Brian Gongol
Show notes from the WHO Radio Wise Guys - August 30, 2008
An Internet-only edition of the show
Mandatory evacuation order issued for New Orleans
Mayor expects it to be worse than Hurricane Katrina. This time, they're using buses, trains, and airplanes to get the people out. Seems like someone finally looked at the full range of evacaution options and realized that to get enough people out of town, you have to use every available tool. For the rest of the country, Gustav could be much more serious than Katrina -- particularly if it effectively damages the oil infrastructure or the port system in the Gulf.
Savings-and-loan banks are in trouble
But that should be no big surprise: The nature of an S&L is to lend long (for mortgages, largely), and borrow short (through savings accounts). Stable banking requires lending and borrowing to be conducted on similar time horizons -- which is why life insurance companies get into the secondary-mortgage market. The situation should hardly come as a surprise to anyone who knew about the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s.
Michael Jackson is turning 50...so what would he have looked like without plastic surgery?
An age-progressed photo of Jackson looks positively nothing like he appears today. A pretty amazing online service lets anyone age-progress their own photos.
Why we need to do more international radio broadcasting
Cedar Rapids looks at the next stage in flood mitigation
No flying car, no 16-hour work week
Some predictions have missed the mark pretty widely
Hurricane Gustav headed straight for Louisiana
And it's quite possibly going to be a category 4 or 5 storm by the time it gets there. Monday is the day it's likely to make landfall, just as Hanna becomes a hurricane and hits the Bahamas. One can only hope some thought has been put into how to conduct a mass evacuation by automobile.
Communication link fails at Atlanta regional ATC, causing flight delays all over the country
Tuesday's communication failure led to 90-minute delays in a lot of places, since it meant the work had to be diverted to Utah while they fixed the problems in Georgia. But it reminds us that the nation's air-traffic management depends upon lots of elements all working in harmony, with limited tolerance for failure. Since terrorists are certainly aware of how much disruption this single incident caused, it certainly cannot have escaped their attention that a coordinated effort to attack vulnerable parts of the system could do even more damage. The existing air-traffic-control system is wildly out of date.
"Change" isn't enough: Just ask Cuba
To what is a country changing? Cuba under Batista had plenty of problems, but changing to Communism under Castro was hardly the answer. Customers in the private sector know how to differentiate between "change" and "improvement": That's why the new Cuil search engine hasn't overtaken Google; it just isn't better, at least not yet.
Post-flood tests for toxic wastes to continue through end of year
Stem cells from wisdom teeth
Science finds a way to get around the ethical trouble of dealing with embryonic stem cells by going for the wisdom teeth. It was less than a year ago that skin cells were made to act like stem cells, too. It's hard not to get excited about the resulting prospects for things like bio-engineered replacement organs.
Apple's Safari Internet browser is probably not the best choice
It's been found vulnerable on a number of occasions, with patches slow to get released. But even more importantly, the widely-held assumption that Apple products (like the Macintosh operating system or the Safari browser) are inherently safer against crooked attacks than their competitors may be causing people to overlook the importance of following basic precautions against social engineering attacks. "Social engineering" is really just a fancy way to say "tricking people, not breaking their computers". Why would a crook go to the trouble of programming a virus to break into your computer when he or she can simply trick you into giving away your credit-card information or Social Security number just by asking for it? The jury duty scam and the fraud-investigation scam are two excellent examples.
"More law, less justice"
Attributed to Cicero, it's a problem lasting even to this day. A report finds that British authorities are spending too much time (and too many resources) on punishing kids through official channels where it would be more appropriate to handle things with a stern warning and an informal hand. But since they're tying up their policing resources doing things by the book, more-serious matters are going unpunished and unstopped. On a related note, lazy repetition of platitudes like "If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide" bear some of the blame for letting lazy thinking overtake good policy. Privacy isn't a privilege one earns through good behavior; it's a natural human right which can only be lost by extreme and deliberate choices to threaten the survival of others. Osama bin Laden has lost his right to privacy, but lazy and irresponsible management of customer and client data is eroding the right in a practical sense for many innocent people -- and those who may not be innocent, but who certainly haven't blown up any buildings. It's happened with the loss of a memory stick in Great Britain and the sale of a used computer on eBay. And now there's the loss of six backup tapes containing data on some 12.5 million people by the Bank of New York. The 21st Century is not going to be defined as much by what we know as by how we learn to apply good judgment. With people posting videos of themselves powering merry-go-rounds with motor scooters on the Internet, it's clear that a judgment deficit exists.
Fame comes to a Chinese iPhone factory worker
Propaganda often works in the short term
China's conduct of the Olympic Games has given it a lot of good publicity around the world for the last two weeks or so, but the fact remains that people were thrown in prison for even daring to apply to use the protest zones that had supposedly been set aside for that purpose. The fact remains that the central government in China knows its days are numbered; technology and rising material prosperity will inevitably challenge the political totalitarianism they've been trying to sustain for half a century. Whether that ends with a peaceful transfer of power or in an explosion of secessions and coup attempts can't be predicted with certainty. But it's very likely that the recent collapse in the Chinese stock market, along with high inflation, are increasing the pressure for political change. Economic growth has been offered as the trade-off for political freedom in China for years. If that growth stumbles or stops, then the trade-off is no longer in balance.
A little ham with everything
(Audio) Just as brilliant as bacon salt, just a little more fictitious: A ham-flavored fork
Lincoln raises water and sewer rates by 3%:
Half of Ukranians worry that Russia wants to attack them
Which is a perfectly reasonable fear to entertain, given the mess in Georgia from which Russia clearly isn't extracting itself.
Borlaug calls for more effective, more efficient fertilizers
Rumor has it Mark Cuban is still in the running to buy the Chicago Cubs
If his offer is accepted, then he'd probably be even more popular in Chicago than Cubs-hating Senator Barack Obama
The long, slow path of Tropical Storm Fay
Video time-lapse of the radar signature shows how the storm lingered over virtually the entire state of Florida. And now there's a new hurricane in the Caribbean: Gustav.
Council Bluffs wants a new water plant by 2011
Warren Buffett's three-hour marathon on CNBC
Sometimes, before you find your sheriff, you have to kiss a few pigs
In Page County, Iowa, kissing a pig at a children's health fair is, it would seem, a prerequisite to holding the highest law-enforcement office for 30 miles around
Ottumwa notes one-year anniversary of waterworks flood
Notes from the Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - August 24, 2008
The shrinking Register...sunk costs...Obama's text-message stunt...and a podcast