The WHO Radio Wise Guys
Brian Gongol


Whether or not it's really true that some astronauts have been flying while drunk, you can probably understand why someone might want to take the edge off while strapped to 53,000 cubic feed of liquid hydrogen. NASA is a strange agency: On one hand, they're so far behind the curve that the Space Shuttle is almost at its expiration date. But on the other hand, they're one of the few government agencies that offers incentive prizes -- in NASA's case, the Centennial Challenge Prizes. The best thing about these kinds of prizes is that they're market-friendly ways of encouraging innovation. The X Prize Foundation is using the power of these prizes to try to bring about progress in areas like air travel and human genomics.

The Department of Energy says that gas prices are going to stay level through 2009. There's reason to be skeptical of that forecast. Among other things, we keep driving cars.

The Oshkosh Air Show is wrapping up this weekend. Dan remembers meeting Chuck Yeager at one Oshkosh event about a decade ago and seeing Yeager's P-51 named "Glamorous Glennis," which was also the name of the plane Yeager used to break the sound barrier.

A caller asked about getting his Nero CD burner program to work correctly (he was having conflicts with a previous version supposedly loaded on the computer); one tool that might help is their CleanTool for removing previous versions.

Mac sold about 270,000 iPhones in the first weekend of sales. A lot of people have called the iPhone "revolutionary." That word is probably an exaggeration: Wireless Internet access anywhere is cool -- no doubt about that -- but it's not necessarily a revolution. Electric light was a real revolution.

The Burj Dubai is the new tallest building in the world...and before it's done, some people expect it to be about as tall as the radio/TV towers up in Alleman, with a downtown Marriott on top.

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