March 15, 2005
I have every Seinfeld episode on my hard disk. My wife and I rewatch Friends. After a while you know every line by heart, which sounds like a problem until you realise it is actually a feature. Swiss DVDs come with four or five audio tracks and even more subtitle languages. Our high school French was good enough to order a drink. Maybe a beaver.
March 13, 2005
Negroponte's 100 dollar laptop for the developing world sounds like a lovely idea. Education, bulk components, last-generation tech. The trouble is unreliable power, internet that costs ten times as much as in the US, and the small matter that 100 dollars is a lot of money when you make 1 dollar a day. There is a better gadget for the job.
March 01, 2005
O'Reilly is putting one of my Python hacks into Mapping Hacks. The 75 dollars won't get me far, but it got me thinking about where this site is going - and about Philosophy Hacks, which has been rattling around my head. The earliest philosophers were really politicians. Then scientists. Then economists. So who are they now?
February 24, 2005
German-Swiss food can be as subtle as a good kick in the head. Anything with Bierhalle in the name seems to cater for people working in coal mines. We went to Johanniter for lunch, ordered the Roesti with fried cheese and sausages, and didn't finish it. The waitress had thoughts on this. Specifically, on our work ethic.
February 15, 2005
Waiting for the perfect phone is a losing game. The Benq P50, the Motorola Mpx, the T-Mobile MDA IV: each spec sheet sweeter than the last, none of them actually for sale. So I gave up and bought something that exists. A week in, with Seinfeld playing full-frame on the touchscreen, I have thoughts about who wins this fight.
February 05, 2005
Four riddles about coin flips, envelopes, and quiz-show doors. Each one offers you a switch. In two of them you should take it; in two it makes no difference. The probabilities feel identical at first glance and the puzzles look almost the same. So what is actually different between them? Think before you scroll.
January 30, 2005
Do old men really have bigger ears, or does it just look that way once the hair retreats? My wife claimed habits magnify with age and I argued ears do too. The internet had opinions; my grandfather, who turned ninety in November, had decades of photographs. So I fired up Paint, pasted them side by side, and started measuring.
January 19, 2005
People keep asking whether I miss the freedom of being my own boss now that I work for Google. Honest answer: I'm freer now than I was running my own company. The 20% rule gets all the press, but it turns out the other 80% works in a strangely similar way. Nobody checks when you come in. Weirdly enough, it works.
January 10, 2005
CES is in full swing and gadget lovers everywhere are refreshing their favorite blogs. Nokia rules cell phones, Apple owns music, Sony still has the living room, TiVo has the DVR. But look one layer down at what powers the runners-up on every front and the same name keeps showing up. In a world of convergence, second place might be all Redmond needs.
January 06, 2005
Am I the only one, or is the Tsunami aid effort getting out of hand? The death toll is staggering and the generosity is real, but four million died in the Congo and nobody held a telethon. Aid budgets are not infinite. If we genuinely want to help countries in the long run, there are cheaper and more effective levers than competitive Christmas-week giving.
January 01, 2005
New Year's resolutions are easy this year. You already know what you want to do; the credit card is already in your wallet. There's a button at the bottom of the page. Click it and start 2005 with something that actually matters.
December 27, 2004
Five years ago, in a backpacker cafe in Kashgar, my brother and I started complaining about Lonely Planet. Couldn't the web do this better? An open travel guide that anyone could edit? We brainstormed on the bus over the Turugart pass and forgot about it. Then came a honeymoon train ride, two weeks of frantic coding, free beer at First Tuesday, and an investor who wanted a business model.
December 22, 2004
I am all for helping the Third World. I think solving global inequality would dissolve most of our other problems too. And yet there is something strange about foreign aid handed out by governments: it looks suspiciously like theft. Why do we tax in the first place, and what does building dykes in the Netherlands have to do with whether Robin Hood is a democrat?
December 18, 2004
It's the little things that change country to country. In the Netherlands, free-range eggs are always brown and battery eggs are always white. Discrimination, obviously. The marketing logic isn't hard to reverse-engineer: brown signals recycled, virtuous, slightly rough on the backside. Then I moved to Switzerland and the free-range eggs were white. So what does that say about the Swiss?
December 17, 2004
Apparently the odds of dying in a plane crash are lower than dying in an asteroid strike that wipes out humanity. Sounds absurd. Run the back-of-the-envelope math, though, and the numbers line up rather neatly. Whether this should make you feel safer in airplanes or more nervous about the sky is another question entirely.
December 14, 2004
Google just announced plans to scan in fifteen million books from Harvard's library. The how is impressive engineering. The why is something else entirely. In an age when copyright, patents and trademarks are increasingly used to wall information off, suddenly the largest library in the world is about to become searchable from your couch. And it reminds me of a childhood grudge.
December 10, 2004
I don't watch much TV, but there are a few shows worth tracking down. Bittorrent handles the delivery; the trouble is finding the torrents in the first place. Some sites publish RSS feeds of new releases, which felt like the seed of an idea. So I wrote a little Python thing to scan them for me.
December 07, 2004
Everybody knows why Germany's economy is stuck: too few working hours, taxes too high, labor markets too rigid, an aging population. Everybody knows. Everybody is wrong. Look at the export figures and German companies are competing just fine. The real culprit is something subtler, and it's quietly setting up an unwind that could take the dollar, the housing market and the Euro with it.
November 29, 2004
Back from Sri Lanka, where the tea pickers earn about a euro a day and the hills are beautiful. But it wasn't always tea up there. It used to be coffee, which is picked by men, not women, and that small distinction in gender norms set off a chain of events that ended in civil war. Tea drinkers, pay attention.
November 28, 2004
A very weird little experiment. Click through, watch the short video, and count how many times the players in white shirts pass the ball. It sounds trivially easy, and it is. The interesting part is what happens after you finish counting and click the next link. Don't read ahead. Just try it.
"I'd love to go out with you, but I want to spend more time with my blender."