Brian Gongol
Official report says that China's bullet train crashed in July due to design flaws and sloppy management
There's a great deal to admire about Chinese culture, and a lot to learn from it. But there's a great deal of behavior by the Chinese government of which to be highly skeptical. The tacit endorsement of intellectual-property theft is one of the worst. It's widely argued that China stole the technology behind its bullet train, and there's a very important lesson for people to remember about the theft: Knowing how to put something together that looks the same as the original isn't the same as knowing how to make the original. Plenty of people can duplicate paintings, for instance. But the process matters, too. A photograph of a Jackson Pollock painting is definitely not the same thing as a Pollock original. And process matters in technology as much as it matters in art: Knowing why individual materials were chosen, or angles used, or steps taken in a manufacturing process can be essential to the outcome, even if two products -- original and copycat -- look a lot alike when placed side-by-side. And with many companies relying so heavily on China, the world has a vested interest in getting the Chinese government to play by the rules that allow the market system to work. A free market requires the rule of law.
Copy editors at the Cedar Rapids Gazette miss a pair of big errors
An article titled "Iowa Republicans struggling with who to back in precinct caucuses" made two big mistakes. First, it should be "whom to back", not "who". And second, the first sentence of the article should not read "It's hard to find a straight Republican in Iowa", even if the author is trying to make a clever reference to how many voters say they're "leaning towards" a candidate. Saying you can't "find a straight Republican" simply doesn't pass the giggle test.
Cloak-and-dagger move in Iowa politics
A state senator abandons his post as chair of Michele Bachmann's Presidential campaign so he can endorse Ron Paul instead -- less than a week ahead of the caucuses. Should one have a sincere change of heart of that magnitude, one should probably just knuckle down and do the best he or she can for the remaining few days. But this looks like something underhanded. The individual in question (State Sen. Kent Sorenson) previously used a database from his state-government email list to drop spam on voters on behalf of Bachmann. He seems to have a problem with his judgment.
The rise of the misquotation
Justice prevails for some Egyptian women, but too late
A court has ended the practice of forcing degrading "virginity tests" on female detainees. It's unbelievable that they were allowed to take place at all, ever.
How to make predictions better
Apparently, the more an individual adheres to a unifying worldview, the less likely that individual is to produce useful predictions. Better predictions appear to come from those who are interested in the heterogeneity of the sources from which they draw.
The rise of drone aircraft for fighting wars
They look great from the standpoint of being able to project greater American fighting power without putting more Americans in harm's way. But they're a terrifying development should they fall into the wrong hands. We may find ourselves quite urgently needing to learn how to detect and defend against them far more than knowing how to launch them.
Fun with levitation
Someone's been Photoshopping in North Korea
Erasing stragglers from a shot of Kim Jong Il's funeral procession. But why bother?
Firefox 9 is on the market
They're trying to seriously speed up their release cycle -- Version 9 follows Version 8 by a matter of weeks
A less-powerful laser pointer
