Gongol.com Archives: February 2011
Brian Gongol


February 1, 2011

News Egyptian army says it won't use force against protesters
That's a huge announcement under the circumstances. Google and Twitter are cooperating to allow people to circumvent a government blackout of Internet access by delivering a phone-to-Twitter service for those who can't directly access the site itself. That step may very well be one of the signs we're on the fringe of an era in which companies rival national governments for power. It has happened on occasion in the past -- the Hudson's Bay Company could have passed for the actual government of parts of Canada for some time, and the Dutch East India Company had warships in its fleet. But it's something mainly new to us in the modern day.

Science and Technology Researchers think a baby bonobo has autism
He's at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, and they think that some of his eye movements and behaviors are signs he may be autistic. He obviously didn't get it from a vaccine.

Computers and the Internet Three rules for the safe use of Internet message boards
A segment from Saturday's "WHO Radio Wise Guys"


Broadcasting "The King's Speech": A delightful film, but wildly inaccurate
Christopher Hitchens tears apart some of the fabrications that form major parts of the movie

Science and Technology Telephone exchange names
American telephone numbers used to be identified by exchange names that revealed the first two digits of a local number in a word name, followed by five digits. We've long since abandoned the practice, but it's not hard to root out the origins of the convention.

Weather and Disasters Blizzard closes Lake Shore Drive in Chicago
A thousand cars got stuck

Computers and the Internet Google wants your mobile-phone number
Google Voice users can now port their existing cell-phone numbers over to Google Voice, so that the mobile number becomes a Google Voice number instead (that could, in turn, ring a cell phone number again). Not recommended for anyone but the boldest and savviest of computer users. Though it's unlikely to be closed now, Google has a history of shutting down lots of its experiments over the years, and Google Voice could become one of them.

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