Where there's smoke, there's fire

A picture today from 420 miles above southern California showing smoke plumes drifting westward from the devastating fires there:

(data from NASA's MODIS-Terra satellite, 23 Oct 2007, 1819 GMT or 1119 PDT) 

And, a map (also taken from the satellite data) showing the extent of the burned and burning areas:

Finally, an interesting comment about getting timely news during the tragedy:

One site that continued to perform admirably during the emergency despite the heavy load was twitter (see, for example, the KPBS, San Diego twitter site )  Could it be they held up so well because twitter runs on Solaris?!?  You bet!