December 08, 2003
While poking around in World66, the open-content travel portal, Douwe ended up with a list of country coordinates and an obvious next question: what if you projected the day's Google News headlines onto a world map? The result shows you, at a glance, where news is happening. A small project, but a satisfying one.
December 07, 2003
American populists hear a 'giant sucking sound' of jobs leaving for China. Cheap exporter, unfair trade, yellow peril rerun. But the headline number — that the US drove two-thirds of nineties global growth — is a dollar-terms artifact. Measure in purchasing power parity and the picture flips. Over the last two years, EU and Japanese exporters have been growing fastest into one country, and it isn't the US.
December 06, 2003
Following up on Hjalmar Gislason's puzzle — what's the smallest number Google has never seen? — Douwe found an algorithm that's roughly ten times faster than brute-force querying. The trick exploits the fact that big numbers rarely show up alone: one page of serial numbers gives you a whole batch for free. Still nowhere near fast enough, but the gap is closing.
December 05, 2003
Hilbert's hotel is full, but the clerk always finds a room. Even for infinite new guests. The trick works because the rooms are countably infinite — and the real numbers between 0 and 1 famously aren't. Now consider the set of all numbers you can express in mathematical language. They're countable. Hand that list to Cantor and a strange paradox starts unfolding.
December 04, 2003
Two ways to handle a product idea: build it and risk discovering it already exists, or blog it and hope someone else has done the work. After fumbling a business card into his phone's address book, Douwe wondered why the camera couldn't just read it. Surely someone has built this? Google says no. So here we are.
December 03, 2003
Douwe's dishwasher dies. A replacement clock costs two thirds of a new machine; the repair guy charges 45 euros just to look at it. Somewhere along the way, the parts started costing more than the whole. What does that say about shipping, handling, and the strange economics of throwing things away rather than fixing them?
December 02, 2003
What is the smallest number that Google has never indexed? Hjalmar Gislason puts it somewhere around two million. The trouble is, finding it brute-force would take six years of API calls, get you banned, and the moment you publish the winner, Google spiders the page and your number is no longer ungoogleable. A small recursive tragedy.
December 01, 2003
A first attempt at simulating chemical reactions: atoms bouncing around fast, combining into chemically valid molecules, though not always the ones you'd expect. Far too simple to be useful for medical research, but it does produce organic compounds, including metaminine, a bit of ammonium, and one weird radical. Source included for anyone tempted to take it further.
November 30, 2003
Dictatorships, democracies, shareholder capitalism: every system humans have invented to run things is fundamentally about balancing competing interests. The geeks went and did something different. They asked what the best technical answer was and built that. Compare the scaling of the early Internet with the scaling of DOS hard disk support, and you'll see why Douwe thinks engineers should be running more of the planet.
November 28, 2003
Museums charge extra for video cameras. Airlines ban cell phones but happily wave laptops with WiFi through the gate. The Netherlands once taxed televisions. So what happens when every gadget becomes every other gadget, and a phone in your pocket is also a video camera, a TV, and a computer? A lot of laws are about to need rewriting.
November 27, 2003
The leaves have fallen, the air is crisp, and Google has changed its algorithm again. Someone started naming these events like hurricanes; this one is Florida. Sites rise, sites disappear, livelihoods evaporate, all with no appeal. Google has been good to Douwe so far, but watching the Florida dance raises an uncomfortable question about depending on yet another monopoly.
November 26, 2003
Western governments have quietly run up future obligations ranging from one to five times their entire GDP, and we worry about deficits creeping past three percent. Peter Heller's book lays out the long-term math: pensions, social security, disaster insurance, all promised, none funded. Everyone who has thought about it knows where this ends. The strategy for now is to not think about it.
November 24, 2003
GoogleTalk, the Google Hack that gets two arbitrary search terms arguing with each other, now travels. A few lines of iframe and you can drop the whole thing into your own site. Copy, paste, watch Google fight itself on your homepage.
November 21, 2003
Traveling through India with a digital camera, a laptop, and a phone full of addresses, Douwe runs into the usual obstacles: scarce wall sockets, eye-watering roaming fees, and museums that still don't trust cameras. Then a guard in green spots the suspicious bulge in his pocket and threatens to involve the police. The negotiation that follows turns on a surprisingly small request.
November 20, 2003
Naively, you'd expect the Internet to flatten markets: everything open, prices transparent, Froogle uncovering the best deal in seconds. But sellers really don't want clear markets, and the same data trail that helps you compare is helping them quietly do the opposite. The global supermarket may be drifting back into something older, noisier, and a lot more like a bazaar.
November 19, 2003
Dedicated cameras lose to phone cameras for one obvious reason: the phone is already in your pocket. By the same logic, the iPod should lose to whatever device people are carrying anyway. So how close is a Nokia 3650 to replacing a Walkman? Armed with a 16MB card, some ogg files, and a brave little pre-alpha player, I went to find out.
November 18, 2003
Hunt-pecking this into a Nokia 3650 on a third-class train rattling between Magauo and Cochin at an optimistic 40 km/h. GPRS roaming refuses to roam, SMS refuses to send, and the carriage looks suspiciously like a prison. Plenty of time, then, to work out why the south of India is booming while the north is not — and what the Soviets and air conditioners have to do with it.
November 01, 2003
One side wants to protect the poor from capitalism with subsidies and safety nets. The other wants to set entrepreneurs loose and trust the rising tide. Both, somehow, end up failing the people they claim to care about most. The bureaucrats and the free-marketeers each have their reasons — and a surprisingly similar blind spot about who actually knows best how to spend a poor family's money.
October 31, 2003
Visual Poetry, the Google hack that turns sentences into image-search slideshows, just escaped from Windows. The new online version skips the install and renders your poem as a wall of Google thumbnails on a single screen. Feed it a line and see what the web thinks it looks like.
October 30, 2003
A US-funded lab has cooked up a souped-up mousepox virus that kills its hosts even when they're vaccinated and on antivirals. There may well be a medical upside hiding in there somewhere, but the downside reads like a comic-book villain's lab notebook. I'm broadly pro-science, but designing improved plagues feels like the sort of curiosity we could maybe leave on the shelf.
Everyone hates me because I'm paranoid.