Alexis C. Madrigal

The day is upon us. Rumored and discussed for months and months, Verizon is widely expected to announce that Apple's iPhone will become available on its network soon, possibly even later this month.

If you follow tech news, you know that this story will consume everyone and that every minor detail and angle will be written. After the details are released, we're going to keep a tight focus on the two big consumer questions: 1) If you're a Verizon customer, should you buy the first-generation Verizon iPhone or wait? 2) If you're an AT&T customer and you think that network is failing you, should you switch?

The Noun Project is a website dedicated to the cataloging and distribution of icons from around the world. Some they've taken from public domain sources like the United States Park Service (like the radio icon). Others they've created from scratch (like the bomb). In all cases, you know exactly what the icon represents and can use it in your own creations. They may remind you of Gerd Arntz's "isotypes," which were an attempt to create a visual language of the socialist worker.

The site's run by Edward Boatman, an LA-based designer. Though his campaign on the micropatronage site Kickstarter asked for just $1,500 to get the site up and running, he received more than $13,000 in donations.

The idea is simple, the execution is excellent, and the icons are remixable. We love this project. And it's only going to get better. With the Kickstarter funding in hand, the site will become categorized and searchable soon.

Via Tim Carmody.

Should your emails have the same legal protection as your letters?

LAS VEGAS -- At the official end of the Consumer Electronics Show, another grueling ritual takes over. Everything that came into Vegas has to go back whence it came. The booths are packed up. Trucks are loaded. Small exhalations of relief and satisfaction puff up from the exhibitors even before they've finished the task of loading out.

I wandered the halls and loading docks of the convention center watching this mini-city get pulled apart at the seams and packed neatly into heavy plastic cases. You'll find photos of that operation below.

But the best moment I captured was out on the loading docks. I could not believe how many different types of wheeled vehicles were being used to move people and things around. All sizes and shapes were represented, and not a single car was among them. I felt like I'd landed on the Galapagos Island of automobile technology. Here were undiscovered branches of the car evolutionary tree and each specimen was perfectly adapted to its role in the ecosystem.

I could have stood there forever watching the rough choreography of skilled work.

LAS VEGAS -- The more time I spent wandering the great halls of the convention center, the more I grew obsessed with how conference booths were designed. From the choice of floor covering to the arrangement of products, every company was trying to say something, even if it wasn't always clear what.

The oddest manifestation of this newfound interest is the gallery you see above. It's a bunch of (mostly) stock photos that different companies used to illustrate their products. Stock photos like this tell you nothing about a product, obviously. They could be used to sell salad or cell phones. Stock photos are photographic emoticons. They tell you how a product will make you feel.

I found all these particular specimens in South Hall, but they were scattered pretty evenly throughout the thousands of booths. I'd say one in four booths made heavy use of them, though not all stock photos are quite as ridiculous as these.

LAS VEGAS -- "Hey, man, do you want a free beer?" the bearded man asked as I walked by his booth. Like any good conference attendee, of course I said yes. He handed me a card. On one side, there was an image of Jesus Christ with an Xbox 360 controller in his hands, a headset in place of a crown of thorns, and a Twitter bird on his arm. On the other, there were the details for a USB stick giveaway, and the note that for four hours a day, they'd be giving away free Sam Adams bottles to passersby.

 "Are you a Christian game developer?" I asked.
 "No," he said. "We are just here telling people that Jesus loves them, making sure they hear that Jesus loves them."

This is the GameChurch.com booth, which consisted largely of tattooed, skater-style hipsters wandering around talking about Jesus and videogames. It turns out GameChurch is a Christian gaming website. Their slogan: "We are all for killing pixels on a screen but loving people in real life. Love Without Agenda."

The site is part of Fireproof Ministries, a site founded by Craig Gross, a former youth pastor with edgy hair. Gross aims to spread the word through "culturally relevant" programs, reaching people outside traditional church events. GameChurch is actually a junior member of Fireproof's website network. The original site was XXXchurch.com, which tries to connect with people making or looking for pornography.

