Brian Gongol
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
