As more information comes available:

1. The plane did not end up in one piece. Two engines were sheared off by the water. Witnesses reported the plane skidded sideways after hitting the water. Could this have sheared off the engines?

2. If the engines had stayed on the plane, would it have been able to stay afloat five minutes?

3. Passengers reported water coming in immediately. Where did this water come in?

4. Is it possible to remove the rafts from the rear exits and use them on the front? It appeared only two rafts were available.

5. News reports on Friday quoted the First Officer as saying no one had ever done a "successful" ditch before. I presume he was talking about a large aircraft in which no one was killed. Are there stories of previous ditch attempts?

6. When doing recurring training on a flight simulator, do the pilots ever experience this scanerio?

7. Was the plane using the method of flying with less than full tanks for energy savings? This would have meant extra air in the tanks helped the plane stay afloat.

I can see many comments on politics, but maybe the science can be engineered so as to satisfy everyone.

First, there is no way to place the mirrors so close together than no sunlight hits the ground. The tortoise can and will find the warm spots or cool spots, depending on time of day or year.

Second, There is no way vegitation will grow under these mirrors. At least no vegitation that needs sunlight will grow. At the same time, other vegitation that thrives in shade might have a chance.

Third, transferring all this heat energy to the boiling tower will make the whole desert floor cooler. That has implications for both plants and animals. If the project is ecologically planned, it does not have to be destructive.

Fourth, Austraila has already placed big solar farms in production. What do we know about the desert ecology in the already existing places?

Fifth, while it may be economical to grade parts of the desert like a parking lot, it does not have to be. Each heliostat has a computerized equation which moves the mirror to follow the sun. They could be placed with minimal disturbance of the topography. They do not have to be on a level plane.

Two such systems have already been used in California. Both were abandoned, possibly because of economics. Why can't we have a writer report these technical issues from our past research?

Archibald MacLish wrote this same comment in the 1950s.

Except it was short:

"If God is God, he is not good. If God is Good he is not God."

There is lots of dancing around the subject by all concerned, but the way to solve the housing crisis is to make sure younger people, (thirtysomethings) have enough earning power to pay a mortgage. We have seen the real income for the middle class decline since the early 1980s. How could this not cause a decline in housing prices at some point? The older people would have to cash out, and they would need younger people to buy.

All the talk about "overpriced" houses is actually a reference to "underpaid" workers of today.

Rather than give Cheney or other Republicans credit for brainpower, it is a simple matter of addition. You know that you have two or more cable news channels which will magnify and mold the news cycle. The other major networks will follow along. And presto! The public relations landscape is changed!

This was the same trap the Democrats had to deal with for ten or more years: not being wrong, but being shouted down.

The good news is that unlike the Nazis, the domestic terrorism we now see is done by loners.

The bad news is that like the Nazis, when the powerful institutions turn away and ignore such violence, then the lawlessness will increase. The constant barrage of neo-Nazi propaganda which comes from Fox News, could be a motivating force to an organized Fascist group in the USA.

Unfortunately, the traditional media will still try to split the difference and lay blame equally on the right and the left, whatever right and left mean in this context.

Because the Right Wing is so anxious to copy other standards of Nazism, this may have a perverse logic to it. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, a person could not cease being a Jew if one of his grandparents was a Jew. No matter that the person might have converted to Christianity.

Using the standard that Barak Obama's father was Muslim, and denying the right of conversion, then the case could be made. It puts those thinkers in some pretty bad company, however.

Here is the link to the video of the most famous tanuki on the web.

http://www.gamespot.com/users/CrashSpyro123/video_player?id=dyZgljL95bgLuzHW

Lester Maddox, Governor of Georgia before Jimmy Carter, said, "The only way to improve Georgia prisons is to get a better class of prisoner." It looks like that has been done.

Now, whether that is a good thing, I wonder.

Spare me the American sexual fixations.

How many young Iraqi girls were killed by George Bush's decision to go to war? How many youthful men and women in America's army will never have a normal life again?

Roman Polanski was wrong, but where's the perspective?

An unnecessary war is the ultimate tragedy.

I suppose I'm jaded, because I rarely shed tears over news stories either in print or on TV.

The worst cry I ever had over a news story was when I saw people being loaded up on a bus at Katrina for the trip to Houston. A dog was trying to get on the bus, but the animal was abandoned.

This article, where it touched on a similar theme--except this time with human words--made me cry more than I have in four years.

Of course, I like Heather Graham, but still--the script is right on target.