November 26, 2008
Picasa Web Albums quietly grew a face recognition feature, and running it over an old archive lands squarely in Clarke's third law territory. The glitches are where it gets fun. After an igloo build in the Swiss Alps, the leftover snow went into a snowman. Picasa flagged him under clearly recognized faces. Sadly, no matching contact.
November 16, 2008
A bicycle shows up in Sydney with the rest of the move. My wife predicts it will get stolen since no other bikes are on the street. I argue the opposite: no bikes, no bike thieves. For three weeks I am right. Then a brake cable snaps, with a yellow Post-it stuck to the Google-branded frame. The note is just the beginning.
November 12, 2008
Ninety percent of creativity is misunderstanding. A headline about a Death and Taxes poster turns out to be something much more boring, but the imagined version, life expectancy plotted against top income tax rate per country, sounded better. Two tables, one spreadsheet and a quick scatter plot later, the chart exists. Whether it shows what you'd expect is another matter.
November 06, 2008
Back from a wedding in Hong Kong, struck by the odd genius of British-Chinese cultural mashup, here is a modest proposal. Not gunboat colonialism, more like the Greek colonies, or country franchises. The Netherlands builds a city inside the US. Saudi Arabia runs a Sharia enclave in Amsterdam. Vote with your feet without changing continents. What could possibly go wrong.
October 28, 2008
Bank stocks are down 32.5 percent this year. The S&P is down almost exactly the same. If the banking sector is really on the brink and the rest of the economy is not, why are investors not being punished more? Maybe because they know taxpayers will bail them out. So here is a counter-proposal that calls the bluff and lets the market sort the survivors.
October 08, 2008
The 700 billion dollar Wall Street bailout is being handed to the same crowd that helped break things. The guy running the rescue operation made 700 million while at an investment bank. There has to be a better plan. Here is one: skip the committees, skip the banks, and just hand the whole pile to a single individual on terms he cannot refuse.
August 10, 2008
Three and a half years in Switzerland end the same way they began: with a man walking the apartment hunting specs of dust. The lazy pay 1500 dollars to a cleaning company. Real Swiss scrub it themselves, because companies are not thorough enough. There is a third way, but the rental inspector still muttered something about a disaster. India next, Sydney after.
August 06, 2008
Porting old projects from Zope to AppEngine, one at a time. Back online: Chinese Radicals, a program I wrote to teach myself to read Chinese, and Google Share, one of my earliest Google hacks. Pick a domain like search, pick some concepts like google, yahoo, msn, aol, then count co-occurring pages to measure mind share. The resulting pie chart looks suspiciously like something else.
July 13, 2008
Three old toys, freshly tuned up after the move to App Engine. Visited Countries gets a feature people kept asking for, Archean Self Organization stops making your friends decipher weird codes, and The Next President picks a more sensible starting point. Small tweaks, but enough to make them feel less like museum pieces.
July 06, 2008
Two hard disks died in a RAID array and the hosting company sent their condolences instead of my data. The backups were old. Zope was the kind of platform that fights you on the way out. Of the 48 projects on the dead site, only a handful are worth bringing back -- and one of them is getting an upgrade in the process.
May 24, 2008
A billion people need jobs, and India has solved the problem in a way no economics textbook covers: manned automation. The ticket gate has a guy. The fruit scale has a lady. The office light switch has a dedicated employee. And when the country's first automatic drinks dispenser was unveiled with great fanfare, the staffing decisions revealed exactly what kind of economy India is.
May 15, 2008
Adverts tell you what a country dreams about, and Hyderabad is dreaming about concrete. Billboards push 'European Style Living', other billboards just display phone numbers with no context whatsoever, and the package tours to Europe spend a baffling fraction of their time in Switzerland. The explanation for that last one involves Bollywood, Kashmir, and a problem they could no longer ignore.
May 06, 2008
Laundry service in India means your t-shirts come back washed almost every day, which collapses the natural rotation cycle down to two or three shirts. Pulling from the bottom of the stack instead of the top should have fixed it. It didn't. The cause turned out to be a second layer of optimization, run by someone closer to home, with different objectives.
April 26, 2008
An old friend flies in from the Netherlands and decides, against all reason, that the Andaman Islands are the place. The trip features a shoeless non-English-speaking taxi driver who also cannot drive, a lost Tamil cheat-sheet for 'go faster', and one question we could not crack over the beers: if wind makes waves, how does the wave know which way the beach is facing?
April 24, 2008
A weekend hop back to Switzerland after three months in India, and the caveman brain somehow handles the teleport just fine. The difference between the two countries is summed up perfectly the moment you walk into Zurich Airport's train station. After a winter of warm dust, one morning of European skiing administers a lesson about what 'mild spring sun' actually means.
April 10, 2008
In India the starter kit is a cook, a driver, a house boy and a nanny, and nobody bothers with polite euphemisms. We only really needed the house boy -- 48 hours a week of him, apparently. Trying to share him with a co-worker triggered an unexpected negotiation, because the man was studying business and had clearly thought about the math. He drives a hard bargain on rickshaws, too.
March 10, 2008
It's 2008, the Democrats have two strong candidates instead of the usual one, and they look likely to snipe at each other right up to the point where McCain quietly wins. Here is a plan that fixes that, locks down the White House for the next twelve years, and rewards both candidates more handsomely than waiting their turn. Why twelve and not sixteen? There's a constitutional reason.
March 09, 2008
India is cheaper than Switzerland by a factor of about 4.5 -- unless you're tall and white, in which case the multiplier wanders. Rickshaw drivers seem to think 150 rupees is the universal answer regardless of distance. The Lonely Planet warning about touts adding to prices, though, deserves a closer look. Whether they actually do depends on a small detail of the commission structure.
March 04, 2008
Last week Douwe likened Indian traffic to rock-paper-scissors, then realized the analogy was broken: a cow sits unbeaten at the top of the pyramid. Bad game design. Then he saw something on the street that completed the circle, and it involved a creature that apparently never got the memo about which animals are holy.
February 24, 2008
Getting across Hyderabad makes Zurich feel like a village green. Buses beat cars, cars beat rickshaws, nothing beats cow, and auto-rickshaw drivers will invent reasons not to use the meter. On the ride back from the airport, Douwe finally got one to agree to the meter. Halfway home, it mysteriously went dark.