June 12, 2004
Coffee, sunshine, free wifi outside the cafe — pretty close to geek heaven, and a good spot to puzzle over why American prison sentences are so much longer than Dutch ones. Culture explains part of it, but the surprising culprit is democracy itself: more direct popular control over sentencing pushes terms one way only. And the Dutch alternative isn't obviously better.
June 01, 2004
How do you count the bits in a 32-bit word? How would you estimate how often a word appears on the web without spidering it? The phone interview kicks off a strange two weeks: an unplanned trip to Mountain View, hispanic train-riders who have never heard of Google, code on whiteboards in a half-forgotten C, and a question about Foucault that there was, sadly, no time for.
May 29, 2004
Sorting through the morning's spam, fishing real messages out of the suspected-junk folder — when an email titled 'Google in Zurich' surfaces. Someone at the company has been enjoying the Google Hacks page and would like a chat. Turns out running a personal site, even one nobody seems to read, has unexpected reach. Brand 'me', episode one.
May 27, 2004
A recognizable face morphs gradually into something unrecognizable — and then it turns out to be the same picture all along, just rotated. There's a small panic button somewhere in the brain that this gif presses, hard. A short post about a strange optical effect that, once you've seen it, is hard to unsee.
May 27, 2004
UMTS was supposed to have us all surfing at top speed by 2000. Instead, in the Netherlands we're still testing it, and we're stuck with GPRS: a slow, expensive, hacked-together protocol bolted onto GSM. So why does this clunky compromise stand the best chance of bringing four billion people online?
May 25, 2004
If you're too poor to pay for software, is pirating it really theft? Microsoft doesn't lose a sale you were never going to make, and arguably gains the free publicity. Sounds appealing, until you notice the trap it builds for poor people who eventually do get a bit richer.
May 23, 2004
What color is the word 'money'? Or 'love', or 'Tuesday'? Word Color grabs the top nine Google image results for any word or phrase, averages their hues, and reports back. The answers turn out to be more obvious than I'd hoped in some cases, and weirder than I'd expected in others.
May 16, 2004
Nokia's swappable face plates turned phones into fashion statements. Mine was looking worn, and buying a fresh one seemed wasteful when there was a half-finished can of spray paint in the closet. I taped off the bits that shouldn't get painted, and at first it all went splendidly. The phrase 'at first' is doing some heavy lifting there.
May 15, 2004
George Bush warned the UN it had to act or risk becoming irrelevant. No, this isn't about Iraq. While the left tries to indict Tony Blair for war crimes and the right argues humanitarian motives, Sudan is quietly carrying out genocide in Darfur, and the UN's response makes 'irrelevant' look generous.
May 11, 2004
In a perfect market, everyone has perfect information. In the real one, we get advertising instead: annoying, uninformative, and so expensive that no campaign runs under fifty grand. Unless you happen to be my parents renting out their holiday home in Drenthe for fifty bucks of Google ads. Something small is shifting, and the productivity stats haven't caught up yet.
May 08, 2004
Which economic system is winning right now? Not Europe's social market, not the Anglo-Saxon free-for-all. Look at the fastest-growing big economies and you'll find an answer that would have horrified a Cold Warrior, and probably horrifies a few people still. The punchline writes itself, but it's worth saying out loud.
May 05, 2004
Europe has been losing smart people to the US since 1945. The pay gap explains a lot, but not everything. In the Netherlands, being good at something technical earns you a strange reward: a promotion to manager, where you stop doing the thing you were good at. No wonder the young geeks keep heading west.
May 01, 2004
I got a Gmail account. The interface is nifty, the privacy panic feels misplaced (Yahoo knows more about you than Google does), but the underlying question is sharper than the outrage suggests. Is your privacy actually yours to sell? You can't sell your vote, after all. And what if you could rent it out instead?
April 25, 2004
PDA, GPS, camera, mp3 player, radio, memo recorder, e-book reader: one day a phone will replace all of them. Specialized devices will lose, because in electronics the general-purpose thing always catches up. Here's my 2004 spec sheet for the ultimate cell phone, written without knowing the iPhone was three years away.
April 20, 2004
Everyone agrees the Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the world's gravest threats to peace. But pull out a calculator and the numbers tell a stranger story: three years of fighting has killed fewer people than Belgian traffic accidents in the same span. Meanwhile Congo, malaria, AIDS. Maybe we've been picking the wrong battle all along.
April 19, 2004
Back from ten days driving San Francisco to Las Vegas. The thing that surprises a European most about America isn't the size or the strangeness — it's how eerily the same it all is. Drive 200 kilometers in the Netherlands and you'll need subtitles to understand the locals. Drive across a continent in the US and barely break a sweat.
April 06, 2004
Four months ago I launched Google News Map, plotting headlines onto a world map. Two months of quietly logging country mentions later, the data is in. Mostly it confirms what you'd guess — Iraq dominates — but there are some odd outliers. Niger, for instance, punches well above its weight. And the United States barely shows up at all. Curious why?
April 02, 2004
Good news from Aarhus: my abstract for the Read_Me 2004 Software Art and Cultures Conference got accepted. In August I'll be presenting Mapped Web extensions, and possibly running a live Mind World experiment — a giant projected map where the audience votes, pixel by pixel, on whether each spot is land or sea. Strange things with software, indeed.
April 02, 2004
You know that party game where everyone adds one sentence to a story, and it slowly degenerates into beautiful nonsense? I built the online version. There's a twist to stop it spiralling into pure chaos: visitors don't just write, they vote. Four candidate sentences, a quick election, and the winner joins the story. Then we do it again.
March 30, 2004
An article doing the rounds argues that Open Source is a huge opportunity for the Third World, and an existential threat to Microsoft's empire. The math is striking: a copy of Office in Vietnam would cost the equivalent of 48 thousand dollars in American income terms. But comparing GDP to license fees turns out to be the wrong yardstick. The real picture is messier.
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.