Early this morning, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf coast with 145mph winds. My dear friend Kaye Trammell is an LSU professor in Baton Rouge, and blogging the event as she keeps vigil at her apartment. Another friend from growing up, Ben Legg, is a meteorologist in Lafayette for KLFY - part of a three-man reporting team. And to round things out, Brendan Loy is a local blogger in New Orleans and has maintained updates since Katrina was making landfall in Florida over the weekend.

What do we understand about hurricanes these days? Researchers are walking the careful tightrope of crying wolf and issuing a legitimate warning, so we have a ways to go. The recent National Geographic film, Forces of Nature, has an excellent primer on both the historical and current study of hurricanes. The new PBS series, NOVA Science Now, did an excellent 12-minute piece on current research and eerily focused on New Orleans as the case study.

Friends, stay high and dry and keep your heads!

National Geographic just mailed out its special issue on Africa, complete with a double-sided map of the landscape and the human impact. They've also developed a unique map-based archive of articles on Africa that date back to 1888. Why focus on Africa? Editor Chris Johns explains.

My friend, Matt Diffee, had one of his cartoons in my New Yorker daily calendar this week. Come see his work in the popular Rejection Show on September 13th!

A *New* List Apart from the Zeldman crew and Ruby on Rails. Bravo!

The NY Times explores the intersection of God and science. Be well-informed: National Geographic's cover story, the PBS 7-part series, Dr. Tim Keller's talk on evolution, and Time Magazine's focus on the issue.

I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature. Like St. Augustine in A.D. 400, I do not find the wording of Genesis 1 and 2 to suggest a scientific textbook but a powerful and poetic description of God's intentions in creating the universe. The mechanism of creation is left unspecified. If God, who is all powerful and who is not limited by space and time, chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create you and me, who are we to say that wasn't an absolutely elegant plan? And if God has now given us the intelligence and the opportunity to discover his methods, that is something to celebrate.

I lead the Human Genome Project, which has now revealed all of the 3 billion letters of our own DNA instruction book. I am also a Christian. For me scientific discovery is also an occasion of worship.

Nearly all working biologists accept that the principles of variation and natural selection explain how multiple species evolved from a common ancestor over very long periods of time. I find no compelling examples that this process is insufficient to explain the rich variety of life forms present on this planet. While no one could claim yet to have ferreted out every detail of how evolution works, I do not see any significant "gaps" in the progressive development of life's complex structures that would require divine intervention. In any case, efforts to insert God into the gaps of contemporary human understanding of nature have not fared well in the past, and we should be careful not to do that now.

Science's tools will never prove or disprove God's existence. For me the fundamental answers about the meaning of life come not from science but from a consideration of the origins of our uniquely human sense of right and wrong, and from the historical record of Christ's life on Earth.

—Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, as featured in the August 15th cover story for Time Magazine.

Warning: You may think I've been drinking Koolaid.

Target has just released a series of advertisements celebrating the city of New York through the works of over twenty talented artists. This is not unusual for a company that wrote the book on bringing design to the masses... and receiving major awards for their promotional work.

What is unusual is that Target worked for several months to monopolize the advertising space in this week's New Yorker magazine. Every ad holds fast to the zippy black-white-and-red Target color scheme and cleverly scatters their iconic bull’s-eye logo into each illustration. From the classic (construction worker having coffee in a cafe) to the urban (basketball players flying through the skyline) to the inventive (the Brooklyn Bridge replaced with a red high heel shoe), Target has added a new layer of creativity to their campaign that mirrors the complex citizenry of NYC.

And these efforts haven't gone unnoticed.

Stuart Elliott broke the story in the New York Times, bringing up the obvious question: where's the Target store in Manhattan if you're going to run ads in the New Yorker? Minda Gralnek, Target's creative director, was the first to point out this concern, as well as a solution (there are five Targets in the outer boroughs and over fifty stores in the metropolitan area); to which Elliott quipped: "True, but is there a magazine called The Long Islander, or The New Jerseyan?"

Gothamist queried their readers to get their reactions, which were mixed at best - from love to hate. Pentagram designer Michael Bierut decried the ad series as "unnerving" and "the product of a more nakedly mercenary world."

Liberal Serving hints that a Manhattan store could be on the horizon (especially with folks like Jeff Lang and yours truly already "smitten with Target's classier, more hipster-friendly vibe"). And what's not to love about good design? It's cool to be warm.

Update: Here's a Flickr photoset with all the ads.

Sure to be on MTV this fall: OK Go's new music video. The fight scene is the best part by far. (Honorable mention for Saturday night dancin' in the hizouse: Fatty Koo's "Bounce".)

The hottest small state school: College of William and Mary

Coudal's fishy riddle: Hey buddy, is this your pike?

A new bacon recipe everyday. Dan, Mike and Ian (fine, upstanding compsci kids from the W&M Class of 2001 who celebrate 'Bacon Day' annually), eat it up. (via Airbag)

Who would write the new constitution? Jason loves asking these questions.

My thirteen-year-old cousin emailed me with a simple challenge: "I failed the test, and so will you." So I had to click on the link. (We're all insane.)

Arlington, Virginia to Baikonur Cosmodrome to International Space Station to... the Moon? Space Adventures unrolls its latest expedition: a Soyuz hop-skip-orbit over the lunar surface. What's a $100 million ticket of a lifetime between friends?

Maybe tonight it's gonna be alright. I will get better. Maybe today it's gonna be okay. I will remember. Cities grow, rivers flow; where you are, I'll never know. But I'm still here. If you were right and I was wrong. Why are you the one who's gone and I'm still here. The lights go out, the bridges burn; once you're gone, you can't return. I'm still here. Remember how you use to say I'd be the one to runaway. But I'm still here.
—Vertical Horizon