June 17, 2003
Sitcoms aren't actually funnier than real life. They just have canned laughter and writers. Both, it turns out, are fixable. Picture a big red chuckle button in every office, jokes piped to your phone moments before you need them, and entire episodes of Friends running in parallel across six hundred actual friends.
June 15, 2003
A small follow-up to yesterday's Atlantis theory: a new project that lets you slide the sea level up and down across a map of Europe, and watch the coastlines breathe.
June 15, 2003
Bowling for Columbine blames the guns, but the numbers don't quite agree. Switzerland and Canada are armed to the teeth and peaceful; Americans manage a higher murder rate than Europe even without firearms. So what is it? A second number, about working hours, points somewhere unexpected.
June 11, 2003
Most theories about Atlantis settle on the comforting conclusion that it never existed. Here is another. Ten thousand years ago the Strait of Gibraltar was closed and the Mediterranean sat much lower than it does now. Then one day it opened. Look at the map of what was, until that morning, dry land.
June 10, 2003
Children's bibles leave out rather a lot. The sons of God mating with the women of earth and producing giants, for instance. The genocide of Benjamin. The forty-two children mauled by bears for teasing a balding prophet. A proposal for the bible they don't give you in Sunday school, and why it might just be a bestseller.
June 09, 2003
Languages get simpler over time. Latin became Italian, Sanskrit became Hindi, Old Greek became New Greek. Fine, but then how did they ever get complex in the first place? An answer that has nothing to do with grammar and everything to do with what happens when nobody yet knows how to write.
June 07, 2003
The Netherlands has a new government, the economy is bad, and spending must be cut. Sounds reasonable until you do the arithmetic: revenues are flat in real terms, so why is standing still such an expensive habit? Apparently the beast eats a little more each year just to do the same job as before.
June 03, 2003
A pretty graphing library appeared, and resistance was futile. The result: GoogleShare, a small project for measuring the mind share of just about anything.
May 31, 2003
The Euro rebounded and economists are scrambling for explanations that don't contradict the ones they gave last year. Here's a theory I haven't seen anywhere else, involving the world's mattress-stuffers and the shoeboxes of cash they kept in dollars. The currency chart hints at exactly when they changed their minds.
May 28, 2003
A little script that abuses Google to answer the question 'when did X happen?' Give it a search term, get back a year. Works fine for anything in the last two centuries; beyond that, you're on your own.
May 13, 2003
Conservation of energy is one of those laws that feels rude to argue with. So how can a gas heater be more than 100% efficient? It sounds like a perpetual motion pitch from a guy at a bar, except someone in the Netherlands actually built one. The trick involves running a fridge backwards and the fine print of thermodynamics.
May 07, 2003
Ten thousand dollars to patent the bright idea you had in a pub. Outrageous, right? Maybe not. The complaint that patents favor big companies over lone inventors might have the economics exactly backwards, and the fix isn't making patents cheaper. It's making them into something stranger: shares in an idea.
May 02, 2003
Iraq is done, so what's next on the list of countries due for liberation? Setting aside the Bush-bashing for a moment and taking the democracy-spreading premise at face value, the obvious candidates don't line up neatly. North Korea has nukes. Myanmar has jungle. Africa has options. The catch is figuring out who gets to draw up the list.
May 02, 2003
Bird flu is sweeping the Netherlands, the fourth livestock plague in a handful of years after swine fever, mad cow, and foot-and-mouth. Treating each outbreak as a one-off disaster the government pays to clean up might be exactly the wrong policy, if you're trying to actually change anything.
May 02, 2003
We keep hearing about Muslim fanaticism, but if you look at the actual scoreboard, the supposed thousands of suicide attackers heading to Iraq turned out to be two guys, and they may not have been all that voluntary. Compared to the Nazis or the Japanese in 1945, this lot folds early. So what's actually going on?
May 02, 2003
Iraq made it plain: foreign policy is power, dressed up in moral language for the cameras. So where does that leave the UN? One country, one vote isn't democracy when half the countries aren't democracies themselves. And if Europe really wanted to stop Washington, there's an awkward question about why it couldn't.