November 17, 2009
Buying Super Freakonomics at an airport, as a present, should be easy. Boxes of unpacked books rule out hardcover, so it has to land on the Kindle. Two seconds on Amazon. Then a half-hour spiral through hotel WiFi, iPass, a corporate VPN, and a nervously brief flick of data roaming, just to get the phone online. Amazon nailed the buying part. The rest of the internet, not so much.
October 09, 2009
A long-weekend trip to Kakadu becomes my first real conversation with Aboriginal Australians, over beers at a roadhouse three hours from where they live. One painted Paul McCartney's jacket. Another has been a mechanic for 62 years and looks anywhere between 50 and 90. The conversation drifts into harder territory - life expectancy, alcohol restrictions, petrol sniffing - and ends with a slightly mischievous modest proposal.
August 02, 2009
Bought my wife a Kindle 2 for her birthday and ran straight into Amazon's geographic restrictions. They will happily sell you the hardware, just not the books - not even the ones out of copyright. Meanwhile any torrent site hands you the complete works of Bill Bryson in minutes, and 1984 is public domain in Australia but not the US. Something here does not add up.
April 18, 2009
Vegetarianism is hard to argue against on the merits. Meat drinks 70 percent of agricultural water, drives 18 percent of greenhouse gases (six times what flying does), and the bio industry treats animals like furniture. And yet. Steak tastes really good. Augustine's prayer on chastity comes to mind. So here is a compromise with a deliberately ugly name, designed to do roughly half the good for roughly a seventh of the sacrifice.
January 06, 2009
Most 2009 predictions are dreary: bad economy, Obama president, internet still up. Boring. Time for five less obvious bets, including a Microsoft rebound that makes Mac heads stop and wonder, a country in trouble that isn't the one everyone's watching, and a European love affair that may not survive the year. Check back in twelve months.
December 15, 2008
Sydney pubs advertise steaks for 12, 10, even 7 Australian dollars, and old-timers still grumble that back in the day it was a fiver. Turns out one pub still does the fiver: 300 grams plus fries, twenty-five minutes away on foot. Compared to Zurich, where a packet of nuts costs the same, it feels like a steal. Until a Swiss friend opens his mouth.
November 26, 2008
Picasa Web Albums quietly grew a face recognition feature, and running it over an old archive lands squarely in Clarke's third law territory. The glitches are where it gets fun. After an igloo build in the Swiss Alps, the leftover snow went into a snowman. Picasa flagged him under clearly recognized faces. Sadly, no matching contact.
November 16, 2008
A bicycle shows up in Sydney with the rest of the move. My wife predicts it will get stolen since no other bikes are on the street. I argue the opposite: no bikes, no bike thieves. For three weeks I am right. Then a brake cable snaps, with a yellow Post-it stuck to the Google-branded frame. The note is just the beginning.
November 12, 2008
Ninety percent of creativity is misunderstanding. A headline about a Death and Taxes poster turns out to be something much more boring, but the imagined version, life expectancy plotted against top income tax rate per country, sounded better. Two tables, one spreadsheet and a quick scatter plot later, the chart exists. Whether it shows what you'd expect is another matter.
November 06, 2008
Back from a wedding in Hong Kong, struck by the odd genius of British-Chinese cultural mashup, here is a modest proposal. Not gunboat colonialism, more like the Greek colonies, or country franchises. The Netherlands builds a city inside the US. Saudi Arabia runs a Sharia enclave in Amsterdam. Vote with your feet without changing continents. What could possibly go wrong.
October 28, 2008
Bank stocks are down 32.5 percent this year. The S&P is down almost exactly the same. If the banking sector is really on the brink and the rest of the economy is not, why are investors not being punished more? Maybe because they know taxpayers will bail them out. So here is a counter-proposal that calls the bluff and lets the market sort the survivors.
October 08, 2008
The 700 billion dollar Wall Street bailout is being handed to the same crowd that helped break things. The guy running the rescue operation made 700 million while at an investment bank. There has to be a better plan. Here is one: skip the committees, skip the banks, and just hand the whole pile to a single individual on terms he cannot refuse.
August 10, 2008
Three and a half years in Switzerland end the same way they began: with a man walking the apartment hunting specs of dust. The lazy pay 1500 dollars to a cleaning company. Real Swiss scrub it themselves, because companies are not thorough enough. There is a third way, but the rental inspector still muttered something about a disaster. India next, Sydney after.
August 06, 2008
Porting old projects from Zope to AppEngine, one at a time. Back online: Chinese Radicals, a program I wrote to teach myself to read Chinese, and Google Share, one of my earliest Google hacks. Pick a domain like search, pick some concepts like google, yahoo, msn, aol, then count co-occurring pages to measure mind share. The resulting pie chart looks suspiciously like something else.
July 13, 2008
Three old toys, freshly tuned up after the move to App Engine. Visited Countries gets a feature people kept asking for, Archean Self Organization stops making your friends decipher weird codes, and The Next President picks a more sensible starting point. Small tweaks, but enough to make them feel less like museum pieces.
July 06, 2008
Two hard disks died in a RAID array and the hosting company sent their condolences instead of my data. The backups were old. Zope was the kind of platform that fights you on the way out. Of the 48 projects on the dead site, only a handful are worth bringing back -- and one of them is getting an upgrade in the process.
May 24, 2008
A billion people need jobs, and India has solved the problem in a way no economics textbook covers: manned automation. The ticket gate has a guy. The fruit scale has a lady. The office light switch has a dedicated employee. And when the country's first automatic drinks dispenser was unveiled with great fanfare, the staffing decisions revealed exactly what kind of economy India is.
May 15, 2008
Adverts tell you what a country dreams about, and Hyderabad is dreaming about concrete. Billboards push 'European Style Living', other billboards just display phone numbers with no context whatsoever, and the package tours to Europe spend a baffling fraction of their time in Switzerland. The explanation for that last one involves Bollywood, Kashmir, and a problem they could no longer ignore.
May 06, 2008
Laundry service in India means your t-shirts come back washed almost every day, which collapses the natural rotation cycle down to two or three shirts. Pulling from the bottom of the stack instead of the top should have fixed it. It didn't. The cause turned out to be a second layer of optimization, run by someone closer to home, with different objectives.
April 26, 2008
An old friend flies in from the Netherlands and decides, against all reason, that the Andaman Islands are the place. The trip features a shoeless non-English-speaking taxi driver who also cannot drive, a lost Tamil cheat-sheet for 'go faster', and one question we could not crack over the beers: if wind makes waves, how does the wave know which way the beach is facing?
I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.