STAR WARS Chapter II: Damian Penny wrote back to say, "...I still would not write off a [Missile Defense] plan being feasible. Arthur C. Clarke once said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that if a scientist says something is possible, he's probably right; if a scientist says something is IMpossible, he's probably wrong."

The problem with using Arthur C. Clarke as a reference is that, in his twilight years, Clarke has come to embrace some rather crackpot notions. Clarke is a devotee of cold fusion and other "free energy" schemes which have been pretty thoroughly de-bunked at this point ... and more recently, he put forth the notion that the pictures taken by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor reveal fields of vegetation and trees, even though the imaging resolution is vastly insufficient to provide such detail. It'd be cool if that turned out to be true -- but he's just seeing what he wants to see. Or saying what the interviewer wanted to hear.

That said, the 70mm re-release print of 2001: A Space Odyssey which has been slowly making its way across the country has finally showed up in New York, and I managed to catch a screening. Hey ... I finally "get" the ending...!