August 30, 2003
Everyone marvels that a four-year-old can speak fluent Chinese. But really — four years is a long time. Given four years and nothing else to do, most adults could manage it too. And honestly, four-year-olds aren't all that articulate. The truly amazing thing about children learning languages turns out to be something other than the speed.
August 29, 2003
Next year's American deficit could hit 500 billion. Sounds big. But how many people could tell you, off the top of their head, how many $100,000 donations it would take to plug it? Politics is mostly conducted in numbers, and numbers are the language of every issue at once. So what happens to democracy when most voters cheerfully admit they don't speak it?
August 28, 2003
Bentham dreamed up the panopticon: a building in which everyone is visible from a single central point. Turns out he was about two centuries early, and the building is called Google. Everything I type here is indexed within a day. There are no more distant lands, no more genuine discoveries — just the next search result. Which makes the internet a curiously un-poetic place.
August 27, 2003
If you own a thing, surely you can do what you like with it — play a CD in your microwave, take a gadget apart, see what makes it tick. Apparently not, if the European IP Enforcement directive has its way. Tinkering, it turns out, is the father of innovation and the grandfather of economic growth. So why is Europe quietly preparing to make it illegal?
August 23, 2003
The North American blackout cost a billion dollars. Sounds like a damning indictment of deregulation, until you remember that Americans spend 400 billion a year on electricity. Why do humans consistently fail to weigh many small gains against one dramatic loss? From flickering lights to farm subsidies, a quick tour of the math nobody wants to do.
August 20, 2003
A modest proposal for a new top-level domain: .ianal, the I-Am-Not-A-Lawyer corner of the Internet. By entering you agree not to sue anyone for anything you find there. A return to the playground before the suits arrived, enforced by the same shrink-wrap logic the lawyers themselves invented.
August 19, 2003
Google can answer almost anything in two clicks. So why is it that when you ask for a number, you find ten different answers and no way to tell which one is right? PageRank rewards popularity, not accuracy. What might a search engine that hunted facts instead of pages actually look like?
August 18, 2003
Yesterday Douwe got his new Nokia to play an episode of Seinfeld. 176x120, ten frames a second, tinny sound — and somehow still the holy grail. The phone has 500 times the memory of his first computer and runs movies on it. A small marvel, with Moore's law doing the heavy lifting.
August 15, 2003
Actors, porn stars, and assorted lunatics are running for governor of California. The world is laughing — but the world tends to copy California once it's done laughing. So here is a modest proposal: combine Big Brother (a Dutch invention, naturally) with the political circus. Lock the candidates in a house with cameras. Media training only holds for so long.
August 13, 2003
There should be a national uproar. There isn't. The EU is quietly finalising its IP Enforcement Directive — the DMCA, but worse. Refilling your printer cartridge? Illegal. Playing a DVD from the wrong region? Illegal. The parliament votes on September 11th. There is still time, but only barely.
August 12, 2003
Half the planet has read the new Harry Potter, and Douwe is worried — for the wizards. A thousand years ago the gap between magic and muggle was unbelievable. Today, planes outrun broomsticks and email beats owls. The wizard world is run like the Soviet Union. If they don't reform soon, the muggles win.
August 10, 2003
An old argument with a friend: is there such a thing as an unselfish deed? The hero who throws himself on the grenade felt good doing it, so really he did it for himself, no? The reasoning sounds airtight — and it is exactly the kind of airtight reasoning that should make you suspicious.
August 09, 2003
Germany and Austria have been bickering over whether Mozart was theirs. Both, in a way — and neither, because in 1756 the nation state hadn't been invented yet. Once upon a time a passport was a letter of recommendation, borders were soft, and the Roma went where they pleased. What did we lose when we drew the lines?
August 07, 2003
Tim O'Reilly says the real killer app of open source isn't OpenOffice or KDE — it's the LAMP stack that powers Google, Amazon and Yahoo!. Agreed. But that points at something awkward: Linux is mostly good for big companies. Free as in beer is cheap. Free as in speech only counts if you can actually read and write.
August 05, 2003
A friendly email arrives suggesting Archean is really an Euler-method integrator for the Laplace equation with six coupled potentials. Flattering, except Douwe isn't entirely sure what that means. He can see the parallel with disease-spread models, but the rest is a hint at deeper waters — and a request for pointers to more local operators.
August 04, 2003
Only about 5% of development aid reaches its intended target, and a big reason is that we ship western experts at western wages to places where they're less productive than at home. Douwe wonders if the answer is to stop sending westerners altogether — and instead send Indian engineers to solve African problems, while the west picks up the bill.
August 03, 2003
The International Phonetic Association already worked out how to write any language consistently. So why does every language community keep agonising over spelling reform, weighing tradition against reason? Douwe makes the case that our current spelling rules quietly exclude a huge fraction of the population — and that learning foreign languages would suddenly get a lot easier. juw jork rools.
August 01, 2003
The RIAA is suing individual Kazaa users, and legally, fair enough — Douwe admits he's one of them. But while they're winning the lawsuits, they're alienating the people who love music most and missing an obvious opportunity. Imagine a flat monthly fee, anyone can run a radio station, a million music bloggers spring up overnight. That's the business they're not building.
July 31, 2003
A new project: Worldsizer, a Flash applet that lets you resize the continents according to their share of wealth, population, or military spending. The graphics, Douwe admits, are kind of crude — but watching a familiar map warp into an unfamiliar one is its own kind of cool.
July 29, 2003
Diamond Way Buddhism teaches five paths to enlightenment. The Internet, Douwe proposes, has four. From the novice frantically printing webpages, to the bookmarker, to the search-engine zen of typing in the right keywords. The fourth stage? He hasn't reached it yet — and is openly soliciting reports from anyone who has.
People are always available for work in the past tense.