July 28, 2003
Bob Cringely has a baroque scheme for legal Napster involving shared CD ownership across millions of people. Douwe thinks it leans too hard on fair use. He has his own idea: a storage facility that physically holds your CDs and lets you stream them — and lets you swap ownership with other members when you want to hear something new. IANAL, but it might just work.
July 27, 2003
A beer with friends produces more new ideas than a week of television. And every one of those ideas, when Douwe goes looking, has already been built by some crazy person on the Internet. TV broadcasts what people already know; the web is full of the genuinely new. A trivial observation, perhaps — except for what it implies about why we still pick Seinfeld reruns.
July 26, 2003
A hundred years ago, Topsy the elephant was electrocuted on purpose. She'd killed three keepers — the last one tried to feed her a lit cigarette — but the strangest part of the story is who arranged it. Thomas Edison, losing his current war with Westinghouse, was electrocuting animals to prove AC was dangerous. He lost the AC battle. But he did convince America of something else.
July 25, 2003
Richest country? Norway. Least corrupt? Finland. Most women-friendly? Sweden. Whatever the metric, the Scandinavians keep winning. They're tall, handsome, peaceful, wired, and speak excellent English. Even Al Qaeda once called for attacks on Norway and nobody could figure out why. Douwe thinks the Scandinavian model deserves more study. Only the weather lets it down.
July 19, 2003
Everyone reaches for the same comparison: rebuilding Japan and Germany worked, so why isn't it working in Iraq? Maybe it's still early — the Marshall Plan didn't kick in until 1948. But there's another, less comfortable difference between the two situations, one that has nothing to do with timing and everything to do with how a conquered people see themselves.
July 18, 2003
The color scheme experiment now lives as a proper project — and it's evolving. You can also point it at any page on the site and watch a different hue and saturation take over in real time. Click the button and see what happens to this one.
July 17, 2003
Steven Berlin Johnson identifies three holes in Google: shopping pages score too high, dominant meanings crowd out the rest, and we're drifting away from book knowledge. The first two are arguable — maybe popularity is the point. But the third one stings, and the surprising rescuer might be a company nobody thinks of as a search engine.
July 16, 2003
More than half of new American homes are guarded in some way. The instinct is to read this as paranoia — Americans hiding behind gates. But what if gated communities are something stranger: a revival of the Greek city-state, philosophical experiments in how to live, browsable like websites? If you don't like the rules, switch to a different one. Even Kant could have his.
July 15, 2003
PageRank isn't just an algorithm — it's a political system. Google calls linking a form of voting, which makes it a technocracy of webmasters. Overture is more openly capitalist: pay for position. So what other regimes could a search engine run? A populist one based on traffic, an oligarchy of market cap, a fragmented democracy where you vote on the voters. Pick your favorite.
July 13, 2003
New color scheme on the site, all derived mathematically from a single hue — loosely Goethe, who lost the famous color argument with Newton but wasn't entirely wrong about aesthetics. The twist: the site's color is going to evolve. Each visitor gets a nudged variant, and if they stick around, their version pulls the central color in their direction. Slow collective drift, in CSS.
July 12, 2003
Two new toys. GoogleBattle pits search terms against each other by counting how often each appears in the other's top results — a sort of PageRank cage match. And Archean, the self-organizing colored-string experiment, just learned to breed: run four variants in parallel, click the one you like, and the others mutate toward it.
July 10, 2003
On the internet, there can only be one of anything — one bookstore, one second-hand shop, one search engine to rule them all. Which means Google has quietly become the arbiter of who counts as *the* Bob, *the* painter, *the* bank. Man used to be the measure of all things. Now it's an I'm-Feeling-Lucky button. So what's the most-the thing on the whole web?
July 08, 2003
Pink Floyd had a point. Ask any adult what they remember from secondary school and you'll get a shrug — some English, maybe, but possibly that came from Springsteen. The uncomfortable truth is that the years are mostly wasted: kids aren't interested, the material is forgettable, and high school doesn't really prepare you for anything. So what would actually be worth teaching a sixteen-year-old?
July 07, 2003
Grammatical evolution plays out over thousands of years, which makes it hard to study. Accents, though, are a snapshot you can grab today. George Mason University has hundreds of non-native English speakers reading the same paragraph, transcribed into IPA. Plot the distances between them, draw the shortest paths, and you'd have a map of languages. Would it look like the one we already know?
July 06, 2003
You can't beat the index — by definition, since the index is the average. So if everyone wised up and dumped active funds for trackers, who would actually decide where the index goes? Somebody has to do the trading that sets the prices. The answer leads to a slightly uncomfortable conclusion about who's left in the room.
July 05, 2003
The dot-com bubble pumped the web full of content like a rainforest on steroids. Then the money stopped. Now the great dying has begun, but the dead trees aren't falling — they're still ranking on Google, still being linked to, still freezing the whole ecosystem in amber. A meditation on the coming web ice age, and who's quietly making it worse.
July 04, 2003
The EU keeps agonizing over which language to use, which is silly: Europe already has one. Everyone speaks it — except the British, who haven't joined the Euro either and may yet come around. Put a Frenchman and a Czech in a room and they'll chat away happily. Add a guy from Liverpool and the whole thing falls apart. A modest proposal.
July 03, 2003
Three out of every four mails in the office is spam, and everyone and his brother has a clever fix. Here's one more — but this one only works if you happen to run Hotmail. The trick involves setting up bait accounts, getting them onto every spam list on earth, and then doing something faintly devious with the inbound mail.
July 02, 2003
Cheap flights and cars are slowly killing the train. Sad — but the most valuable thing the railroads ever built isn't the tracks, it's the right of way straight into the heart of every major city. Cut up that network and you lose it forever. So what do we do with all those rails once the trains are gone? An idea involving cars that sleep while you do.
July 01, 2003
Stopping counterfeiters doesn't need fancy holograms or color-shifting ink. It just needs a central bank willing to keep four times as much cash in the vault as out in the wild, and a phone line you can call to ask: is this serial number really out there right now? The math does the rest — and the would-be counterfeiter is suddenly playing terrible odds.
If you can survive death, you can probably survive anything.