Brian Gongol
New Madrid or something in California?
Research suggests a massive earthquake is virtually certain somewhere in California within the next 30 years. And yet a noticeable quake has just hit the Midwest, near the New Madrid fault, which is likely to obliterate a huge part of the Mississippi River valley sooner or later. The scary part is that it's virtually impossible to believe that either FEMA or the general public is any better-prepared to handle either crisis than they were before Hurricane Katrina. Have we learned anything?
Entertaining ourselves into poverty
Some residents of Tulsa resent being told they might have to help subsidize a complex and extremely contentious migration of an NBA franchise to Oklahoma City. No surprise: It all comes back to the perpetually-abused economic-development system, which should be put out of its misery post-haste.
Mold prevention saves money later
Today is self-exam day
Take a minute or two and conduct some basic self-screenings for cancer. Early detection saves lives.
We're not at a state of perfect information, but...
The combination of the volumes of information that people are putting on the Internet -- particularly about themselves -- along with the rapidly-improving state technology for finding that information is creating some peculiar new conditions for privacy. For instance, Spock claims that it's going to blaze a new path into "people search." But at what stage is information that may be obtained through public and legal means the same as information that should always be available in an instant? The conventional hurdles involved -- like going to a county courthouse to look up property records, for instance -- are being leapfrogged by instant access to online databases. That can be very helpful to both useful activities and sinister ones alike.
How American accents are changing with time
Nebraska legislators override governor's veto on fluoridation
Two Midwestern rivers listed among nation's "most endangered"
The cost of being Google
People use the Internet so much now, that serving the online masses takes lots of capital spending on things like data centers, and lots of operational money as well to pay for the electricity required by the computers in those data centers. It's a bit funny to think about how much physical stuff is required to produce a completely intangible service. Related: Some thoughts captured from Charlie Munger about investing at a recent talk.
New law says British users of online banking are personally responsible for antivirus software
Water pipes become a theft target
Delta and Northwest plan a merger, but would it really save any money?
One analyst thinks that the concessions the airlines will have to make with their pilots' unions will be enough to drive up costs far in excess of any savings they'd get from merging. Related: See a map of US airline hubs and see if any other mergers appear to make sense.
A Google security hole that could have become a crisis, but didn't
A flaw in the way Google's services share cookies put users at risk of having their information stolen by a clever bit of programming trickery. Google says it's cleared up the vulnerability. But it should be noted that users of Microsoft Internet Explorer are at vastly greater risk of falling victim to such attacks than are users of other browsers, like Firefox.
Tighter water-pollution control laws under Senate review
Professor specializing in credit-card law stumbles into his own credit-card nightmare
Evidence that sentient beings are actually good
It's a very popular theme among some circles that humans are innately bad and evil. That suggestion seems remarkably inhumane on its surface, and unfortunately it cannot be conclusively proven or disproven. But if it's assumed that we have anything in common with the other animals (which we most certainly do), then the story of a dolphin that led two stranded whales to safety ought to give us at least some evidence that animals can be inherently good...which in turn at least disproves the notion that all animals (including humans) are inherently bad. Fortunately, humans have the capacity to try to become even better than nature would make us to begin with. So into the garbage with the ridiculous assumption that humans are bad by our nature. Related: Babies appear to form the capacity to judge between good and evil by the time they're just six months old.
British store sells padded bra for 7-year-olds
Notes from the Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - April 13, 2008
Living fast? How about 31 hours in a day?
Time-saving gadgets and technology allow us to get the same amount done in 24 hours today that would've required 31 hours -- just ten years ago. Thank cell phones, wireless Internet access, laptops, and digital video recorders, among many other things.
Would a third Heathrow runway put nearby drivers at risk?
As the crow flies
Web service approximates the distance as the crow flies between two points picked on a Google map
The flying car might be a flying motorcycle instead