Brian Gongol
Another year passes, and "Happy Birthday to You" is still copyright-protected
It's plainly stupid that so many works are still covered by the far-too-broad Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It was seven years ago today that the Supreme Court heard arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft and ruled that there's no problem with extending copyright protection terms to an impossibly long author's-life-plus-seventy-years. It's patently ridiculous and contrary to the best interests of society to drag out copyright protection for so long. The law was bad and the Supreme Court was wrong to uphold it.
Flossing monkeys
Seriously: Where did they pick up this behavior?
The IgNobel prizes are out
Because they've taught us that cows with names produce more milk than those without
Ronald Reagan's best anti-Communist jokes
(Video) Sometimes humor advances a philosophical agenda
Controlling erosion improves lake quality
Bob Barker donates $3 million to treatment center for brain-injured troops
A classy act by the ever-too-tan retired host of "The Price is Right"
How fires can lead to flooding
Well before humans evolved, dinosaurs occupied France
They were long-necked herbivores, unlike the chain-smoking, baguette-munching dinos we might have imagined
David Letterman's love affairs are temporarily good for his ratings
The extortion attempt against him really sounds stupid and ill-planned. Not as though any extortion attempt is a good idea. However, though it may be boosting Letterman's ratings in the short term (as people are drawn to the car wreck), it won't really lead to durability in the long run.
Drunks pick fight with cross-dressers...who turn out to be cage fighters
Justice can be pretty funny sometimes
Old estimates about trees' water use were much too high
Beginning electrical engineering
British Conservative Party acknowledges the population-age curve
They've come out promising to raise the retirement age -- only by a little bit -- but at least they're acknowledging the demographic inevitability that retirement at age 65 is economically untenable when people routinely live to their 80s and beyond
The viral video that summarizes all previous viral videos
UPS Airlines: You used to be able to hop a passenger flight on Brown
Are huge families really a good idea?
A movement to have exceptionally large families (with ten children or more) suggests that doing so is a way of carrying out divine will and combating societal ills. But there's something wrong with using children simply as tools or agents to serve a social agenda. Biologically, we're driven to have children so that our genes can endure. Practically, large families are common in times and places where a large labor force is necessary to keep economies (like un-mechanized family farms) afloat, or where high mortality rates will keep a large number of children from reaching maturity. But in a wealthy, safe, and developed nation, the practice of having more kids just for the sake of fighting a perceived cultural war seems disrespectful of those children as being "images and likenesses of God". They should be welcomed because they are loved, not because they'll stack the deck on Election Day. It's like a peculiar inversion of China's infamous one-child-per-couple policy. Wanting a large family for the sake of loving each of the children is one thing; having them to fulfill an agenda is quite another.
What we need next
A short list of things that we need but don't have yet
The world's best fertilizer is also one of the most unmentionable
Chicago City Council committee approves almost $36 million in incentives for United Airlines
They're trying to get the airline to move 2,500 employees from nearby Elk Grove Township into the Sears (or now "Willis") Tower. The claim, as usual with these sorts of incentive schemes, is that the city will make back more than that much money through new economic activity. But, in the end, the offer (if approved by the full City Council and accepted by United) would be nothing more than a transfer of money from taxpayers in Chicago to the company and a net gain of nothing to the metropolitan area. Economic-development packages are a zero-sum game, and it does a society no good to participate in them. United has been in bankruptcy once this decade (in 2002), and the company managed to lose $5.3 billion in 2008 after profiting by $402 million in 2007. Is that the kind of business in which Chicago taxpayers ought to be invested to the tune of tens of millions of dollars? Crank up the Red Army Choir and the Soviet national anthem.
Cancer-suppressing gene found
The Cambridge researchers who found it think it suppresses breast-cancer tumors and perhaps many others; when it's broken or missing, cancer cells grow and spread. It's news like this that not only buoys short-term optimism that we can find new ways to combat cancer, but also long-term optimism that we can figure out how best to fight the number-two cause of death in the United States.
Having free speech requires defending speech we don't like
But it wouldn't be a bad idea for those who hope to make a point about free speech to do so using thoughtful persuasion. After all, the point of encouraging free speech is to benefit from the exchange of ideas. Rather than making abrasive remarks about any particular religion, some college students who recently tried to make a point at UNI might've instead caused people to think if they'd pointed out that monotheists are just atheists about all gods minus one. Their right to say offensive things about religions is certainly afforded by the First Amendment, but in practice, they didn't use it very effectively.
Congress is making new rules about chemical security, and those could cost small towns a lot