Brian Gongol
"An industrial renaissance is happening [in America], and it's underestimated"
So says Russian steel magnate Alexey Mordashov, who has invested billions of dollars in expanding steel-production capacity in the US. And he's totally right when he says, "What you need to keep most in the U.S. is the entrepreneurial spirit." ■ Meanwhile, the prime minister of Italy thinks the Eurozone could fall apart in a week. And here we see exactly what is meant by the differences between the "real economy" and the "financial economy". There is worldwide demand for stuff of all sorts, in bigger volumes than ever before. People do not want fewer cars, televisions, computers, and dinners out than before -- we want more, and there are more of us occupying this planet than ever before. But the problems allowed by fiscal and financial tricks have caused the process of doing business to become much more difficult for anyone doing business in or with Europe. Nobody there has forgotten how to make things or deliver services -- but unless some adults prevail, the system for exchanging those goods and services is going to undergo some dramatic and painful changes.
Duke University team produces a 50-gigapixel camera
The amount of digital information captured by the 2.5' x 2.5' camera is enormous -- using 98 individual cameras coordinated to produce a single image. The development team points out that developments like this make the question not so much where to point the camera, but exactly how to get the pictures you want from the data. And we're already able to see examples on our smartphones today -- the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx takes an 8-megapixel photo -- just 1/6250th of the 50-gigapixel camera. But that's enough to take a wide-angle shot of an entire baseball park but still be able to zoom in on the ball en route to the catcher's glove.
The abandoned theme park devastated by Hurricane Katrina
Cattle roundup on an Omaha expressway
Surgeons announce successful laser operation to remove tumor from a child in-utero
Curiously, it happened in 2010, and they waited 20 months to announce it to the world. It's really quite uplifting news.
Evidence mounts that the US and Israel are behind the Flame malware
It looks like the dirty program was being used to thwart Iran's attempts to build a nuclear weapon. On one hand, it's nice to see them avoid a shooting war. On the other hand, in a cyberwar, we could all become casualties.
ICANN releases list of potential new generic top-level domains
There are only 22 right now, in addition to the world's country-code TLDs.
Don't get into a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel
It's an old idiom, but it's even more appropriate today, when a "barrel of ink" is free, as long as someone publishes their thoughts on the Internet. The fight between the creator of The Oatmeal and a band of people who have pirated his material without attribution (and their lawyers) is a good example of how the party who already has the loyalty of an audience (in this case, The Oatmeal) is going to have more power to mobilize a vigorous lobbying campaign than the idiots who think it's fair to rip-off that material without giving credit where it clearly is due.
What the IRS expects you to do to keep your tax records safe from disaster
WHO Radio Wise Guys - June 23, 2012
A quick summary of the radio show today
