March 03, 2004
There are not many good reasons to be blogging at 4:54 in the morning. A live interview with Australian radio, where it is comfortably lunchtime, is one of them. Turns out the Internet really is global: a researcher down under stumbles on Visual Poetry, and suddenly the word 'ungodly' applies to your alarm clock.
March 02, 2004
The world champion at memorizing binary digits clocks in at 100 bits per minute. Computers find this hilarious; humans find it slightly terrifying. But how do you actually pull it off? Some napkin math with Hans-Peter suggests a trick involving 1024 carefully chosen words, ten colors, and a sentence like 'seven gray birds jumped happily into the dark river.'
February 29, 2004
Leaving for Georgia on Thursday, and reading up beforehand has done what reading about a new country always does: made the planet feel enormous again. Languages with 46 cases that make Finnish look like kindergarten, fifteen ethnic groups, kings whose empires you have never heard of. With this much undiscovered country still on Earth, why are we sending people to Mars?
February 28, 2004
The Economist is the favorite magazine, but not always for the easy reasons. They are more libertarian than comfortable, which sometimes pushes them uncomfortably close to Republicans. And then they publish a leader making the conservative case for gay marriage so cleanly that it dismantles Bush's argument using his own premises. Anyone still suspecting the magazine is conservative should read it.
February 26, 2004
A BBC poll on religion lands roughly where you would expect: Nigerians top, Russians and the British bottom, the US being the usual stubborn outlier. But a different BBC poll a few years earlier ranked the happiest and unhappiest countries on Earth, and the names at the top and bottom look suspiciously familiar. Coincidence, or something stranger?
February 25, 2004
Yahoo spent years trying to turn its name into a verb. Google spent the same years sending trademark letters to anyone who dared. The asymmetry isn't just branding stubbornness, it points at something deeper about what each company thinks it is, and why one of them quietly wants you to stop saying its name.
February 22, 2004
A new project. A small bit of JavaScript that reads the text of whatever page it's living on, hands it to Google Image Search, and pulls back something relevant to display. Your blog gets a fresh, context-aware picture without you ever having to choose one. What could possibly go wrong?
February 21, 2004
European leaders keep wringing their hands about the weak dollar. Meanwhile, every company exposed to currency risk hedges it routinely with options and swaps. So what is stopping countries from doing the same? In fact, the way Euro governments structure their debt isn't just unhedged, it's actively making the dollar's slide hurt more than it has to.
February 19, 2004
Journalists love quoting Google hit counts as proof of cultural relevance — Abba still pulls 1.4 million, so they must still matter. But search for USA, then USA -Cheese, then USA +Cheese, and the math refuses to add up. So what happens when you try to predict a presidential election by counting hits per state?
February 17, 2004
Pick a date — any date — and Google will tell you what happened on it. Not the famous-person-was-born version, but fragments out of the lives of strangers. The newest in the Google hacks series turns search into something like a random window into other people's diaries.
February 16, 2004
Imagine one of those magnetic poetry sets on your fridge — except the fridge is 1600x1600 pixels, lives on the internet, and anyone can move the words. Each visitor sees a 500x500 window. You can rent your own patch and embed it on your site. What kind of poems do strangers leave behind?
February 15, 2004
Comcast wants Disney. Sony wants BMG. From the outside it looks like Big Media is winning — getting fatter, not breaking up. But why are the giants suddenly swallowing each other? Look at who actually made digital music work (hint: not a record label) and a different story starts to emerge.
February 11, 2004
If you're a straight man, two men kissing should logically be excellent news — that's less competition for the women. Yet the reaction tends to run the other way. Why? A Wednesday night theory involving polygamy, evolutionary math, and Seinfeld's claim that men just have very low sales resistance.
February 05, 2004
SpamBayes catches roughly three quarters of incoming spam, which is the good news. The bad news arrives when you try to email yourself an attachment with no body text — apparently very suspicious behavior. So now there's a small daily ritual that involves typing nonsense words to outwit your own filter.
February 04, 2004
Remember disintermediation? The Wired-era gospel that the Internet would axe the middlemen and let buyers meet sellers directly? Travel agents really did take a beating. So why is your cheap flight to Armenia now passing through four intermediaries instead of one — none of which you'd ever name? The middlemen didn't die. They multiplied.
January 29, 2004
Pick a winner for every state, hit submit, and out comes a map and an electoral tally. A quick little project that lets you stake your claim months before the election does — and then drop the map on your blog as proof you saw it coming all along.
January 26, 2004
In the Seinfeld episode Bizarro Jerry, the gang meets their exact opposites. What if Google had a Bizarro mode? Not the least relevant results — that's been tried and failed — but the pages arguing against the theory or scientist you just typed in. The pro side always rises to the top. Where do the skeptics live?
January 24, 2004
Take every visitor who's used the visited-countries tool, stack all their travel maps on top of each other, and color the result by frequency. Redder means more popular. Which countries glow brightest, and which barely register at all? A small aggregate portrait of where people who fill out web forms have actually been.
January 21, 2004
Last week I had the bright idea of making my visited countries project go viral: enter your countries, get a little code snippet for your blog, link back to me. Then some Danish bloggers picked it up. Then LiveJournal. My usual 500 visitors a day became 6000. Time to think about Google Ads, perhaps.
January 21, 2004
Physical distance between countries is easy to measure. But what about psychological distance? Over a few good Belgian beers, a friend visiting from Italy and I started wondering whether you could project that onto a map. The answer involved counting how often country names show up together on the same web page. The resulting images surprised both of us.