Brian Gongol
"The Lost Voices of Tiananmen"
A BBC documentary including archival material from the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 serves as a vital reminder that freedom is precious and often requires a fight. Even in free countries, freedom and liberty require constant defense -- including against bureaucratic enforcement of the law, which can be abused just like conventional police powers can be.
Foreign-language tattoos: Always a bad decision
Unless you know the language, you probably shouldn't use it in a tattoo. Even TV stars get misspelled tattoos -- and it should be assumed they probably can afford better than most.
Passenger saves trans-Pacific flight from disaster
The passenger -- a boom operator in the Air Force -- noticed a fuel leak from the wing, took video on his camera, and convinced a flight attendant that the plane was in danger. It just goes to show that we humans have pretty good instincts for what constitutes danger, and that we should pay attention to those instincts.
How to complain about junk faxes and robo-calls
A lot of things that act like radio are landing in automotive dashboards
Radio listening via mobile phone is already here, and it's growing quickly in the UK -- where mobile-phone technology is typically adopted before it's adopted in the United States.
It's all in how you market yourself
(Audio) Another dose of genius from The Onion: "Marijuana legalized two days after advocates put on neckties"
How quickly human skin colorations can change
Major evolutionary adaptations to the amount of sunlight in a place mean that most people probably aren't anywhere close to the same color as their ancestors. Other changes appear to happen with evolutionary swiftness of even greater magnitude: A new research study from UC-Santa Barbara concludes that the better we get at avoiding external killers like starvation and accidents, the longer our bodies manage to stretch out our natural life expectancies, too. That appears to be the result of better investment in overall health rather than quick procreation. Now that we know a little more about how things work on the macro scale, how about figuring out better ways of keeping individuals around and functional for as long as possible. Nonagenarian Norman Borlaug is still trying to save the world from starvation, and it would be worthwhile to everyone on the planet to keep him alive and thinking for as long as possible.
Podcast: Been caught stealing
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Podcast: Is that a goat in your lawn?
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Water conservation plans are already on the horizon
