January 28, 2007
The European Google Ski trip ended with Douwe staring at nine pairs of skis in the sun, with no memory of what his rentals looked like. An espresso, some patient elimination, and a binary search later he sped off. The Italian rental man's reaction the next day suggested the algorithm had bugs. Also: squat toilets and ski boots are a poor combination.
January 17, 2007
Back from Ecuador with a phone full of notes: a Conde Nast Traveler writer who thinks somewhere two hours from a European capital qualifies as the middle of nowhere, a clever bus scam that cost us a camera (and the third country to do so), and the price a husband pays for being married to someone genuinely nice on a flight over the Andes.
December 23, 2006
Seven rules distilled from being robbed in three countries, miming through Latin America on fifty words of Spanish, and once finding out that Sumatran third class on a 72 hour ferry is a fine thing to abandon for a flight, an ice cold beer, and a porch with orangutans. Lonely Planet crowd advice, with the receipts to back it up.
December 05, 2006
Frequent visitors might have noticed this blog vanished for a good two weeks. Sigh. Things are better now, though probably still not perfect. A full report to follow later, allegedly.
November 21, 2006
A Technorati claim link, preserved here for historical completeness. Remember Technorati? Exactly. Move along, nothing to see here. Or, if you must, click through for a single bit of 2006 link-rot in its natural habitat.
November 21, 2006
Technorati now ranks this the 27th most popular blog out of sixty million. Impressive, except they also reckon the last post was 475 days ago. Meanwhile a separate site puts the blog's value at $3,760,965.48, calculated to the cent. Any takers? A modest discount is available.
November 07, 2006
I scraped a language database to work out how many you'd need to learn to talk to most of humanity. The answer is at least two hundred, which is impractical. But why settle for one Romance language anyway? Learn the basics of five at once, then move on to Slavic, then Germanic. Speak five languages in three weeks. Badly.
October 11, 2006
Pets.com famously gave away pets to sell dog food, and famously went broke. The flaw: no switching cost. Any dog will eat any food. But what if genetic engineering fixed that? A patented enzyme, a cute puppy for the kids, and a week later, well, you'd better order more food. I'm joking. Kinda. Cars and printers are already most of the way there.
October 01, 2006
The Dutch love their tolerance — gay marriage, soft drugs, euthanasia. But mention the Second Amendment and the sympathy dries up. After watching Hotel Rwanda, though, an uncomfortable thought: what if the Tutsis had been armed? And what if the world kept a well-regulated militia on standby for the genocide we all know is coming next?
September 24, 2006
Has any economist seriously studied the price of public toilets? It is a strange little market, held in place by convention and the size of a single coin. Airports free, train stations not, planes free — for now. Somewhere at Ryanair, someone is surely doing the math on charging two euro a go. And the savings might be larger than you think.
September 06, 2006
Do painters live longer than composers? Hard to say without data — but Wikipedia comes with an XML dump and a curious Sunday afternoon. The resulting graph throws up two oddities: a startling cliff at the modern end (rock stars notoriously die young) and a mysterious dip around the first century AD. One has a boring explanation. The other might not.
August 28, 2006
A monkey hits a typewriter at random. Does abracadabra show up sooner, later, or just as often as abcdefghijk? Most people pick the wrong answer, and the second most popular answer is also wrong. The right answer is sneaky enough that it takes two separate explanations — plus a Python simulation — before it really sinks in.
August 24, 2006
Astronomers have spoken: Pluto is no longer a planet. Sad news for Pluto fans, and an awkward moment for astrologers. After all, their charts dutifully include Pluto's cosmic influence — so do they demote it too, or stand their ground? And if they stand their ground, what about Ceres, Charon, and UB313? Your love life this month may depend on it.
August 17, 2006
Americans visiting the Zurich office liked to compliment its hosts on having such a pretty city — in Sweden. Charming, until the bank started doing the same. The really strange part is that the post office happily delivers the mail anyway. Getting the bank to correct its mistake, however, turned out to require a particular form that could only be downloaded, signed and mailed.
August 05, 2006
Bill Gates has held the top spot forever, but for a while it looked like Warren Buffett might catch him. That threat has now been neutralized in an unexpected way: Buffett gave away most of his fortune — 37 billion dollars — to Bill. Well, not Bill the person, exactly. And if you had to dispose of 37 billion yourself, there is really only one man with experience.
July 03, 2006
Every self-respecting blogger has a Google Alert on his own name. Mostly it surfaces sites scraping the RSS feed for AdSense pennies, but occasionally it delivers a small thrill. Today it delivered the best one yet: someone has gone and written a Wikipedia article about me. Fame, fortune and groupies must surely follow. There is now no way around it.
June 29, 2006
Missing the last train from Milan to Zurich is the kind of problem most travellers solve with a hotel. Not the kind of travellers who notice a Dortmund-bound train sitting on the next platform and decide the route planner must be wrong. What followed involved a flat refusal from the ticket lady, a passport check in Basel, an hour-long walk, and a missed connection at dawn.
June 27, 2006
A fancy wedding at a country house in the Netherlands, reached by the wrong bus. At the front, the kind of passenger every bus has — the one chatting too eagerly with the driver. This one had a beer belly, a scar on his brow, and a sudden urge to play tour guide for the man in the fancy suit. After 32 beers, he had things to confess.
May 28, 2006
My brother — yes, an actual writer — has cooked up an unusual way to promote his new novel Wembley. Instead of the usual press tour, he is serving the book in fragments online and inviting readers to come along for the ride. Here is fragment number 5: a grey Parisian morning, a borrowed bed, and no secrets allowed.
May 11, 2006
The Economist used to publish charts showing how often newspapers said 'recession' versus the actual economy. I always wondered what you could do with the counts of every word in all the news. Then I joined Google. Yesterday a thing I once threw together on a whim quietly went live on Labs.