Brian Gongol
How much we still need to learn about economics
Bill Gates is one of the world's three richest people, and he has the available leisure time to study anything he wants -- and to pay the smartest people in the world to teach him. So when he expresses how many unanswered questions he still recognizes in the economic events of the past few years, he sheds light on a serious problem: Our modern understanding of economics is probably equivalent in sophistication to our understanding of medicine around 1915 or so. We understand some of the major concepts, but we're largely ignorant of the most important factors that determine the real outcomes. It is self-evident, for instance, that financial markets are neither mature nor efficient. Otherwise, we wouldn't have millions of Americans at or near retirement age with no meaningful financial assets to their names, nor would disciplined investors like Warren Buffett still be able to obtain consistently superior results by honest means. There's a lot of learning yet to be done.
What Midwesterners need to know about living in an earthquake zone
Because, contrary to instinct, we're more likely to feel a serious earthquake when it happens than Californians would be likely to feel an equivalent quake.
The world's perfect test of the transference property
If A is better than B, and B is better than C, then A is better than C. Or so "The Most Awesomest Thing Ever" is trying to prove with a head-to-head matchup of, well, everything, in a test of, well, awesomeness. As of now, the Internet is winning, beating life itself, oxygen, and sex.
Streaking through the sky, it's...a meteor
Finding well-educated workers for an unglamorous sector requires real incentives