XXXChurch actually sent a team to the Adult Entertainment Expo with a simple message: "Jesus loves porn stars." Or as the man at the GameChurch booth explained, "Jesus loves porn stars. He loves people wherever they're at."

LAS VEGAS -- You've seen them countless times. They pervade cities, suburbs, truck stops and bars, but you probably haven't thought about where all those LED signs touting an ATM or coffee actually come from. You haven't imagined the global supply chain that delivers them from somewhere in Asia to your local 7/11. But there is one.

The signs you're looking at here were made by a company called GTK Systems, a three-person global enterprise. Jitender Saggu makes these signs in Delhi, but he's been itching to break into the US market. So, he called his brother and sister-in-law, Pavinder and Meenu, and asked if they wanted to give the LED sign business a go. For the last several months, they've been preparing for CES, hoping to find some places to distribute these signs.

GTK is just one startup in the global LED signage market, and a fledgling one at that. But it's a jumping off point for a powers-of-10 mental experiment in the scale of the world's commercial networks. This one company -- three people spread between California and Delhi -- is a tiny player in the LED signage market. The LED signage market is itself a subset of the overall digital signage market. Which itself is a small piece of the overall consumer signage and consumer electronics markets. Which are themselves very thin slices of the American economy, which is a small but significant chunk of the world economy.

But when I pull money out of an ATM machine selling itself with one of these signs, I touch the entire web not just in the money itself, but all the other pieces of that system. Here, you could find the people who make ATM casings and the people who make the boards inside and the keypad makers and the card readers and the networking technology. For that reason alone, CES is worth visiting.

LAS VEGAS -- If anything is true, it is that Las Vegas has the most awesomely bad carpets in the world. The Convention Center, airports, and hotels collectively show a stupefying dedication to installing bad-trip psychedelic carpets. Perhaps they introduce massive amounts of cognitive noise, thereby distracting gamblers from their profit-losing enterprise. Maybe an evil sorcerer cursed the town long ago, following a dust-up with a conniving magician promoter. Whatever the reason, these carpets exist, and that should be enough to make you question this whole idea of Western civilization.

LAS VEGAS -- Two retired cops, one from New York, the other from Dallas, were sitting on a black faux-leather couch off a hallway of Central Hall. Both are men of a certain age. Bruce Powell, the Texan, has a glorious belly and moves like an old athlete, creaky but graceful. He calls the New Yorker, Artie Mahor, his partner. Artie, dapper in a surprising pink shirt, is the suspicious type, and he's not too sure he wants a reporter sniffing around the CES security apparatus. He would be the bad cop, at least from my perspective. In fact, he'll later tell me that he thinks "the press is a greater threat to the security of the United States than Osama bin Laden." And he tried to look me in the eye while he said it. But terrorists don't like to make eye contact, so I laughed into my shoes.

There's a woman in the room, too. Mrs. Davidson, I think I hear her called. She's the sweet, silent type and listens with admirable patience as the boys tell her stuff that it seems impossible she could care about.

They'd just finished lunch when I wandered into their midst and sat down. Powell was finishing up a Coke, which he got up to throw away. On his way back in, he let forth a tremendous belch, a and excused himself. "One Coke and look at me," he said. He struck me like a gentleman. Or at least he seemed gentle, with his nicely combed gray hair, hearing aids, and made-for-walking sneakers. You wanted him to be your grandpa and teach you how to fix a car or use a band saw. He now lives in Arkansas near the Crater of Diamonds State Park.

There'd been a third ex-cop in the room before. A guy by the name of Ron Duffy, who was one of the higher-ups in the Consumer Electronics Show security team. He'd been a Chicago beat cop, and took a joking (but real) pleasure in being the boss of Powell, who retired as a captain.

Duffy was cut from a different cloth from either of the other, too. His passion was drag racing, and he even brought out photos of his son's hotrod to prove it. He got his start in the part-time convention security business at the McCormick Place convention center in Chicago. He'd been helping guard CES shows for 17 years, since back in the days when the show was held twice a year, once in Chicago and once in Las Vegas.

