November 22, 2016
Frederick II reportedly tried to find the universal human language by raising children in total silence and seeing what they spoke. It did not go well for the children. A gentler experiment uses Wikivoyage phrasebooks, the numbers one through ten, and an edit distance older than the microprocessor -- and produces a language tree that lines up with the linguists more often than it has any right to.
November 20, 2016
Search the web for information about the Aqaba-to-Nuweiba ferry and you come away more confused than you started. The ticket said 11PM, the terminal said midnight, the boat left at 1AM, and at some point in the middle of the Red Sea an officer in white woke me up holding my own passport and asked me where it was. One more datapoint for anyone heading this way.
October 21, 2016
The Times World Atlas had these wonderful maps where countries were resized to match a statistic -- population, GDP, whatever. As a kid I assumed an artist drew them by hand. Turns out you can do it algorithmically with CIA Factbook data, some shared border points and a tug of war. The tricky part is keeping Sri Lanka from drifting into India, and keeping the Middle East from squashing Syria into Greece.
October 12, 2016
Prisma made neural style transfer a phone-app sensation, but the underlying paper is public and an open source version exists (only about 100x slower). What if you pointed it at the world's 100 most-visited museums and rerendered each building in the style of its most famous painting? Plus a detour into why Werner Koch maintained GnuPG on a postman's salary.
October 05, 2016
Tourists ruining your vacation photos? A new iOS app takes five shots three seconds apart, stabilizes them, and quietly makes the crowds disappear. Tried out on a statue of Bach in Leipzig with surprisingly clean results. Plus the linguistic confession that karaoke does not really mean empty orchestra, and a haar-cascade detour that did not pan out.
September 29, 2016
Type a word and watch Word2Vec light up each country by how related it is. Coffee glows in Colombia and Ethiopia, as you'd hope - but why does Greenland light up too? And why does Chad get bright for the word walk? A new project, a US-states spin-off, and what happens when Google News decides what your model knows about the world.
September 20, 2016
Airplane seatback systems will swear every movie they offer is a masterpiece. A new iOS app ships with reviews of 15,000 films so you can fact-check at 35,000 feet without WiFi. The first project after leaving Triposo, built as an excuse to learn Swift (now actually pleasant) and to show how to wrangle Wikipedia dumps down to something that fits on a phone.
September 12, 2016
After five years, stepping down as CEO of the travel guide startup founded with my brothers and Jon Tirsen. Not quite a post-mortem - Triposo continues without me - but a frank look at what worked, what didn't, and the awkward question startup founders rarely talk about: what do you do when the one thing you're good at isn't quite enough?
July 24, 2016
Peter Thiel pays kids to drop out of college. Over a beer or two, the question came up: what if the government did the opposite version of the same idea? Hand 18-year-olds a 25,000 dollar check for skipping university - matching the debt they'd otherwise rack up - and watch what happens to the decision. There's even a trick borrowed from the Zappos hiring process buried in here.
July 04, 2016
If you want nobody to live on under 1.90 dollars a day, the Hemingway-style answer is straightforward: give everybody 1.90 dollars a day. Sounds absurd until you do the arithmetic - and the arithmetic is more interesting than you'd expect. With M-Pesa and friends, the plumbing exists too. Three objections, three rebuttals, and a back-of-the-envelope cost that lands closer to the average American charity donation than you'd think.
June 27, 2016
So it is done. The Brits voted 52 to 48 for Brexit. Time for sore losers to assemble. Rerunning the referendum is off the table - that's not how democracy wins - but three sneakier exits from the exit are still on it. One involves Greenland, of all places. Another exploits a technicality nobody has been talking about. The third is just letting Parliament do its job.
June 07, 2016
Silicon Valley keeps shipping miracles, but the productivity numbers refuse to budge. Why? Five theories ranging from the historical (electric motors took decades to actually rewire the factory) to the suspicious (every productive hour gets cancelled by twenty minutes on Facebook) to one that's almost tragic: software designed so anybody can use it means nobody bothers to get great. WordPerfect power users and London cabbies make an appearance.
June 05, 2016
Two years on from the World Cup, the Python football model gets dusted off, retuned, and pointed at the Euros. France comes out on top, thanks mostly to home advantage. But the model's pick for second place is a genuine surprise, and it gives Germany short shrift. The England number matters too - their performance might literally decide Brexit. Actual money has been put down, so this prediction is falsifiable.
May 02, 2016
Trump supporters are angry, and the scariest economic graph Douwe knows hints at why. So where is the next wave of real innovation supposed to come from? The self-proclaimed world capital of it is busy optimizing ad clicks and making the taxi industry slightly more efficient. The app economy is 100 billion in a 100 trillion world. The steam engine affected everybody.
January 02, 2016
Growing up in the Netherlands, street-postcode-city felt like the only sensible way to point at a house. Then you travel. Japan numbers the blocks, not the streets. In Hyderabad you navigate by temples and shopping malls. Bangkok meanders, recursively. Tell a Bangkok taxi driver to take you home to Soi 3 and watch him stare back, politely waiting for the rest of the sentence.
December 03, 2015
After four good years in Berlin, Tonja and Douwe are packing up for Bangkok in January, visa gods willing. Not the weather, not the food, although those help. The real reason involves Triposo, an algorithmic travel guide, and the awkward gap between covering the whole world and actually proving the unit economics. Apparently that gap is best closed from the tropics.
December 15, 2014
A vegetarian quiche invented for Ari and Dhanji wedding, which meant it had to look respectable on a buffet and actually taste of something. Three eggs, 750 grams of brussels sprouts, 200 grams of feta, puff pastry, half an hour of fiddling, 45 minutes at 220. Feeds about four humans. The sprouts get parboiled until a fork goes in under mild protest. The rest is assembly with optimism.
November 30, 2013
Old friends visit from the Netherlands, so naturally an Android phone gets tied to some helium balloons and released over Berlin. First attempt ends with a final photograph of pavement. Second attempt skips the camera, streams SMS coordinates to a bar, and ends up somewhere in the Brandenburg forests. Whether it was retrieved, and what Dropbox has to do with any of this, is the rest of the post.
February 20, 2013
Arriving in Kigali after other African capitals feels closer to Singapore than to Sub-Saharan Africa. Clean streets, banned plastic bags, a national-language switch from French to English for economic reasons. Twenty years earlier, neighbours killed neighbours here and priests handed parishioners over to the Interahamwe. How does a country come back from something like that, and what does its calm say about the rest of us?
February 12, 2013
The Paleo diet insists grains are unnatural and our stone-age bodies were never meant to handle them. Setting aside the awkward objection that taking health advice from a group with a life expectancy of 32 seems suspect, theres a more direct problem visible from the Serengeti this time of year. The grasses are heavy with seeds, and the baboons are not shy. Our ancestors probably werent either.
The rule on staying alive as a forecaster is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.