June 30, 2003
There's a machine that suppresses certain brainwaves and suddenly you can draw dogs, spot prime numbers, and proofread like a savant. Our abstract-thought machinery, it turns out, gets in the way of seeing what's actually there. Which raises a question: are there two kinds of thinkers walking around — and is one of them quietly missing out on being an artist?
June 30, 2003
Prisons don't reform criminals and they don't deter them — 67% of released convicts get rearrested within three years. So why do we keep using them? There are a couple of unsettling theories. And if you really care about giving someone a second chance, there's an alternative worth considering, even if its name has a very bad PR problem.
June 26, 2003
Action movies stopped pretending heroes could get hurt a long time ago. Fight scenes turned into dances; car chases turned into ballet. Matrix Reloaded just takes the next logical step and applies it to the dialogue too. The Architect, the Oracle, the Keymaker — none of it actually means anything anymore. And that may be the point.
June 22, 2003
Developers spend 80% of their time hunting bugs, according to NIST. That's enough time to write the whole program five times over — if you didn't mind the errors. Which suggests a slightly mad alternative: don't bother debugging at all. Just write it three times and let the programs vote on the right answer.
June 21, 2003
Men shop for shoes the way they shop for milk: the old carton is empty, replace it, done. So why is buying another pair of your favourite jeans so much harder than reordering juice? A modest proposal involving unique codes for clothing, and a barcode scanner mounted next to the kitchen bin.
June 20, 2003
Patents are supposed to spur innovation by granting monopolies, which is odd, since monopolies are not exactly famous for being innovative. Nowhere is the tension sharper than in medicine: a graph, a price, and the uncomfortable fact that more than half the people who need the drug never get it. There is a better arrangement.
June 17, 2003
Sitcoms aren't actually funnier than real life. They just have canned laughter and writers. Both, it turns out, are fixable. Picture a big red chuckle button in every office, jokes piped to your phone moments before you need them, and entire episodes of Friends running in parallel across six hundred actual friends.
June 15, 2003
A small follow-up to yesterday's Atlantis theory: a new project that lets you slide the sea level up and down across a map of Europe, and watch the coastlines breathe.
June 15, 2003
Bowling for Columbine blames the guns, but the numbers don't quite agree. Switzerland and Canada are armed to the teeth and peaceful; Americans manage a higher murder rate than Europe even without firearms. So what is it? A second number, about working hours, points somewhere unexpected.
June 11, 2003
Most theories about Atlantis settle on the comforting conclusion that it never existed. Here is another. Ten thousand years ago the Strait of Gibraltar was closed and the Mediterranean sat much lower than it does now. Then one day it opened. Look at the map of what was, until that morning, dry land.
June 10, 2003
Children's bibles leave out rather a lot. The sons of God mating with the women of earth and producing giants, for instance. The genocide of Benjamin. The forty-two children mauled by bears for teasing a balding prophet. A proposal for the bible they don't give you in Sunday school, and why it might just be a bestseller.
June 09, 2003
Languages get simpler over time. Latin became Italian, Sanskrit became Hindi, Old Greek became New Greek. Fine, but then how did they ever get complex in the first place? An answer that has nothing to do with grammar and everything to do with what happens when nobody yet knows how to write.
June 07, 2003
The Netherlands has a new government, the economy is bad, and spending must be cut. Sounds reasonable until you do the arithmetic: revenues are flat in real terms, so why is standing still such an expensive habit? Apparently the beast eats a little more each year just to do the same job as before.
June 03, 2003
A pretty graphing library appeared, and resistance was futile. The result: GoogleShare, a small project for measuring the mind share of just about anything.
May 31, 2003
The Euro rebounded and economists are scrambling for explanations that don't contradict the ones they gave last year. Here's a theory I haven't seen anywhere else, involving the world's mattress-stuffers and the shoeboxes of cash they kept in dollars. The currency chart hints at exactly when they changed their minds.
May 28, 2003
A little script that abuses Google to answer the question 'when did X happen?' Give it a search term, get back a year. Works fine for anything in the last two centuries; beyond that, you're on your own.
May 13, 2003
Conservation of energy is one of those laws that feels rude to argue with. So how can a gas heater be more than 100% efficient? It sounds like a perpetual motion pitch from a guy at a bar, except someone in the Netherlands actually built one. The trick involves running a fridge backwards and the fine print of thermodynamics.
May 07, 2003
Ten thousand dollars to patent the bright idea you had in a pub. Outrageous, right? Maybe not. The complaint that patents favor big companies over lone inventors might have the economics exactly backwards, and the fix isn't making patents cheaper. It's making them into something stranger: shares in an idea.
May 02, 2003
Iraq is done, so what's next on the list of countries due for liberation? Setting aside the Bush-bashing for a moment and taking the democracy-spreading premise at face value, the obvious candidates don't line up neatly. North Korea has nukes. Myanmar has jungle. Africa has options. The catch is figuring out who gets to draw up the list.
May 02, 2003
Bird flu is sweeping the Netherlands, the fourth livestock plague in a handful of years after swine fever, mad cow, and foot-and-mouth. Treating each outbreak as a one-off disaster the government pays to clean up might be exactly the wrong policy, if you're trying to actually change anything.
I've known him as a man, as an adolescent and as a child -- sometimes on the same day.