The key to the job, he said, was to "try to create the atmosphere and perception -- perception! -- that Big Brother is watching." It didn't seem like there was too much crime or punishment going on at the show. In fact, Duffy, out of all those 17 years, couldn't think of a single war story, a single crime, or a single interesting incident. Mainly, he pointed out that doing hired-gun security work was a great way to make some coin in retirement.

He was about the equivalent of a captain, I'd reckon. He had a special go-cart in the hall to help him get around the show to meetings and such. It had his name written on it. There were three other guys like him, and then a security director above them. All the plainclothes security guys had been cops.

Duffy eventually had to run off to a meeting, and I was left with the two other ex-cops. We sat on opposite leather couches in the narrow room with Mrs. Davidson to my left behind a desk. Break time was over and they were readying themselves to head out and inspect the show floor.

I asked if I could come along, the equivalent of a ridealong or something. When Duffy'd been there, he hadn't seemed opposed, exactly, to my presence, but I'd noticed a creeping sense that I wasn't wanted. Mahor didn't like the look of me. Still, I pressed my request.

First, Mahor said if I tagged along all I'd see was them looking at people. Exactly! I said, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. "So I can come along?"

He eyed me. "Have you gotten this cleared?" he asked.

I felt my throat tighten a bit. I felt like he was about to shutdown my house party for not having the right permits. He'd used his cop magic on me.

"Well, no, I haven't run this by anyone, specifically," I said, silently stifling the urge to toss in a "sir."

"No?" he said. "Then you can't come. It's nothing personal."

There was a down beat. The two ex-cops, me, and Mrs. Davidson sat there quietly. Then Powell patted his big hands on his big knees, and pushed off from the couch.

"Ok, killer," he said.

"Truth, justice, and the American way," Mahor said. "Let's go fight some crime."

LAS VEGAS -- The insides of the Las Vegas Convention Center during the Consumer Electronics Show are as manicured as a golf course. The show is a Disneyland for electronics buyers and sellers that gets built in a few days and torn down just as quickly.

Like a Burning Man in which the point is to promote late capitalist commerce, not deny it, everything must be packed in and packed out. The storage area for a lot of the extra stuff turns out to be the parking lot and loading dock behind and between the Central and North Halls.

Seeing this staging area may give you an even better of the scale of the show than the exhibits inside. Plus, check out all those ladders!

LAS VEGAS -- Walking around the CES showroom floor, there is one specific cultural group that stood out to me. (No, it was not the booth models.) A surprising number of Hassidic Jews seemed to be exhibiting at and walking around the show.

When I wondered about that out loud on Twitter, a variety of New Yorkers told your humble West Coast lifer, "Duh, that's because of B&H." Apparently, B&H Electronics was founded and continues to be run by Hassidim.

"Known as 'Beards and Hats' because of the many Hasidic Jews who work there, B&H has become an authentic New York experience," the Associated Press wrote in 2006. "Shopping there is akin to ordering a pastrami on rye at Katz's Delicatessen."

The AP continued: "Ask how business is going and you get this: 'Baruch Hashem,' or 'Blessed be God' -- meaning, roughly, 'Thanks to God, things are good.'"

Like any successful company, some of its employees have gone on to found their own competitors and variations on the theme. So, now there are several electronics distributors run by Hassidic Jews that are here at CES.

I stopped to chat with Asher Shtesl, the CEO of one such company, Ideal Sales of Brooklyn, New York. They're a classic middleman operation: they buy from the manufacturers and they sell to independent electronics stores. They've long focused on photographic equipment but have been expanding their reach into more general electronics. Shtesl said he's built his business from a basement operation 10 years ago into a "multimillion dollar" enterprise now.

And how does being Hassidic impact the business? "People look at us as very honest people," he offered.

Image: Shtesl is flanked by his salesmen Joel Fischbein (left) and Leo Kish (right).