According to UPI’s Thomas Houlahan, dubya isn’t serious about going to war with Iraq anytime soon. According to Houlahan, we would have a lot more tanks in the region if we meant business.

From the extremely Web-challenged L.A. Times (because I can’t find anywhere else to link to it), comes this latest column from Robert Scheer, in which he argues that Colin Powell is being a good soldier by dutifully pretending that the Bush administration’s lies on Iraq are credible.

One of my favorite science writers, Timothy Ferris, has a nice column running in the New York Times: At Dawn, the Columbia.

With the help of my friend Hiro, who found what I was looking for in NASA’s amazing sprawl of web content, I’ve put up a wiki page highlighting photographs taken by the crew of the space shuttle Columbia. It’s a tribute, if you will, to the courage and vision they displayed in making their journey.

So, as someone posted in reply to my 1996 essay predicting another shuttle disaster, and my subsequent apology to “all the hard-working folks at NASA,” posted in April of last year, “if only you’d been right on that one.” If only. But with the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think it’s fair to lay ultimate responsibility for this disaster at NASA’s door (though clearly that’s what’s going to happen, they being such convenient scapegoats). No, the ultimate responsibility for the death of those astronauts is in our hands, yours and mine, the people who allowed, no, demanded that the engineers, managers, and politicians running NASA dutifully recreate the exact same conditions that led to our previous two lethal space-program disasters. Sending people off our planet on a flaming bomb and returning them safely to Earth are things that, currently at least, are at the very limits of our abilities. Given a few dozen successes, though, we come to see it as routine, and the public’s interest wanes, and the funding starts to dry up, and decision-makers more attuned to the public will than to the engineering realities of what they’re engaged in begin to cut corners, until some brave adventurers pay for that hubris with their lives. Anyway, enough of that. Here are some links to provide context: the late Richard Feynman’s appendix to the Challenger investigation report, where he wrote, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” And, from a 19-year-old test pilot named John Gillespie Magee, Jr., Highflight.