February 04, 2008
At tourist spots in India, strangers keep asking to take Douwe's picture. Not with the monument behind him; with him as the monument. A field trip to Warangal turned into full Beatlemania: handshakes, autographs on banknotes, an impromptu speech about how much money he makes. One kid told him he looked like Brad Pitt. He really doesn't.
January 30, 2008
Decades ago, Byte magazine floated a theoretical idea: a program that could spread between floppies like a virus. Surely nobody would actually write such a thing. We know how that went. Now scientists are inching toward artificial life, and Douwe has a guess about who will eventually push the button — and why.
January 29, 2008
Fifteen years ago in Goa, the only Indians on the beach were the fishermen. Now the beach belongs to crowds of young men, jet-skis everywhere, signs warning you not to abuse children. An Indian friend asks Douwe what Western people actually do at the beach, since lying around motionless seems strange. He has a hard time answering.
January 27, 2008
If cleanliness is next to godliness, India is firmly on the godliness side: temples everywhere, but tidiness is not the country's forte. Switzerland wins this round. Douwe ends up with an empty coconut outside a temple and politely asks the guard where the bin is. The guard's solution is elegant, immediate, and not what he expected.
January 23, 2008
India is a guy country. Not in the obvious way — when European feminists were burning bras, India had a female prime minister — but in the sense that whatever you need, there is always a guy. Douwe tries to book train tickets online, fails, and discovers an entirely different system that runs on text messages and parking lots.
January 21, 2008
Years ago the European Commission set out to unify power plugs across the continent. Rather than pick the type used by half the union, they proposed designing a fresh standard equally bad for everyone. Mercifully it died in a drawer. Meanwhile in Hyderabad, with six competing plug types, Douwe spots a much simpler fix the EU somehow missed.
January 20, 2008
India's low-cost airlines are thriving, and at the airport everybody dutifully lines up for security. Nobody empties their pockets. The metal detector beeps for everyone, and a man-line and woman-line each get a personal pat-down regardless. Douwe, the dutiful European, empties his pockets first — and discovers what happens to the only passenger who doesn't set off the beep.
January 17, 2008
Western addresses are declarative; Indian addresses, a colleague tells Douwe, are procedural — directions rather than coordinates, with all the common words helpfully dropped. Flagging down strangers to ask directions is standard practice. After two days of confused rickshaws to the Google office, he discovers the man who picked them up from the airport wasn't quite who they assumed.
January 14, 2008
Another trip to India, another all-nighter spent cleaning the apartment. The first time around, my brother and I had stared at an atlas and decided overland looked doable. Lonely Planet helpfully informed us that hitching across the Arabian Desert was 'only for the hardy.' Then came the Iranian visa, which arrived with its own peculiar twist.
January 09, 2008
Posting frequency has been, let's say, gently approaching zero. In 2003 it was daily; Q4 of 2007 saw exactly one post. So, the classic blog move: a fresh-start post promising it'll all be different from now on. There are reasons to believe me this time — a new platform, and a slightly larger change of address.
November 25, 2007
Airlines love sentences that start with 'for your own safety.' The lifejacket speech reassures us, even though over the Atlantic it's mostly theatre. But the rules keep getting sillier — a flight attendant once told me my iPhone's music was interfering with the plane's computers. Why do Boeing and Airbus tolerate this, after working so hard to convince us steel boxes can fly?
August 22, 2007
Visited Countries has always been the most popular thing on this site, and over the years people have asked for all kinds of features. My favorite request: split Canada into provinces, but merge Germany, Italy and France since they're basically the same thing anyway. A more reasonable suggestion led to something new — finer granularity, hand-picked destinations.
June 25, 2007
A fun little tool my brother seems to be involved in: every URL on the domain is a tag cloud, and visitors are prompted to add more tags, which automatically link to each other. Add typed links and you'd basically have the semantic web on a single page. Neat hack, though with one or two rough edges worth grumbling about.
June 16, 2007
Booking an Amtrak train to Niagara Falls, I found a discount code: V185, good for 10% off. Every other code I dug up online had the same form — Vxxx. So obviously the question became: what does V186 do? V187? Nine hundred numbers is a lot to try by hand, but Python doesn't mind tedium.
June 07, 2007
Unemployment insurance is tricky: you want a safety net without making freeloading attractive. The Dutch employment office was great at one of its three jobs — paying people. Temp agencies, it turned out, were much better at the other two. So what if we let the market handle unemployment insurance entirely, without sacrificing solidarity? There's a scheme that might just work.
May 16, 2007
American bashing might be the least attractive European habit. People who'd never call Africans stupid happily call Americans stupid, then nod along sagely. Working for an American company probably biases me, but credit where it's due — count the Nobel prizes. That said, the things Americans say sometimes. Like the friend who didn't know Disney was based on folk tales.
April 26, 2007
Casual visitors to this site were recently greeted by cheery ads for real estate, dating, travel and used cars. The good things in life. My domain was registered with RegisterFly, who took my renewal money — twice — and did precisely nothing with it. I would call them mindless jerks who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes, except I doubt they'll last that long.
April 09, 2007
Rumsfeld has probably gone down in history as the worst secretary of defense ever — the man who said we should storm Iraq without a plan to rebuild it. But hear me out: what if his doctrine deserves another look? Not the Iraq part, exactly, but the underlying logic. There's a case to be made for marching in and then leaving.
March 11, 2007
Taxes are annoying, but here's the thing: it's not really the paying that grates, it's the doing. The government forces you to do unpaid labor whose sole purpose is to send them money. Surely there's a fix. What if the government had to provide the accountants? Suddenly law makers might feel the true cost of their handiwork.
January 30, 2007
Taxis are a mixed blessing for the carless traveler: expensive, and often the driver knows things you don't, like where you are. The classic information asymmetry. But what if every cab carried a GPS box, a meter visible from the street, and a connection to a central computer that set prices by supply and demand? Uber, basically. In 2007.