Data baste

It's Friday. Another week at work: done. You're feeling good about yourself. You're feeling like a smarty.

And then you read this story on CNN.com about a dude who managed to get data off of a melted disk drive from the Columbia space shuttle. I don't even understand how you'd begin to figure out how to do that. I'm not sciencey, not by a long shot, but I do know one thing: This guy is way smarter than I am.

It also makes me wonder. At a company where I used to work, one of the VPs kept losing all of the data on her laptop computers because she kept dropping them. A few feet. On a carpeted floor. Our IT guys could only throw up their hands in failure.

The Columbia disk drive, on the other hand, falls about 200,000 feet from a vehicle traveling at about mach 19 -- a vehicle that basically disintigrated, by the way -- and the drive is burned almost beyond recognition, and a guy in Minnesota recovers 99 percent of the info on the drive. Wacky.