Excellent piece
Hi Jim -
Two of your sentences decribe in spades the way NASA deals with the impact hazard -
"This is the realm of convenient assumptions, of complacency, of willfulness, of use of statistical superstitions, of a false familiarity with an unblinking foe. It is a culture made possible by an all-too-human aversion to facing unpleasantness."
"The common thread was a willingness to make comfortable assumptions in the known absence of hard data."
the rest will be over coffee sometime -
later,
ep