Brian Gongol
The WHO Radio Wise Guys airs on WHO Radio in Des Moines, Iowa on 1040 AM or streaming online at WHORadio.com. The show airs from 1 to 2 pm Central Time on Saturday afternoons. A podcast of show highlights is also available. Leave comments and questions on the Wise Guys Facebook page or e-mail them to wiseguys@whoradio.com.
Dan used the Redbox service to keep his kids entertained on a recent family road trip to Devils Tower. The convenience of Redbox's system for renting videos and returning them at any Redbox site (not just the one from which the videos were rented) made it valuable for the trip.
Brian is testing Google Voice, a unified messaging service that delivers calls, voice mail, transcripts of voice messages, and text messages to any selection of telephones the user chooses. Unified messaging has long been held out as a promise of future technology, and it's starting to emerge as a reality. With a single telephone number, a person can manage incoming phone messages as easily as e-mail.
On the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, we explore some of the reasons to make a Moon trip today:
- national defense (clearly one of the major reasons for making the trip in the first place)
- as a soure of fuel for future nuclear-fusion reactors
- scientific research
- exploration for exploration's sake
- as a life insurance policy for humanity (we don't know what kind of existential threat might take out Earth someday; we should probably get working on inhabiting a backup planet or at least some other heavenly body just in case)
Skin cells have been turned into full-grown mice. Makes a person think twice about dusting more often, doesn't it?
In a break with standard procedure, Dan may end up with a BlackBerry before he gets an iPhone. BlackBerry has synchronization features for Apple computers now, and Dan has heard of too many frustrations with AT&T's signals in Des Moines (Ma Bell has the exclusive iPhone contract with Apple). On a related note, the Sun Virtual Box may help developers produce useful programs that work on different operating systems.
The value of cross-discipline learning comes into the light when we see what's happened as air-traffic controllers and pilots apply some of their aeronautical organization to emergency rooms, making the ER much more effective.
Twitter's popularity makes it a bigger security target than before. The biggest problem: URL-shortening services hide where a link is sending the user, and that makes it possible for crooks to misdirect well-meaning visitors. More dangerous than letting Google's founders have a fighter jet? Yes, probably.
Bill Gates is putting his name on some crazy-sounding ideas for fighting hurricanes, but before we criticize him too much, perhaps we should be thankful that he's trying to put his enormous financial resources to good use. Many people have been rightly outraged by the stupid superstition of burying children in the midst of a solar eclipse, but we're often much too slow to criticize our own superstitions, like not going to the 13th floor of a building. So before we jump too quickly on Gates for patenting far-out ideas, perhaps we should turn a critical eye upon some of our own ludicrous social conventions.
Keywords in this show:
air-traffic control •
Apple •
AT&T •
BlackBerry •
children •
cloning •
cross-discipline learning •
dust •
emergency rooms •
existential threats •
Gates, Bill •
Google •
Google Voice •
iPhone •
medicine •
mice •
Moon •
nuclear fusion •
Redbox •
road trips •
science •
solar eclipse •
space travel •
Sun •
superstition •
technology •
Twitter •
URL-shortening services