Utah finally gets regular bars and pubs
The age of the "private club" is over
Girl survives air crash, clings to debris for hours
The capacity some people have to survive when called upon can be pretty amazing. A group of teenagers in Utah were found alive after finding their way to an island after being swept down a river.
Congress sticks its nose into radio ratings
International body tells Texas real estate agent he can't have Jay Leno's name
Cybersquatting is annoying and petty. But it's also a little unnerving that the issue made its way to a United Nations commission.
China's concerns about the future of the American economy
The value of the endorsement
When people actually have a sense of trust in the endorser, it can make a big difference
The logic behind choosing what to hope for in Iran
Crude, but possibly accurate
In 1909, the leading cause of death in the United States was tuberculosis.
Today, it kills fewer than 700 Americans a year. What appears to be a calamity in one era may turn out to be relatively minor in another. Changes happen all the time, and our perceptions have to change along with them.
Water towers and community identity
Energy security is a national security issue
But, ironically, sometimes security and energy conflict -- as they are doing in Nevada, where a proposed 600-foot tower for collecting solar energy is believed to conflict with the work of Nellis Air Force Base. The system proposed for the solar tower would actually use molten salt to store the energy captured during the day to allow the plant to deliver energy 24 hours a day.
Michael Jackson: "One of the first truly international stars"
Exactly one of the points made by a certain radio host on WHO-AM last week
Green Party tries to blame petition regulations for electoral failure
The reality is that in America's first-past-the-post electoral system, the stable outcome is going to be two mainstream parties which jockey for position to encompass the largest possible electoral coalitions. If the Green Party really wants to have an influence on American politics, then it needs to ally itself clearly with one of the major parties (most likely the Democrats) and act as a vocal, clearly-demarcated sub-group within the party. As the Green Democrats, for instance, they'd have far more effect than as the stand-alone Greens, who have little prospect of ever obtaining a working majority. American political parties are governing coalitions formed before election day. That's just how it works. The British understand this, with campaigning groups within the major parties, like Conservative Way Forward, which pushes the Thatcherite cause within the Conservative Party.
Gannett is going to cut as many as 2,000 more jobs
The company's net income in the first quarter was 60% below the net income in the same quarter of 2008. Saving newspapers from business oblivion is clearly a major task. It's bigger than just a matter of something like business succession. It's a matter of rebuilding institutions.
Slavery: It's still not gone
Podcast: Resilient Iowa
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Podcast: Saving family photos for good
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Could you use 140,000 gallons of water in a month?
"You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant"
Warren Buffett says it'll take time for the economy to really turn around. And he still can't stand debt.
Obama administration threatens first veto. Target: F-22 fighters.
The White House apparently believes that the Air Force is planning to spend too much money on the F-22, and is threatening to veto bills that include even more money for the jet. But the head of the Air Combat Command says that the planned fleet of 187 F-22s "puts execution of our current national military strategy at high risk in the near- to mid-term" because the number is too small. Meantime, the Air Force and its contractors are working on plans to allow one person to fly multiple UAVs, operating as swarms of aircraft -- possibly as many as 12 at a time. The individual aircraft would fly themselves for the most part, but the group would be controlled by a human operator who could either manage a task for the batch of aircraft as a whole, or individually manage particular UAVs within the group.
Mitt Romney is now more popular than when he was running for President
There's a good chance that his reputation for knowing a thing or two about money could be helping at a time when Washington seems bent on spending every time it can borrow
How will Omaha pay for $1.6 billion in sewer separation?
Britain may be dealing with 15,000 needless cancer deaths a year
Survival rates in some parts of the country are being depressed by poor diagnoses and sub-optimal treatment
How cap-and-trade came out of nowhere as a political agenda
Notes from the Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - June 28, 2009
Jeeps, Hummers, and the Chevy Suburban. What we know about brand loyalty and institutional memory.
Show notes from the WHO Radio Wise Guys - June 27, 2009
Setting up a presence on the Internet is now as easy as dialing a telephone
Show notes from WHO Radio - June 26, 2009
There's a better way to control greenhouse-gas emissions than cap-and-trade
Podcast: Renaming the Sears Tower
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Podcast: Data rot
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When people flush, they want the water to go away
China's government might break its own Internet access
By trying to force the entire country to adopt a program to censor Internet access, it may very likely be opening a gigantic security hole on every single computer in the country. Crashing its own Internet in order to cut off political dissent actually means the Chinese government has shot itself in the metaphorical foot twice: First, the obvious losses in breaking their connection to one of the greatest commercial tools ever created. But in smacking down dissent, political or otherwise, they discourage innovation, which is one of the prime reasons the American economy has done so well for centuries. Creativity, innovation, and dissent are cultural values that cause people to think in different ways than they would if they simply obeyed. This sort of mental acculturation means that, everything else being equal, the person who grows up with a culture of dissent is likely to be more creative than one who does not. That's good for an economy -- and shutting it down is bad.
When will we get tired of hearing everything everyone thinks about everything?
Particularly thanks to the Internet, it's possible for everyone -- virtually every soul on the planet -- to share an opinion about almost anything. Local rules and regulations may keep the lid on things, but the technology itself -- from Twitter to Facebook to Blogger -- means that every opinion can be set out to float on the sea of bits and bytes that make up the Internet. And with comment features on weblogs and Wikipedia entries open to everyone, we don't even need to visit message boards to get caught in the crossfire of a flame war any longer. But at least one writer thinks we may be close to "opinion exhaustion." And he could be right. There's only so much we can stand to hear about how people feel about things before we simply want to be amused or informed without being opined to. There's only so long we can spend listening to others call other things "failures". Fortunately, good ideas still make their way through the noise, even if that requires creative means of getting around dictators and their petty rules.
