Gongol.com Archives: March 2019

March 15, 2019

The Internet is now old enough for one-time teen hackers to be Presidential candidates

Beto O'Rourke earns an unusual spot in electoral history

Connections alone aren't by definition good

There's an embedded logical flaw when Mark Zuckerberg concludes with a phrase like "bring the world closer together." The problem is that the connection *itself* isn't necessarily a good thing, as made plain in the last couple of years. The kinds of people who do the connecting also matter a great deal -- witness the apparent contribution of Internet message boards to the radicalization of the terrorists who just shot up parts of Christchurch, New Zealand. It's not just a Facebook problem, either -- the entire culture of Reddit, for example, serves to undergird the conditions that connect people to others, often in really unsavory ways.

Why the Boeing 737 Max's problems may have been 50 years in the making

Legacy design idiosyncracies may have led to the two recent crashes

A most rewarding way to spend three minutes

The intersection of architecture with culture: Why Tel Aviv has so many Miesian buildings, and why their popularity has been revived

49 people murdered in New Zealand terrorist attack

It's terrorism, period.

American voters are often quite disengaged

We in Iowa have the best political junkies in the nation, but we also have a whole lot of people just living their lives who have an allergy to strong ideology. There's nothing wrong with that, in and of itself: A low degree of intensity is a symptom of a system that is generally palatable to people. It's when your average person is joining mass protests in the streets that something is clearly badly, badly wrong.

Missouri River floodwaters cover I-29 in Iowa

The riverside is flat and low, but it still takes a great deal of water to overtop the banks

There's only one right way to cook corned beef

And that's long and slow. Like, 24 hours long. Anything less than that is the cause of the rubbery texture people wrongly associate with the Irish-American delicacy.