I have to ask, aren't there things (in space) that have a higher return on investment? A ballpark figure for a moon colony would be well north of $200 billion.

It seems that the science return from unmanned space probes has been enormously high, and it doesn't seem clear that the science return from manned space travel has been all that high. I'd also worry that the resources spent on a lunar colony would be taken from other space programs, like the unmanned exploration programs. So we'd be trading a high-return program for a somewhat lower one.

I'd also argue that if we want to build a long-term presence in space, focusing on technologies that will let us have sustainable, affordable space travel would be a wiser way to go -- I'd rather see a moon colony in 2050 or so that was permanent and affordable rather than one in 2020 that was abandoned in 2022.

The classic book Peopleware had some excellent disussions about this issue. Like most productivity-related things, there is good news and bad news.

There is an excellent discussion in that book about how productivity of coders is impacted by the number and frequency of distractions. That helps your case.

On the other side, there was another great discussion about listening to music while programming. They referred to a study (at MIT, I think) where two groups were given a series of puzzles to solve. One group while listening to music, the other while not listening to music. Here's the rub: all of the puzzles had a "brute force" solution and a much simpler "aha!" solution. None of the people listening to music found the "aha!" solutions, and about half of the people not listening to music did. Now depending on your situation and the kind of code you are writing, you might want or need those "aha!" solutions and probably ought to skip the music.

Let's see, the big news stories this week: (1) Tiger Woods gets in a fender bender after he gets in a fight with his wife, and (2) the White House party crashers apparently lied about other stuff, too.

Journalism is already dead.