Rap impersonator
(Video) It's really impressive
Chair of Republican Governors Association tells Iowa Republicans to avoid debates on ideological purity
Haley Barbour spoke in Des Moines and made the salient point that American political parties are coalitions formed before Election Day. In the legislatures of our European and other parliamentary counterparts, the presence of many parties leads to coalition-building after the election is over. But in the US, the coalitions are formed well before the election. And coalitions they are: Republicans draw limited-government enthusiasts, social conservatives, and fiscal conservatives together, among others. They don't always agree, but that was what drove Ronald Reagan's huge electoral victories under his "Big Tent" formula. Iowa's Republican Party is completely out of power at the statehouse, so speculation about who will emerge as the candidate for Governor is obviously quite widespread.
Satellite radio now to stream to iPhones
But it won't be free...listeners will still need to pay a subscription fee. The content had better be pretty amazing to be worth a subscription fee, since services like Pandora and Last.fm already stream music to phones for free, and an abundance of radio stations already offer free streaming and free podcasts.
More than 750,000 tickets had been sold to Michael Jackson's concert tour
Jackson was one of the first truly global celebrities. It's unlikely that any of today's global celebrities -- or even ones who come generations from now -- will be fully equipped to deal with the psychology of being "known" by most of the people on the planet. And for any number of reasons, the public wants to and gets to know more and more about every moment in a celebrity's life.
Vortex 2 project wraps up for the summer
They'll go back to chasing tornadoes next year. Meantime, expect some good video when Storm Chasers comes back to the Discovery Channel.
Michael Jackson dies
That was unexpected. For as strange as he came to be, he was a sublimely talented performer, and his death leaves behind three young children without a father.
The economy slowed in the first quarter, but not by an Earth-stopping amount
The US economy shrank by an annualized rate of 5.5% in the first quarter of this year. Unpleasant? Yes. Catastrophic? No. And it's certainly no cause for us to abandon the market economy, which is the best tool for making human life better that we've been able to find in thousands of years of civilization. After all, not a one of us could even build a pencil from scratch, yet we routinely use things like microwave ovens and laptop computers and autos that are even more complex than a pencil by hundreds of orders of magnitude.
Johns Hopkins researchers try to figure out why a 16-year-old girl doesn't age
China's "Great Firewall" grows again
Government authorities are accusing Google of delivering pornography to Chinese users, but it's being interpreted as a means of restricting access to international destinations on the Internet, and by extension, a way to place a hold on political freedom. Ironically, one of the ways the news of the restrictions has made it out is via angry posts from within China on Twitter. It's quite easy to believe that the restrictions are mainly intended at reinforcing political control by restricting individuals' access to outside information, but as with so many bad ideas, it's being touted as something the government must do to protect children. There may be no easier way to identify an idea that involves government trying to do something it shouldn't than the phrase "for the children." Anything done under the "for the children" banner is almost always being done for some other reason...and that other reason is usually something nefarious and unpleasant. Related: A new crop of Internet and telephone scams seems to have emerged in the midst of slower economic times.
What baseball can teach us about institutional memory
Does Des Moines have the best barbecue in the world?
The windmill as Nebraska's state icon
John Hodgman earns some laughs at the Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner
(Video) Deadpan delivery scores big
It's 11:00. Do you know where your governor is?
South Carolina's governor went missing for days while he went to Argentina to visit his mistress. Mark Sanford was at one time floated as a potential candidate for President in 2008. Maybe it should be reassuring that government runs sufficiently well in South Carolina that the governor doesn't have to be there every day. On the other hand, it should probably be a little unsettling that nobody really knew where the guy was for days on end.
Nobody knew CPR before 1960
That's a scary thought
Podcast: When exactly will GM return to the private sector?
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Podcast: Spreading out our risk
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A dark and stormy day and night
Pets should never be allowed to roam free in a moving vehicle
A small dog jumped into the lap of a man driving an RV, distracting him enough to cause him to cross the centerline of a Wisconsin highway and crash into a car carrying Boy Scouts on a rock-climbing trip. Two people were killed as a result. Letting animals roam free inside a moving vehicle is absolutely unacceptable. It's not cute, it's not funny, and it's not harmless.
The human brain adapts almost instantly to seeing tools as extensions of the body
Which suggests that it might be easier for us (psychologically) to accept bionic adaptations in the long run than our Terminator nightmares suggest. People who have been blind for decades are regaining sight with the help of prosthetics and replacement hands and arms have arrived, too. In the not-so-distant future, it's possible to imagine replacements, either organic or bionic, for virtually anything in the body. As that time approaches, we're going to have to re-evaluate our senses of things like mortality.
A narrated tour of Saturn and its rings
Ottumwa seeks answers: Where is the pollution coming from?
So...how about that 100-year plan, Chrysler?
Businesses ought to have long-term business plans...and by long term, that means planning for the next 100 years. Many people will dismiss such a notion out of hand, positing that "Nobody can tell what will happen over the next 100 years." Au contraire. True, we never know exactly what will happen in 100 years. But we also don't know exactly what will happen in 100 seconds. Planning for any period of time -- 100 seconds, 100 days, or 100 years alike -- means assessing the likely conditions and situations and preparing a response with a knowledge of the likelihoods to emerge, not carving an agenda in stone. Chrysler is now emerging (in a sense) from a messy and deeply political bankruptcy brought on by years of bad decisions. Yet even in 1958, Chrysler officials knew that the future would require them to build new and different cars, including electric-powered vehicles. They had 50 years to get the situation right, but didn't. What's amazing today is how so many people are willing to take extraordinary and perhaps even outlandish steps in the name of preventing global warming, but yet they look right past the obvious disasters in our immediate future -- like the fiscal implosion of the Medicare program. The debt crisis is right in front of our eyes, but it's treated as though it's 200 years away.
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