January 18, 2004
I really should have known better than to wade into one of those discussions about what men are good at versus women. I am all for equal rights, but the claim that women are simply better inventors whose work was suppressed got me defensive. So I made a joke about vacuum cleaners. In hindsight, possibly not my best diplomatic moment.
January 15, 2004
You are allowed to say democracy does not work. You are not allowed to say you will not vote. Yet any child can see the maths: your single vote has, in all of recorded history, never been the deciding one. So why does half the country turn up anyway, and what would a more honest democracy actually look like? I have a proposal involving juries.
January 13, 2004
The first Landgeist maps looked good but had a funny quirk: Iraq scored disturbingly high on Sex. The culprit turned out to be the way search engines count co-occurrence — any page mentioning Iraq alongside a long list of other words got swept in. Switching to Altavista with its NEAR keyword cleaned things up considerably.
January 07, 2004
Google AdSense forbids you from clicking your own ads, or even hinting that visitors should. Fair enough. But what if a hundred strangers each clicked one of your ads, in exchange for you clicking one of each of theirs? A pyramid scheme, basically, with Google footing the bill. I am not actually suggesting anyone do this. But the mechanics are interesting.
January 05, 2004
Google has its Zeitgeist. I now have Landgeist. Type in a word and it shows you how often that word appears next to the name of each country on the web, painted onto a world map. Try malaria. You might expect something resembling an actual malaria map. What you get is rather different, and says more about us than about mosquitoes.
January 02, 2004
Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1517. Michael Moore writes today. Different centuries, similar surname, oddly similar arguments — including a complaint about rich landowners driving peasants off the land to make room for sheep. The parallel to outsourcing programming jobs to India is almost too neat. So is More's leftwing radicalism still radical, or did history quietly settle the argument?
December 30, 2003
A CD plays in any CD player. A song bought from iTunes plays only on the devices Apple permits. Five of six big digital music services have already solved this — by all licensing the same DRM from a single company. The hero of consumer interoperability turns out to be Microsoft. Yes, that Microsoft. Hear me out.
December 20, 2003
The physical robots are not taking over the world anytime soon. The software ones might. Imagine a script that scrapes popular content, fills a site with it, runs AdSense, and once it has earned enough, buys itself a new hosting account, copies itself over, and goes its own way. Money-making artificial life. Probably starting, as these things do, with porn.
December 17, 2003
Half a year in, Douwe finally hit number one on Google for 'Osinga' (Douwe Egberts still owns the coffee corner). Cycling home, it struck him: google.com/search?q=... is starting to look an awful lot like http:// or ftp://. So what would it take to make Google a proper URL protocol? Delphi, the Windows registry, and a small detour through gopher: ensued.
December 15, 2003
The rear speakers are off the bookshelves and on the ceiling, and the surround sound is glorious. The thirty meters of wire snaking through the living room, less so. Wireless audio exists, but the speakers still need power, which means another little black brick. Tesla died broke trying to fix this. What are the actual options for truly wireless electricity?
December 14, 2003
This week's project: tick the countries you've been to, get back a world map with them shaded red. The trick under the hood is a small bit of palette manipulation — every country gets its own carefully-chosen color in the GIF, and the script swaps palette entries on the fly. No image processing, no server-side rendering. Just bytes 13 through 13+255*3.
December 12, 2003
Kyoto isn't working — the signatories add up to less than half of global emissions, and they're barely reducing. New Scientist has a Plan B called Contraction and Convergence: every country converges to 0.3 tons of CO2 per head by 2050. Fair and simple. But Douwe thinks it could be fairer and even simpler — and the analogy involves a thief.
December 10, 2003
The US has decided that countries that didn't help with the Iraq war shouldn't profit from rebuilding it. 'Why should our taxpayers help French, German or Russian companies?' It sounds logical. Douwe argues it's actually the opposite: locking out the better and cheaper bidders means American taxpayers end up paying more, not less. The Iraqi cell phone procurement is exhibit A.
December 09, 2003
Growing up, going out meant the disco, and Douwe was bad at it. Shouting 'AND NIETZSCHE SAYS' over the bassline didn't work as a flirting strategy. Beer was overpriced. The dancing part was a mystery. Then pubs happened, then lounging, and now blogging — which is suspiciously close to his natural way of expression. The pattern, it turns out, is fairly reliable.
December 08, 2003
While poking around in World66, the open-content travel portal, Douwe ended up with a list of country coordinates and an obvious next question: what if you projected the day's Google News headlines onto a world map? The result shows you, at a glance, where news is happening. A small project, but a satisfying one.
December 07, 2003
American populists hear a 'giant sucking sound' of jobs leaving for China. Cheap exporter, unfair trade, yellow peril rerun. But the headline number — that the US drove two-thirds of nineties global growth — is a dollar-terms artifact. Measure in purchasing power parity and the picture flips. Over the last two years, EU and Japanese exporters have been growing fastest into one country, and it isn't the US.
December 06, 2003
Following up on Hjalmar Gislason's puzzle — what's the smallest number Google has never seen? — Douwe found an algorithm that's roughly ten times faster than brute-force querying. The trick exploits the fact that big numbers rarely show up alone: one page of serial numbers gives you a whole batch for free. Still nowhere near fast enough, but the gap is closing.
December 05, 2003
Hilbert's hotel is full, but the clerk always finds a room. Even for infinite new guests. The trick works because the rooms are countably infinite — and the real numbers between 0 and 1 famously aren't. Now consider the set of all numbers you can express in mathematical language. They're countable. Hand that list to Cantor and a strange paradox starts unfolding.
December 04, 2003
Two ways to handle a product idea: build it and risk discovering it already exists, or blog it and hope someone else has done the work. After fumbling a business card into his phone's address book, Douwe wondered why the camera couldn't just read it. Surely someone has built this? Google says no. So here we are.
December 03, 2003
Douwe's dishwasher dies. A replacement clock costs two thirds of a new machine; the repair guy charges 45 euros just to look at it. Somewhere along the way, the parts started costing more than the whole. What does that say about shipping, handling, and the strange economics of throwing things away rather than fixing them?