Space exploration continues; Russian cargo rocket blasts off for space station. - MercuryNews

"NASA chiefs 'repeatedly ignored' safety warnings" - Don Nelson, retired mission operations evaluator, in UK's Observer.

Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart this morning over Texas.

Tardblog. True, but not for the faint-hearted.

Richard Dawkins almost makes genetics entertaining.

For anyone who has had to sit through this sort of thing: If the Gettysburg address were butchered on PowerPoint.

Art historians continue to argue over Leonardo da Vinci.

At the UN, on Weds., Colin Powell will reveal intelligence info that clearly demonstrates Iraqis hiding weapons. - MSNBC

From the Onion - Skeptic Pitied.

Michael Kelly's latest column in the Wash. Post - "Marching with Stalinists" tells us who is really behind the "peace" marches and who they're marching with.
More of the same in National Review.
- (from my friend Jason G.)

Wash. Post - By a voice vote, the Senate voted to ban funding for the Total Information Awareness program. Excellent.

Innovation is inefficient. More often than not, it is undisciplined, contrarian, and iconoclastic. It nourishes itself with confusion and contradiction. This makes America the ideal place for innovation - Nicholas Negroponte.

Run Al, Run. (Sharpton, that is). Let's send him $20.

I actually learned something today - about The Golden Ratio.

"They" want to get at file-swappers through their ISP's. In the Inquirer - a brit tech mag.

In USA Today: Front-line troops disproportionately white, not black. Numbers refute long-held belief.

Show's we watched last monday: PTI with Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon.
Then Sportscenter and The Screensavers. Then on the History Channel we watched Mail Call and Peter Woodward's show Conquest.
A fine night of most of my favorite shows.

A few months ago I recommended Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, a statistical inquiry into the claims of Wild Environmentalism, as a refutation of the Greens/Socialists. He has so upset them that a Danish committee has charged him with scientific dishonesty, but in the finest Stalinist tradition, they provided no evidence. Reason Magazine and The Economist try to explain. Lomborg replies.

Steve Wozniak was on Screensavers the other day. I like that guy. He made a pro-libertarian comment and showed off his Segway (which he'd brought in his Hummer). My kind of genius.

Berkeley mayor fined for stealing free papers. Unlike a certain high school principal.