Stephen Nash

Rondo dwarf galago of Tanzania, by Stephen Nash/Conservation International

Seurat

Alex Hillman Family Foundation
The rarely exhibited drawing “Square House,” conté crayon on paper.
“Georges Seurat: The Drawings” is at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400, through Jan. 7.

Among the Ruins

Photo: David W. Dunlap/The New York Times
The landmarked Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island.

1958 Ford Edsel

From the brochure collection of Steve Hayes

Ron van der Ende

Sputnik (Sputnik1): 2006: Bas relief: Recycled wood
230x200x18cm
http://www.artbbq.nl/ron/menu-eng.htm

Tom Hanke

German artist Tom Hanke of surrealien created a wallpaper that is specifically designed for your room, taking into account the exact placement of the door, light switches, and electrical outlets.

Marc Newson

Photo: Richard Harbus for International Herald Tribune

The spaceplane (interior designed by Marc Newson) was unveiled in Paris last week by its manufacturer, Astrium, part of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, as the latest challenger in the space tourism market.

Astrium plans to take people into space and straight back again. It expects to charge up to €200,000, or about $265,000, for a ticket when commercial flights start in 2012. Another competitor, Space Adventures, will offer multimillion-dollar eight-day holidays at a space station. When Astrium contacted Newson's design studio in early January, it had already completed the engineering of the spaceplane as a single craft with both jet and rocket engines. Most of the other leisure spacecraft will consist of a mother ship and a rocket. Astrium's jet engines will take the spaceplane, its pilot and four passengers to 15,000 meters, or about 49,000 feet, the rocket engine will power it to 60,000 meters, and the craft will then float up to zero gravity at 100,000 meters. It will return to Earth under its own power, landing like a conventional aircraft."They had engineered the basic configuration, and gave us an empty shell to design the interior and everything else relating to the passengers," explained Newson. "Obviously you have to respect the basic dimensions of the cabin and safety issues. Beyond that, it's a question of trying to understand the conditions that passengers will have to withstand, without losing sight of the ultimate goal of enhancing their experience of being in space."

Aaron Muszalski

Wood-burning

Until last month, Americans could admire Antonio Citterio’s Shaker wood-burning stove, which won Germany’s prestigious Red Dot design award in 2006, but they couldn’t have one — unless they were willing to pay extra to ship it from Europe and forgo fire insurance, because most insurance companies won’t write policies for homes with stoves that aren’t approved for use in the United States. To the rescue: Wittus Fire by Design of Pound Ridge, N.Y., the sole distributor of the Shaker stove in North America. Alyce Wittus, the company’s vice president, discovered the stove, made by Skantherm in Germany, on a buying trip to Europe and had it U.L.- and U.L.C.-rated for safety. The initial shipment of 30 has already sold out, but Ms. Wittus is expecting a new one any day. The Shaker model, left, weighs nearly 300 pounds and costs $4,280. (A model with a long bench is $4,780.) Information: (914) 764-5679 or wittus.com. Linda Lee: NYTimes

Lake Ontario

Photo: James Rajotte for The New York Times

A ship carrying road salt pulls into the Port of Oswego, N.Y., on Lake Ontario. The lake’s water level has dropped three inches during this month alone.

Turkey

Photo: Associated Press

Turkish soldiers patrolling the province of Hakkari, near the Turkish-Iraqi border.

Malibu

Photo: Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times

Lake Mead

Photo: Simon Norfolk/NB Pictures, for The New York Times

Draining

The 100-foot-high bathtub ring left by the dwindling waters of Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam.

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21water-t.html?ref=magazine

Clint Eastwood

As Blondie in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
1966
Dir: Sergio Leone

San Francisco, California