June 13, 2005
The espresso in Albania is surprisingly good. Travel long enough and you start noticing a pattern: former colonies inherit one specific thing from their occupiers, and that thing tends to outlive everything else. English colonies got railways. French ones got baguettes. Germany's brief colonial stint left behind, predictably, beer. The Dutch had Indonesia for four centuries — guess what stuck.
June 12, 2005
Back from Albania. There's that familiar time warp you get on a strange trip: the first days feel like a week, and the last days vanish in a sprint to the ferry. Then a frantic run through the terminal, 42 minutes to spare, 300 Germans in the security queue — and one quiet glance at the departure board that didn't quite add up.
June 01, 2005
Switzerland is expensive. The pub charges nine francs for a beer, the supermarket sneaks meat past 100 francs a kilo, and one ATM on Bahnhofstrasse refuses to dispense less than a thousand. Mostly it is fine — you get what you pay for. Then Douwe topped up his prepaid phone with 50 francs and watched it land at a balance of 32.
May 30, 2005
The French have voted Non to the EU constitution, and the Dutch will probably follow. The strange part: most people don't actually object to it. They are just unhappy and feel like saying no. In the nineties everything was going great — growth up, crime down, a sensible prime minister biking to work. Then something flipped. What changed?
May 16, 2005
douweosinga.com made PC Magazine's list of 100 sites you didn't know you couldn't live without. Then a Googleplex colleague suggested grabbing People Magazine because Douwe had landed in the 50 Most Beautiful People list — which, on closer inspection, meant something rather different. Then the BBC chimed in. Quite the month for accidental fame.
May 09, 2005
Europeans get teased about their bizarre opening hours — shops shut on Sunday, museums on Monday, the kitchen at nine. Americans, the story goes, have everything open all the time. Out hunting for late-night food in California, Douwe found this story to be slightly oversold. And then there's the 2am rule: a club open until four, with the bar going dry at two.
May 07, 2005
Sixty years since the war ended. The Economist notes that three quarters of German soldiers who died fell on the Eastern Front. In the Netherlands, May 5th is mostly about the Canadians who arrived to liberate us — and rightly so. But the numbers tell a less comfortable story: Canada lost 37,000 people, the Soviet Union lost 27 million.
April 30, 2005
Munich for a conference, Hannover for a pub conference (a fancy word for drinking beer while talking shop), Amsterdam for Queensday, then off to Mountain View for two weeks. With wireless in the hotel lobby, a broken server back home can be fixed from anywhere. Tempting to imagine hacking on Google projects from the Thai jungle. But there's a catch.
April 20, 2005
Why do we still reach for paper travel guides when we have the whole internet at our fingertips? My brother and I had a theory, and it came down to a single page: the overview map with highlights scattered across it. Online guides never quite nailed that. So we spent a few weekends hacking in Python.
April 18, 2005
Zurich's answer to Burning Man involves the guilds that have run the city since 1336, a straw snowman called Booogg (whose name also means something that dropped out of your nose), and a pile of explosives. The faster the snowman blows up, the better the summer. This year it took more than 15 minutes.
April 13, 2005
Back from SES Munich 05, and the total food provided by Swiss during the flight added up to exactly one piece of chocolate. Which got me thinking about LOT Polish Airlines, Delhi to Amsterdam via Warsaw, and the seven full meals they once served me. The trouble was the quality. And the milk chocolate would have been a deal-breaker anyway.
April 09, 2005
I flip a coin. Heads, your income is halved for life. How much extra do you need to take that bet? Most people want a lot - and that intuition, plus John Rawls and a spreadsheet of GDP figures, leads somewhere uncomfortable. The poorest 10% in the US do worse than the poorest in Slovenia. So who was right?
March 26, 2005
Zurich is famously expensive. For European visitors, the explanation is easy: Switzerland is richer than the EU, so things cost more. For American visitors, the story breaks. Income per head is actually higher in the US, yet a haircut in Zurich costs a fortune. Stereos trade across borders, but haircuts don't - and that detail leads somewhere awkward.
March 18, 2005
Zurich in winter is a brothers Grimm fairy tale - snow-covered squares, medieval churches, winding streets, and absolutely nobody outside. Then a week or two ago, the snow vanished and the thermometer hit 19 degrees. Every cafe sprouted a terrace overnight, and people materialized from somewhere. The lake is still too cold for swimming. For how long, though?
March 15, 2005
I have every Seinfeld episode on my hard disk. My wife and I rewatch Friends. After a while you know every line by heart, which sounds like a problem until you realise it is actually a feature. Swiss DVDs come with four or five audio tracks and even more subtitle languages. Our high school French was good enough to order a drink. Maybe a beaver.
March 13, 2005
Negroponte's 100 dollar laptop for the developing world sounds like a lovely idea. Education, bulk components, last-generation tech. The trouble is unreliable power, internet that costs ten times as much as in the US, and the small matter that 100 dollars is a lot of money when you make 1 dollar a day. There is a better gadget for the job.
March 01, 2005
O'Reilly is putting one of my Python hacks into Mapping Hacks. The 75 dollars won't get me far, but it got me thinking about where this site is going - and about Philosophy Hacks, which has been rattling around my head. The earliest philosophers were really politicians. Then scientists. Then economists. So who are they now?
February 24, 2005
German-Swiss food can be as subtle as a good kick in the head. Anything with Bierhalle in the name seems to cater for people working in coal mines. We went to Johanniter for lunch, ordered the Roesti with fried cheese and sausages, and didn't finish it. The waitress had thoughts on this. Specifically, on our work ethic.
February 15, 2005
Waiting for the perfect phone is a losing game. The Benq P50, the Motorola Mpx, the T-Mobile MDA IV: each spec sheet sweeter than the last, none of them actually for sale. So I gave up and bought something that exists. A week in, with Seinfeld playing full-frame on the touchscreen, I have thoughts about who wins this fight.
February 05, 2005
Four riddles about coin flips, envelopes, and quiz-show doors. Each one offers you a switch. In two of them you should take it; in two it makes no difference. The probabilities feel identical at first glance and the puzzles look almost the same. So what is actually different between them? Think before you scroll.