August 07, 2004
Can money buy happiness? Robert Frank says yes, just not on bigger cars and houses. More puzzling: statistics suggest people don't get happier as their society grows richer, but they do feel happier when they're richer than their neighbours. Which raises an awkward question. Why don't the rich emigrate to poor countries to maximize their relative wealth?
August 05, 2004
Once a year the Google Dance leaves the servers and moves to the dance floor. Real men don't use Pascal and real men don't dance, but throw in some beers, Google food, and women from the nearby SEO conference and the rules start to bend. There were foosball tables, a pirate puzzle, and a ride home from a girl whose friend was carrying a suspiciously familiar bike.
August 01, 2004
What else is there to do on a Saturday night? A little script that asks Google for the number N and gives slot N to whoever ranks highest. The result is a Top 1000 of sites that won the lottery of integers. As for where this blog sits in that list, the answer involves a four-digit number and a salute to someone called Sexy Jim.
July 29, 2004
Bringing an Amsterdam bike to Silicon Valley sounded clever until the airlines did to it what they do to coffee. A WalMart replacement, a flooding, a misplaced note, and a stolen bike later, an unexpected lesson in what 68 dollars actually buys you. Four bikes in, the current one has a lock that locks to things and a key with a clock. Progress.
July 24, 2004
Everybody agrees drunk driving is Very Bad. But is it, or is it one of those things we never question because it involves sin and death? A 300-times higher chance of dying sounds terrifying, until you do the math on what 300 times a very small number actually is. The short drive home, it turns out, may cost you about as much life expectancy as three cigarettes.
July 20, 2004
Concentrate enough engineers in one place and patterns emerge. Nobody owns a watch. A surprising number don't even drive. Politically they're either mildly left or radiate libertarian, with nothing in between. And the official Google dress code, per the VP of engineering, is that everybody should wear clothes at work. The unwritten one is rather more specific.
July 17, 2004
Finally, a band that gets it. They Might Be Giants are selling their albums as 256Kbit MP3s with no DRM, ten dollars an album, straight from the source. Their stance on file sharing is refreshingly direct: please don't, this is how we make a living. Trust your customers, skip the middlemen, and maybe the whole proxy war with file sharers stops being necessary.
July 16, 2004
Google Talk had a habit of getting stuck in a loop. Sometimes that produced accidental poetry: type in I did not authorize torture and it would answer did, did, did. Charming, but not really what anyone wanted. After meaning to fix it for a while, the fix is finally in. Worth another look, and probably worth retiring a few of the better infinite responses.
July 14, 2004
Posting has slowed down. Work eats the hours, and the Google hacks that used to land here now quietly land at, well, Google. But interesting projects still drift by — too small for a real post, too good to ignore. So there's a second blog now, purely to dilute productivity further. Link inside.
July 13, 2004
Democracy is a luxury good — countries seem to acquire a taste for it somewhere around 8,000 dollars per head. So here's a thought experiment: what if communism is the same? Not the drab Eastern European version, but Club Med for life. Once a society gets rich enough, why would anyone bother arranging their own material needs?
July 11, 2004
Saying Americans are stupid has become a perfectly respectable European pastime. Try a quick test, though: ask the same person whether Americans are dumber than, say, black people on average. Watch the political correctness dilemma engage. The dodge that follows is revealing — and the reasoning behind both kinds of insult turns out to be uncomfortably similar.
July 10, 2004
Life at Google feels a bit like living on a tropical island after a great shipwreck. The dot-com bubble has burst, and the best swimmers keep washing ashore. At lunch you sit next to someone who was at Sun when Sun was hot, someone who watched four startups go belly-up, someone who jumped off the Oracle boat voluntarily. Postcard from the beach.
June 27, 2004
On Wednesday, beers with a face-painted billionaire. On Friday, a dirty bus full of hopeful gamblers headed to a second-tier Reno. Somewhere around Stockton things go sideways, and getting to Yosemite turns into a puzzle that yields to engineer-brain reasoning about bus timetables. The deduction is elegant. The conclusion the deduction leads to is, well, less so.
June 20, 2004
Europe needs immigrants, but only a fraction of those who want in can come. Quotas, tests, asylum rules — they all end up selecting for the wrong things and rewarding the most desperate paperwork. Here's a simpler proposal that's bound to make everyone uncomfortable: just auction the green cards to the highest bidders. With a twist on where the money goes.
June 12, 2004
Coffee, sunshine, free wifi outside the cafe — pretty close to geek heaven, and a good spot to puzzle over why American prison sentences are so much longer than Dutch ones. Culture explains part of it, but the surprising culprit is democracy itself: more direct popular control over sentencing pushes terms one way only. And the Dutch alternative isn't obviously better.
June 01, 2004
How do you count the bits in a 32-bit word? How would you estimate how often a word appears on the web without spidering it? The phone interview kicks off a strange two weeks: an unplanned trip to Mountain View, hispanic train-riders who have never heard of Google, code on whiteboards in a half-forgotten C, and a question about Foucault that there was, sadly, no time for.
May 29, 2004
Sorting through the morning's spam, fishing real messages out of the suspected-junk folder — when an email titled 'Google in Zurich' surfaces. Someone at the company has been enjoying the Google Hacks page and would like a chat. Turns out running a personal site, even one nobody seems to read, has unexpected reach. Brand 'me', episode one.
May 27, 2004
A recognizable face morphs gradually into something unrecognizable — and then it turns out to be the same picture all along, just rotated. There's a small panic button somewhere in the brain that this gif presses, hard. A short post about a strange optical effect that, once you've seen it, is hard to unsee.
May 27, 2004
UMTS was supposed to have us all surfing at top speed by 2000. Instead, in the Netherlands we're still testing it, and we're stuck with GPRS: a slow, expensive, hacked-together protocol bolted onto GSM. So why does this clunky compromise stand the best chance of bringing four billion people online?
May 25, 2004
If you're too poor to pay for software, is pirating it really theft? Microsoft doesn't lose a sale you were never going to make, and arguably gains the free publicity. Sounds appealing, until you notice the trap it builds for poor people who eventually do get a bit richer.