Another Shuttle mission, another NASA comission. Colby seems most impressed with the failure to heed the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's comments about PowerPoint. Me, I dunno. You can produce poor engineering on a typewriter just as well as a computer screen. The day this latest mission was launched, I read a quote from a NASA flack crowing over the achievement of launching, while following all the recommendations of CAIB, particularly the "reforming our culture" part. This seemed nonsensical to me. How do you reform a culture? And how do you tell if it's reformed? And indeed, it seems that the culture remains unreformed.

No, the part that struck me was the section (the minority report is Appendix A.2, starting on page 188) labelled "Requirements". You gotta know why you're there, everything else -- risk acceptance, engineering tradeoffs, etc., flows from that. This section reads like a discussion of organizational processes and documentation systems, but it's really a discussion of the soul of American space flight. And the fundamental problem is that there is no articulated mission, at least not one that the folks who are supposed to carry it out can understand. It's as if, on some level, NASA management actually accepts that the whole Shuttle program has been a stupid waste of time, money, and American lives.

The best essay I've yet seen on same-sex marriage. (Props Pinole Creek.)

Quiet streets, big houses. Blue sky, crystal sands and azure sea. Safe -- people leave their doors unlocked at night, and their children play together. Mostly religious, yes, but accepting of the secular among them. And a very strong sense of community, of building something together, building something larger than yourself, and important.

Yes, the Israeli settlements. Paint it like this, and I too would have to be dragged away, kicking and screaming.