One would think a sleeper terrorist cell who sets off several bombs, killing many people, in a major metropolitan area might get more attention than something - while important - somewhat insignificant. I am talking, of course, about the London bombs and the return to flight of the US Space Shuttle.

Man did the space shuttle get a lot of attention ! By my rudimentary news-importance tracking method (the number of articles on Google News) the Space Shuttle story is 82% as important as the London bombs. To compare, the, "Is Karl Rove involved in the leak?" story is only about 29% as popular.

At any rate, I was forced to watch a whole lot of "Return to Flight" news. CNN even interrupted the one hour of CNN I can tolerate to watch (that is, the one hour of every day they show CNN International) to cover the shuttle, even though it was not set to lift off until several hours later.

However, I did get something out of watching the space shuttle, perched on its launch pad, framed by an uncertain Florida sky. I realized how much of a parallel there is between the space shuttle and most US-based airlines.

Consider it, if I described something as, "...an underfunded body with an aging fleet of vehicles, who has also suffered major setbacks due to improper safety procedures," it would be pretty hard to distinguish between NASA and a US-based airline.

Another thing I came to think of was the weird inverse state of transportation and population age in Europe and the US. While Europe has a very old population, they also have one of the most modern transport systems in the world. The US on the other hand, is younger, but has an archaic transportation system.

I still wish I had gotten some slightly more substantive news out of the hour I watched, but realizing these two very unimportant things made it at least somewhat productive.