The Sears Tower is now Willis Tower
The name change is going to find public acceptance to be an uphill battle, but if people really care about these things, they have to start acting on the preservation of institutions before it's much too late. In the case of the Sears Tower, the time to have acted was about two decades ago.
FAA will look into maintenance practices at Southwest after 737 peels open
Fortunately, there wasn't a catastrophic failure (like what happened aboard Aloha Airlines Flight 243), but cabin pressure was lost after a football-sized hole appeared in the fuselage of the plane.
Bill Gates is buying his way to the top of the class, and good for him
Gates is in on a patent application for a geoengineering process to mitigate hurricanes by cutting off their supply of warm water. The idea itself isn't the important thing (though the idea should be addressed; more importantly, we should address how much overbuilding has taken place in storm-prone areas). The important thing is that one of the wealthiest people alive is using some of his considerable resources to do things to make himself smarter (like investigating ways to prevent hurricanes). He'll get things wrong, just as he'll get things right. But as he continues to concentrate his efforts on becoming smarter, he's refining a potent combination of intellectual aptitude and freedom to experiment. Fortunately, the indications are that he's driven to use these for benevolent purposes.
Iowa Governor Chet Culver gets a Twitter account
The problem is that he's using the username "GovChetCulver", which will seem outdated when he's no longer Governor. One person who really ought to get a Twitter account is Aaron Brown, formerly of CNN. Twitter is still going through growing pains -- like absurdly insecure server management -- but there's no getting around the fact it's a very popular tool.
The definition of price elasticity
Credit-card error causes pack of cigarettes to appear as $23 quadrillion on smoker's bill. The old phrase, "Everyone has a price" rings true -- there's some price between $0.01 and $23 quadrillion a pack at which nobody will pay for a pack of cigarettes.
Chimps can learn from instructional videos
Jumbo hail lands in Des Moines area overnight
Clinton braces for a higher-than-expected sewer bill
Know when to walk away, and know when to run
A Russian firm has offered to buy even more of Facebook, valuing the entire firm at $6.5 billion. Anyone who is holding on to shares in the company, which is not yet even publicly-traded, needs to sell out immediately. Sure, the valuation could rise even more. But, sooner or later, Facebook will be eclipsed by some other site or combination of sites. And when that time comes, the people who held on instead of selling out will look like the people who held stock in Yahoo when it was $400 a share. Internet companies have proven to be faster to rise and faster to fall than any other business segment in modern history. When someone comes along and offers ten times annual revenues for your firm -- and that's revenues, not profits -- and your only reason to hang on is the hope that your whiz-kid CEO will eventually start caring about making profits, then you need to make like a fighter pilot in a crippled plane and punch out. Something better will eclipse Facebook sooner than most people probably think.
Competition forces Microsoft to launch a free version of Office
A versin of the office-productivity suite will be available online for free sometime next year. Google already offers Google Docs and Sun backs the OpenOffice suite, so Microsoft's one-time virtual monopoly on word processing and spreadsheets has already been cracked. The announcement is a clear indicator that competition is making good things happen for computer users.
Was the death of Michael Jackson a good dry run for a real disaster?
At least as far as stress-testing online communication services can go, the answer may be "yes"
GE claims it can make a house run on zero net energy from the outside
It's a project targeted for availability by 2015
YouTube is costing Google a fortune to maintain
At least $175 million a year, but possibly almost half a billion annually. That's a load of opportunity cost right there -- a half a billion dollars is a lot to keep on paying for something that only might become profitable in the future. It could certainly buy a ton of research and development.
The frequencies (in hertz) that form the musical notes we hear and like
Is bottled water safer than tap water? In a word, no.
How to manage a radio station's identity
The BBC, which has more resources than the average station or even station group to devote to these things, has some useful lessons for everyone else in the broadcasting business -- including the use of positioning statements that focus on the listener, not the broadcaster.
What's wrong with the cable TV service in Des Moines?
American highways were rarely paved in concrete before World War II
Unintentional sewer inspection
Evidence suggests red-light cameras are being used for revenue, not safety
At least that's how it looks in suburban Chicago. Nor should it come as any surprise: Red-light cameras are a lazy and not-necessarily-altogether-effective way of preventing traffic accidents. Surveillance is an inferior tool for improving traffic safety; better design is what's called for. Better design can range from creating intersections with fewer cross-street connections to changing the length of time that lights stay on the yellow caution. Red-light cameras have the pernicious effect of introducing even more surveillance into what is increasingly a surveillance society.
Insider says radio stations should control their hosts' Twitter accounts
Google really is planning to launch its own operating system
The Google Chrome OS will be targeted first at netbooks (with a planned release next year). It's an interesting proposition, since the intent is to get users to get online and stay online, using Google products for as much time as possible. Should Microsoft and Apple be terrified? Probably not. But Google is clearly trying to diversify beyond search-engine services alone, which is the only way for the company to stay in business over the long term. Search engines are incredibly useful, but they're also (relatively) easy to launch, at least when compared to things like car companies or pharmaceutical firms.
"Good GM" emerges from bankruptcy
But it leaves behind a huge mess, no matter what we're told about this being a "fresh start"
Monkeys may be able to identify improper grammar
Which may suggest where the linguistic functions of the brain started to evolve
Unusually heavy rainfall across the Plains
Wife of Britain's foreign-service spy agency says a little too much on Facebook
That's the persistent problem of the Internet -- once anything starts to leak, it's generally preserved online forever. And publishing via anything from Facebook to Twitter to Blogger can be done instantaneously, by drunks and sober people alike.
