Gongol.com Archives: 2008 Weekly Archives
Brian Gongol


Time to find a way to permanently fund the wheat-rust surveillance team
Five US scientists follow wheat rust and other threats to cereal crops, but a lot of their funding comes from Congressional earmarks. Earmarks ought to be beaten into submission -- but a program to monitor some of the biggest threats to the world's food supply ought to be a pretty high priority for public spending.

"[A]n absolute, utter, complete waste of the taxpayers' money"
One expert's opinion on what would result from a public-diplomacy effort that gives up on broadcasting the news impartially


Show notes from the WHO Radio Wise Guys - May 10, 2008
Including discussion of PDF files, the Microsoft/Yahoo relationship, and video on cell phones. A ten-minute podcast of part of the show is available.



YouTube, Netflix on demand, and cell-phone video predicted in 1974

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday will include three "critical" updates
And regarding a different kind of security, CNN is reporting that fewer than 1% of domestic flights in the US have an Air Marshal on-board. The TSA denies that the number is that low, but it also won't give any real detail on how many flights are actually covered. On the other hand, El Al keeps many of its security techniques secret, but tells the world security agents are always on board. Secrecy about technique is a good thing -- secrecy about the quantity of security, on the other hand, looks like a failure of responsibility.

Your brain makes decisions before your conscious self does
Brain research from Germany suggests that many decisions we think are made consciously are several seconds behind the parts of the brain that actually commit to the decision. That suggests that the importance of solid mental habits and patterns is more important than we might usually think. It also probably explains why a humane but structured approach to life at the Angola Prison in Louisiana seems to be working well at reducing violence.

Council Bluffs may rename "SOB Road" to "Veterans Memorial"

Platte River recovery plan becomes law

Summary of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting

"When you absolutely, positively don't care if it gets there overnight"
Courier delivery is, of course, one of the millions of things that we get thanks to labor specialization. It's a really good thing you don't have to deliver everything yourself.

Minneapolis envies I-235



Text-message service solves huge problems for poor farmers in India
Using SMS (short message service), the service from Reuters distributes market pricing information and alerts about weather and pests for a very low price. The better their information, the better the chances for the farmers using it to escape from poverty. And it's all thanks to text messages. Of course, as with most technology, SMS can be used for misleading or crooked purposes, too -- as people facing shocking bills for "premium" text services may discover.

China plans to control the weather at the Olympics
They already employ tens of thousands of people using anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers to seed clouds and create rain. Whether it even works is up to question, but they spend almost $100 million a year trying anyway. Besides the weird-science nature of the whole effort, there's also the fact that it's strange to put high-powered weapons into the hands of 30,000-some peasants in a country where there's been a separatist undercurrent for at least a decade seems odd.

Charlie Munger expects 5% returns on stocks
If he's right, that's much, much less than what people have grown accustomed to

Is $2 a month too much to pay for stormwater control?



The man who controls the North Platte

"Biometrics are extremely unreliable and that's dangerous in an airline environment"

The Burmese cyclone/hurricane was about the same strength as Hurricane Hugo
Yet with a vastly higher death toll of 60,000 or more

Putin stays in the spotlight through Medvedev's inauguration
Also noteworthy is how nostalgia for the Soviet era is making a comeback

Does Sen. McCain really need the Secret Service?



Water pipelines come to America

Georgian minister says Russia wants to go to war


Changing ocean currents could offset global warming in some places
Perhaps the lesson to be learned from all of this is that we really don't know what the climate will be like with any high degree of certainty for more than a year or two at a time. And as climate goes, so goes the food supply. And as we've learned about the food supply lately, we're downright awful about storing enough of the surplus in the good years. The last thing we need right now is for 6.5 billion people to go hungry because of some freak event like a volcanic eruption that ends up shattering a year's worth of food production, as happened in the early 1800s.

Lacking a farm system for new talent, radio's having trouble creating stars



Davenport negotiates trade-off between river views and flooding

One storm kills 10,000 people in Burma
Further evidence that disasters themselves don't kill, disasters amid poverty kill. Burma is a terribly poor country with a repressive government. Had the same weather event occurred in a wealthier country or one with better governance, the death toll would almost assuredly be smaller. 10,000 lives, though, have been lost.

More on what happened at Regency Homes

Audi gets into the electric-car business

Microsoft gives up on plans to buy Yahoo, but says it's charging ahead online
Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, is not happy that Yahoo rejected their offer, but says it's not worth spending billions more to take over the company. Microsoft's new post-Yahoo-offer online strategy is indistinguishable from that of any hypothetical company in any hypothetical market: "Deliver on the basics. Change the game through innovation. Expand our global scale and focus." Yadda, yadda, yadda. Microsoft needs to think in terms of basic economics: Is there anything that it can do or provide online that competitors can't or won't? The answer seems to be "not really," based on their existing technologies. Internet Explorer isn't the only browser on the market, and the push for standards-based Internet design keeps them from making the browser inescapable. Windows Media Player gets competition from QuickTime and iTunes, as well as RealPlayer and now a number of Flash-based alternatives. And so far, Google has been next-to-impossible to eclipse for search-engine performance. (A fall from grace for Google is practically inevitable, over a long enough period of time -- but Microsoft isn't likely to be the successful newcomer.) So instead of offering platitudes about "changing the game," Microsoft ought to be taking a long, hard look at anything it's in a truly unique position to do. And if there isn't anything, it ought to invest elsewhere -- like in energy or chemicals or medical research. Computing power could make a huge difference to a company's potential in any of those areas. AT&T used to be "American Telephone and Telegraph." Sometimes, your core business has to change. Creative destruction is a fierce predator.


No flying cars, but we do a lot of flying anyway

A history of branding
Artisans of the medieval era knew how to put unique traits into their products to ensure that far-away consumers would recognize their products. What's interesting today is the revival in hand-crafting that's encouraged by sites like eBay and Etsy. Want a handmade necktie? It's yours for $10.

Lawn-care time is back, unfortunately



Notes from the Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - May 4, 2008
New oil refineries...Russia and the market for natural gas...tax competition...and a downloadable selection of a show highlight