and shoes all summer. The fact that I now own not one but two pairs of peep-toe shoes, even if I rarely wear them, feels to me like an extraordinarily daring act.

The bare shoulder and arm you see in my sidebar picture are a reminder: writing ought to be like getting naked. If I don’t feel some of the same discomfort, I’m not writing candidly enough.

So, here’s a candid reflection on headscarves. I don’t mind the idea of headscarves at all. As long as your face is shown – your expression, your personality, the sparkle in your eye – who cares about whether the rest of you is in plain view or hidden by a scarf?

Yet, our culture – ever since we threw the Victorian whalebone armor into the bonfire – associates freedom with the less restrictive dress codes. More skin, more freedom. It’s hard for us to understand how some women, in cultures that are not so far from ours, may choose to wear a headscarf as liberating. Yet, I have a lot of personal sympathy for this claim. I think I can instinctively understand how a woman, modestly dressed and with her hair covered, might find it somewhat easier to go about her business.

Yet this is not a commonly held view in the West. Ataturk, in the 1920s, decided that banning the Muslim headscarf was a necessary milestone in the secularization of Turkey. (Incidentally, the country just went through a psychodrama over the headscarf-wearing wife of presidential candidate Abdullah Gul, but let’s put this aside for a minute.) So, if – like Turkey, Tunisia, and some Western democracies – you decide to ban the Muslim headscarf from schools and public offices, where should you draw the line? Surely, then, the Polish legislator who is introducing a bill to ban miniskirts and see-through or low-cut blouses is justified too? In the end, that’s probably a more demeaning dress code than the headscarf, and perhaps a ban is healthy, one could argue. Our culture has plenty of instances of demeaning dress codes enforced by tacit agreement – and I don’t mean in Hollywood or Las Vegas. In my country, a member country of G7 and a founding member of the European Union, I have seen corporate cultures where the dress code for women – usually confined to administrative or other low-ranking jobs – involved plunging necklines, miniskirts and high heels. I will repeat it for the sake of my American readers, who may not remember life before Politically Correct: I have seen corporate cultures where, to this day, women are expected to come to the office in plunging necklines, miniskirts and high heels. In the summer, those places look like meat markets. I’d choose full Muslim garb any time.

Of course, at least from a libertarian point of view, banning any sort of harmless personal or religious expression doesn’t make sense. Such a point of view would also argue that, in personal appearance, rules of any kind invite defiance, and therefore defeat themselves. (The Economist reports that in both Turkey and Tunisia “veiling, which a decade ago was confined largely to the tradition-bound poor, has made a middle-class comeback”; at the same time, some of the countries with some of the strictest rules mandating headscarves – Iran, Saudi Arabia – are witnessing “an undercurrent of rebellion against sartorial rules of any kind.”) So, let people wear what they want, perhaps with minimal exceptions for identification documents and the like. Don’t ban anything, or it will come back to haunt you.

Are bans ever justified? Perhaps under revolutionary conditions, when a strong break with tradition is needed (as in 1920s Turkey, and probably even more so in today’s Taliban strongholds?) Or when whoever gets to decide feels that there’s not enough separation between church and state? If I were a ruler in charge of deciding on this criterion, I probably wouldn’t ban anything in Turkey and in France, who are established separationists; yet, I’d be tempted to ban religious displays from schools and public offices in the United States, where those boundaries are a lot more porous.

It is plain to see that the world doesn’t work according to logic. We have a lot of bans that ought to go, and we may engage in intellectual play over some that are never going to happen. Yet, I think if I were to meet Mrs. Gul, we’d probably have more in common than one would first guess. For a start, she probably doesn’t have too many pairs of peep-toe shoes either.

Weekend reading and more: Jonathan Lethem, Tim Powers, Steven Landsburg and P.D. James

I love reading but I can’t seem to go on a healthy diet with a regular intake of books. I alternate starving (these last three weeks or so) and bingeing (last weekend, when I planted myself on a lawn chair and did little else). So, here’s mini-reviews of the latest titles I’ve fed myself.

• Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet: Lethem gets out of his native Brooklyn (Fortress of Solitude, The Disappointment Artist) and goes to Los Angeles to tell us this whimsical story about a dysfunctional band, among art galleries, avant-garde parties and with a not insignificant part played by the LA Zoo. While the prevailing tone is farcical, Lethem’s ear for wordplay hides language gems on almost every page.
• Tim Powers, Three Days to Never: if you’re into time travel, alternate realities, and the Mossad’s most improbably cabalistic experiments, this book is for you. It took me a long time to read the first half, then I accelerated and finished it in one sitting. IMHO, the story would have held up well even without so much Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein.
• Steven Landsburg, More Sex Is Safer Sex: economics professor Steven Landsburg builds on the success of Dubner and Levitt’s Freakonomics and expands on some of his most successful Slate columns to produce an entertaining book (his parents, we’re told, hate the title, but I bet it’s selling better than “Incentives, Externalities and Cost-Benefit Analysis” would have. Oh, and “Applied Statistics” – see Gerd Gigerenzer’s Calculated Risks for more on the dramatic lack of numeracy in our society). A quick read written in an almost-too-accessible style, this is the perfect gift for your libertarian friends and offers several counterintuitive insights. The world is overcrowded? Take the state of Texas, carve it into 500-square-meter subdivisions, and build a home for 4 people on each lot – voilà, you’ve just housed the entire world population. I’ve always thought of other people’s children as imposing negative externalities, especially when they fly within half a dozen rows of my seat, but perhaps I should revisit my judgment. This point is also being driven home to me by…
• P.D. James, The Children of Men: this is a terrific dystopia about the end of our civilization due to a sudden and unexplained infertility of the entire human race. I’m only about halfway through it and I am in awe at P.D. James’s skills – perhaps I should start reading the Dalgliesh novels too? My paperback edition also had the added bonus of Clive Owen’s face on the cover; I haven’t seen the movie, but I am not very inclined to do so, as this book is the opposite of a Hollywood action blockbuster – introverted, meditative, almost philosophical. On a side note, I wonder why it is Canada and Britain that consistently produce the best in the apocalyptic genre, as in The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (whose quiet, elegiac tone seems to me to owe something to P.D. James’s book). Americans, it seems, are too terminally optimistic to entertain such thoughts. Yet, when material like this comes from such capable hands as Baroness James’s, the results are – as American book jackets would say – un-put-downable.

New York vs. Silicon Valley, David vs. Goliath, working at Meetup vs. working at Google

You have to give Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman credit for a creative way to explain his talent value proposition, a GoogleDoc comparing working at Google with working at Meetup (even just the part about the toilets would make it worth the read). Having lived in downtown New York for a few months in my student days, not far from where Meetup is based today (at least going by the reference to the hair salon on Astor Place), I have a lot of empathy for the guy. What do you think?