Brian Gongol
Is science moving too quickly for science fiction?
One writer says the genre is in danger of being nothing more than "fantasy in a space suit"
Modern technology begets modern threats
Congress: Pallbearers at the funerals of the Big Detroit Three
Lots of people have suggestions for how to save General Motors (and Ford and Chrysler, too). But it's hard to believe that the calls for a bailout are little more than political maneuvering -- too little, too late. Nobody wants to see the companies go belly-up, but where does the government intervention end?
Sleepwalking into a surveillance society - what's the backlash?
Futurist Ian Pearson predicts that the cumulative effect of lots of little and annoying bits of surveillance in civil society is going to be a public backlash. Maybe not quite yet, but sometime in the near future. Just because government can, for instance, monitor traffic via red-light cameras doesn't mean they should. Yet some do anyway, and people begin to get annoyed -- especially when they can see real criminals getting away with much more ominous crimes. The temptation all too often emerges that because government can do something, people think it should. That's not the way it ought to be.
Perhaps the best way yet to depict election results
Changing the intensity of a color to depict the relative population in the county shown -- simple, but very effective
A short history of the quality of the Cedar River
China's economic risks
Tracking the flu via the Internet
Google is tracking searches for terms related to influenza as a way to provide early detection of outbreaks. It's a novel application of information technology in the interest of public health.
"A government bailout of recidivist capital destroyers is a particularly bad idea"
If the government does too much to "protect" some American businesses, it could end up putting the entire economy at risk. The government itself has been remarkably incapable of managing its own affairs; that's why we have a $10.5 trillion Federal debt. At the rate it's been growing, we could be in the realm of teradollars in debt soon. Ironically, the growth of that debt and our other Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid liabilities could do vastly more damage to the US economy than the failure of an industrial giant or two: If taxes keep rising, we might see a brain drain out of the United States among smart, adaptable people who'd rather live in an increasingly-prosperous India than in an economically-calcified America. One of the great risks of the present is that the incoming government will mistake more regulation for better regulation and stifle the economy even more. Some very intelligent people -- like Benoit Mandelbrot, author of "The (Mis)Behavior of Markets" -- worry that so much of the modern world relies on tiny tolerances and lacks any resistance to shocks and disruptions that we could be in for profoundly difficult times. Mandelbrot, for instance, points out the extreme price sensitivity to even small changes in oil supply and demand right now (a matter of some recent discussion) reveals just how little tolerance for failure is left in many systems. It's a frightening warning sign. While we know that we're probably at or near a point of peak global oil production, month-to-month changes in oil production and oil consumption hardly vary by more than a percentage point or two. Those changes can't remotely begin to account for the violent recent swings in oil prices on the world market. And with a Treasury Secretary zigging and zagging like a running back with hundreds of billions of dollars, it's easy to see that uncertainty is being taken up a notch.
Trouble for Jordan Creek's owners
What Presidents have done with their first 100 days
Ethanol companies, including VeraSun, are filing for bankruptcy
Gas prices collapsed, credit got tight, and contract prices for corn went haywire all at once. It's been quite enough to put at least some of the plants and firms out of business. This has the potential to be categorically awful news for the economies of states like Iowa and Nebraska, since it's going to put a serious pinch on tax receipts and have a considerable ripple effect on related business sectors. Moreover, it's certain to have a massive effect on land values, which have been charging upward for several years straight.
DHL to withdraw almost completely from US package delivery
UPS and FedEx have been too much competition for the company to fight. They're going to shift to handling mainly international express deliveries.
"You just can't build something and never pay attention to it again"
EconDirectory update for November 2008
A directory of 322 sites discussing economics and related issues, along with traffic rankings for 161 of them
While we weren't looking, Medvedev ordered missiles to the Polish border
Under no circumstances should anyone underestimate the impact of falling oil prices on Russia's economy. When the economy slips, politicians tend to take other bold-looking actions to maintain their popularity. It's a universal phenomenon. Related: Mexico's police are in a precarious position right now. And, to the north, eco-terrorists are attacking Canadian natural gas pipelines.