Four of the world's top 15 tallest buildings are new construction
The Burj Dubai, Greenland Financial Center (in China), Guangzhou West Tower (also in China), and the Trump International Hotel (in Chicago) are all brand-new. And #3-ranked Shanghai's World Financial Center is only a year old. What a peculiar boom.
Anachronisms of the old media era that just annoy us today
...without serving any useful purpose. People living in a handful of places (including Iowa) are considered residents of the "home markets" of as many as six Major League Baseball teams, which means lots of broadcast blackouts. There's no good reason for it -- this is the Internet era.
It turns out "Billie Jean" sounds pretty good when played at high speed
(Video) And it's also pretty amusing to hear "Thriller" played in Mario Paint Composer. Michael Jackson was, by anyone's reasonable estimation, a strange guy. But he came up with some classic hits.
Colin Powell on President Obama's spending: "We can't pay for it all"
Lack of evidence for what happened to crashed Air France airliner may be final
There's good reason to suspect weather-related problems as the cause of the crash, but it's starting to look like there won't be any firm evidence from cockpit voice and instrument recorders to tell what really occurred. If engineering is the study of failure (and the subsequent avoidance of it), then a crash without any resulting data becomes a dual tragedy, because it tells us that something is wrong somewhere in the system, but we don't know what or where.
Wildfires in Los Angeles as drought lingers
How a flying styrofoam cup can break a windshield
If this is the kind of story that it takes to get ordinary people interested in science, then perhaps scientific-minded people ought to be looking for more opportunities to explain things in scientific terms. We need vastly more scientific literacy in America (if not the world), and there's something to be said for finding ways of getting people hooked on scientific thinking, rather than hoping that they'll find it on their own. Science and economics alike share a sort of popular mystery -- it's considered socially acceptable in many circles to say "I don't know anything about money" or "Science is too complicated for me", even by people who can rattle off football statistics or automotive dimensions as though they're tattooed on the back of the speaker's hand. An understanding of complexity and complex issues can be enormously worthwhile -- especially if people realize that complexity is better embraced than feared. And if it's true that a lot of people are dumber than many might realize, then perhaps it's more important than we might think to get the vast population of capable-but-unchallenged minds up to a higher gear. At least once in a while.
Towns not actually hit by devastating tornado get recovery money anyway
Something about it just doesn't seem quite right, especially considering the state of Iowa has a huge budgetary shortfall right now.
Passenger happens to know how to fix his broken airliner
...and manages to get the plane working quickly enough that the flight was only 35 minutes late
A field guide to tattoos
(Warning: Not for the easily-offended)
A catalog of "mental models"
The "mental models" idea is repeated frequently by Charlie Munger
How will vision drive infrastructure investment?
Gov. Palin threatens to sue news organizations
It's unlikely that the portion of the population persuaded by her "outsider" status with "the media" is larger than the portion of the population put off by her threatening to try to fight the freedom of the press.
Holy endorsements
Vatican Radio (which discusses its own history as though it's still 1996) is going to start carrying commercials in order to subsidize its annual budget from the Catholic Church
Underwater-loving mouse deer might be the evolutionary connection between cows and whales
How will vision drive infrastructure investment?
Podcast: Microsoft's diversification strategy
Listen to the MP3 file, subscribe to the podcast feed, or subscribe using iTunes
Podcast: Michael Jackson crashes the Internet
Listen to the MP3 file, subscribe to the podcast feed, or subscribe using iTunes
Five big shortcomings in many business plans
Thinking that all you need is a small share of a big market or that the only thing that matters is having a lot of great talent aren't enough to get a business off the ground. But many businesses fail to keep up their strategic long-range planning once they get off the ground. That's a good way to fail in the long term.
Survey says that the military is actually more moderate and independent than conservative and Republican
The officer corps does tend to be heavily weighted towards the GOP, but there are more enlisted members of the military than officers
"I always feel like...somebody's watching me..."
A new satellite swarm put into the skies by Raytheon and the US Air Force can deliver high-quality images (in color or in other spectra altogether) within ten minutes of a request, more or less anywhere on the globe. Meantime, helium-filled balloons the size of a football field are being launched to provide surveillance for incoming cruise missiles.
Casey Kasem pulls the plug on his weekly countdown show
39 years of "American Top [well, it was 40 before he went to 20 and 10]" come to a close so he can "pursue other projects".
Kansas probably won't stay quiet for $10,000
Notes from the Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - July 5, 2009
In which we explore the possibility of adding some new states to the USA
We may find out soon whether the President is a protectionist
What's been odd about the Obama administration thus far is that it's shown lots of love for internationalism in political affairs (the President himself has gone on a series of foreign trips all over the world), but it's still not clear how internationalist the President's economic views are. His campaign rhetoric was decidedly protectionist (that is, anti-free-trade), but there are a lot of close advisors who are well-known free-trade enthusiasts. On the Independence Day holiday weekend, it's good to think about how much stronger America has always been because it interacted with other countries -- especially in the commercial arena. Also in honor of the holiday, perhaps we ought to think about opening the door to new states. Why shouldn't the United States in 2009 be open to entertaining the idea of other countries adding themselves to this federation?
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