This might ruffle some feathers, but here we go:

This reminds me of my experiences with alcoholism and sexual abuse while living in the religiously conservative South. You have an area of the country with the highest rates of evangelical religious participation, yet produces characters like Bill Clinton and high alcohol-related violence and fatalities.

How can this happen? Well, when you think going to church on Sunday and helping out with Bible Study constitutes complete morality, then it's easy to binge drink and have unprotected sex and still think you're doing "the right thing."

This isn't to say there aren't "true believers" in the south who practice what they preach; there are. They're a minority there too, just like in the rest of the world.

What is it with Democrats not being able to talk to people? First the town halls, then simple questions about where they stand, and now they can't take a joke? Aren't these supposed to be the ultimate career politicians, the ultimate "people's" people?

Kinda makes you wonder if they aren't "people" people and are really "out-for-themselves" people...

At least we have 200 words and not 140 characters. Trying to have any real conversation on Twitter is like trying to enjoy filet mignon through a straw.

Richard: Can the government pursue this based on a hypothetical violation of rights alone? In other words, can the Federal Government alone change Arizona's law without a John Q. Public whose rights have been violated under that law? (That theory sounds like a very large pandora's box, but I'm not a lawyer.)

Now that's the scary part: Rahm Emmanuel is the level-headed pragmatist keeping the Administration's idealists grounded in reality. Rahm "never let a crisis go to waste" Emmanuel!

That's the precarious position engineers have found themselves in these days: we've done our job so well, people take all the technology and innovation we've brought to society at large for granted.

This comes to a head when things go wrong: any form of construction on the interstate, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Interstate 35W Bridge Collapse, and--of course--the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. "What happened?" Well, we messed up.

A lot of this stuff is bleeding edge: new, exciting, and one-of-a-kind. That mean a lot of good things: new methods of delivering more better things at lower prices. It also means we're going to learn a lot of new things the hard way.

There's a poster in the civil engineering department at my school: "Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement." It's a Mark Twain quote, but it's also the only real way engineers synthesize real knowledge. As much as we try to get it right the first time, we can only know what doesn't work. Everything else is just a suboptimal solution.

Rob, I don't think that engineers expect people to know how things work in detail, but we would like to think that people have the basics down. It's one thing to know that oil comes from a drilled well in the ground, another to think that the internet comes from a wire in your wall. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWPwrIVk6v4 comes to mind.)

It's also infuriating when engineers don't get the credit for what expert knowledge they have; I had an argument with an elementary school teacher about how "easy" it should be to stop the oil leak "because they drilled there in the first place." Wow.

All that being said, I know of no practicing engineers who write as columnists on these issues; the genre seems to be filled with journalists and academics. Engineers have a unique perspective, but I haven't found many strong voices in print.

"Scientists are technicians, not moral philosophers."

Only if the scientists I know really felt that way. Truth be told, after three years working as an undergraduate researcher in academia, many scientists I know see themselves as activists first, objective investigators of truth second. Look no further than the ClimateGate emails to see how scientists can pervert their work for political (and monetary) gain.

Not to say all scientists are that way, of course. Most engineers I know don't behave this way, but most engineers base their work on cold, objective calculations, rather than subjective observations. Physicists and other "hard sciences" are still run this way, but branching out from there, (biology, climate science, economics, etc.) and you get a heavy dose of opinion with interspersed facts. When systems get too complex to calculate, you introduce (expert) opinion-based models and produce more subjective results. It's still science, but it's hardly as objective as the President seems to think.

Of course, all of this is irreverent if you think political ideology can be based on some objective truth to begin with; given that basis, you can rationalize all the politics you want... based on science, of course.

It's not like there's some special advantage to being number one in the first place. Being number two isn't some dramatic collapse; it's a ranking, not a sentence.

Besides, if were to get really serious about "leveling the playing field," as many politicians put it, we would repeal the minimum wage, eliminate all tariffs and price controls, and ban the EPA. I'm not holding my breath.

As an engineer who has been published a few times, it's unbelievable that there is no general outcry or acknowledgement that this happened. One would hope that the authors involved have enough personal integrity to defend their work, but the silence from the media is even more troublesome. The administration turns objective experts into political pawns, and the media is complicit. It exposes the mediocrity and general incompetence of the mainstream media. (Truth to power? Yeah, right.)

Undermining the very experts who are doing the best they can to objectively assess the situation? Very petty. Very short-sighted. Very Orwellian.

There are so many themes and threads throughout Lost that it's hard to pin down just one reason why I followed it to the end. It's the most detailed character drama ever televised, a gripping morality tale, a fantastic fight between good and evil, a mythological sci-fi adventure, and a story told darn well. There's plenty of criticism out there about the show's approach, but one things' for sure: it did something different.

I loved how the show avoided spelling things out: there was never "the expository speech" which gives it all away; the viewer is left to wade through the story and decide things for themselves. For some, this is too much work to enjoy a show, which is completely understandable; for myself, it was the kind of smart, intelligent television I doubt I'll ever experience again.