Instant global communication changes how companies release news
Since there's no longer any gap between the moment a rumor is initiated and the moment it can appear on the Internet for all the world to see, the notion of "news cycles" with tightly-controlled public relations is badly outdated. That doesn't mean everyone and every company needs to be immediately transparent about everything, but it does suggest that the less they say, the more their stories will be told by people running on rumor and conjecture. Even the Office of the President-Elect is running an official website to manage the spread of public information and even accept applications for appointments to government jobs. After all, when anyone can make a video about a VP, it's not like we're living in the era of Walter Cronkite anymore.
Talk radio isn't irrelevant, but...
An essay in the Boston Globe, which surely would bristle if newspapers were called "irrelevant," suggests that talk radio is less important now than at any time since the 1976 Presidential election. That's not entirely true. What is true is that too many talk shows fall into the trap of recycling old opinions rather than finding new ideas, but what is false is to assume that those opinions are irrelevant. If they were irrelevant, then Democrats wouldn't care about reinstating the Fairness Doctrine. But that's what some on the left want to do, and it may very well come back to surprise them with some unintended consequences if they're successful. The relevance of media programming is a worldwide phenomenon, anyway: Britain is involved in a broad debate about the quality of its radio and television programming, too.
Massive drive-by download computer attack is underway
Malicious software is being loaded onto people's computers when they visit sites hosted by vulnerable servers. It's the work of some JavaScript code that redirects the visitor to malicous sites that exploit recently-patched security vulnerabilities in a lot of ordinary software.
If we treated math like we treat varsity sports
An entrepreneur has launched a site called Indian Math Online, based on the premise that if Indian students are learning math effectively, then American students might benefit from learning via the same techniques. Maybe if Americans were a little less math-phobic, we wouldn't have investment firms promising to make millionaire-thousandaires.
Fannie Mae loses every penny it made during the housing boom
Fluoride defeats are unfortunate news
Analysts think the Obama campaign was a victory for the Internet -- but that's not quite right
Undoubtedly, the campaign made very strategic use of tools like Facebook and their campaign website, but the victory wasn't really one for those tools, per se. The victory was really one for branding. The Obama campaign branded itself early -- using the "O" logo since March 2007. And they stayed on that brand without a moment's deviation. People attached themselves to the brand first, then used Internet tools as ways to express their attachment to that brand message. MySpace and Facebook may have audacious plans, but people aren't buying Obama victory T-shirts because of social networking. When even our closest allies in Britain talk among themselves about how the candidate's postitions "are still evolving", the election victory wasn't a matter of policy choice, either. They created a successful brand, and it sold. We may be thirty years past the era of Howard Beale and "Network", but the result is still the same. The Onion makes fun of this fixation. This sort of enthusiasm doesn't happen because of a Twitter page. It happens because someone built a juggernaut of a brand and then used all of the tools available to hammer that brand home wherever they could.
Fiscal discipline to be a "medium-term goal" for the Obama administration
Unfortunately, the medium term includes the bankruptcy of Medicare and, if we're not careful, considerable inflation as a result of all the economic-stimulus packages that have been put into the system. These are problems of colossal consequence and they simply can't be overlooked just because they're politically inconvenient.
The best summary of over-extended government yet
"Liberty -- the freedom from unwarranted intrusion by government -- is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark." That's from a case entitled United States of America, Plaintiff-appellee, v. $124,570 U.S. Currency, Defendant, decided in 1989 by a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Nebraska AWWA meeting makes the news
Notes from the Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - November 9, 2008
Topics: Scoping a GM bailout...borrowing from a drug dealer...saving for a cold day
How will Google's book-digitization deal play out?
It's hard to say whether it will be good for knowledge, or just good for Google's bottom line