December 02, 2003
What is the smallest number that Google has never indexed? Hjalmar Gislason puts it somewhere around two million. The trouble is, finding it brute-force would take six years of API calls, get you banned, and the moment you publish the winner, Google spiders the page and your number is no longer ungoogleable. A small recursive tragedy.
December 01, 2003
A first attempt at simulating chemical reactions: atoms bouncing around fast, combining into chemically valid molecules, though not always the ones you'd expect. Far too simple to be useful for medical research, but it does produce organic compounds, including metaminine, a bit of ammonium, and one weird radical. Source included for anyone tempted to take it further.
November 30, 2003
Dictatorships, democracies, shareholder capitalism: every system humans have invented to run things is fundamentally about balancing competing interests. The geeks went and did something different. They asked what the best technical answer was and built that. Compare the scaling of the early Internet with the scaling of DOS hard disk support, and you'll see why Douwe thinks engineers should be running more of the planet.
November 28, 2003
Museums charge extra for video cameras. Airlines ban cell phones but happily wave laptops with WiFi through the gate. The Netherlands once taxed televisions. So what happens when every gadget becomes every other gadget, and a phone in your pocket is also a video camera, a TV, and a computer? A lot of laws are about to need rewriting.
November 27, 2003
The leaves have fallen, the air is crisp, and Google has changed its algorithm again. Someone started naming these events like hurricanes; this one is Florida. Sites rise, sites disappear, livelihoods evaporate, all with no appeal. Google has been good to Douwe so far, but watching the Florida dance raises an uncomfortable question about depending on yet another monopoly.
November 26, 2003
Western governments have quietly run up future obligations ranging from one to five times their entire GDP, and we worry about deficits creeping past three percent. Peter Heller's book lays out the long-term math: pensions, social security, disaster insurance, all promised, none funded. Everyone who has thought about it knows where this ends. The strategy for now is to not think about it.
November 24, 2003
GoogleTalk, the Google Hack that gets two arbitrary search terms arguing with each other, now travels. A few lines of iframe and you can drop the whole thing into your own site. Copy, paste, watch Google fight itself on your homepage.
November 21, 2003
Traveling through India with a digital camera, a laptop, and a phone full of addresses, Douwe runs into the usual obstacles: scarce wall sockets, eye-watering roaming fees, and museums that still don't trust cameras. Then a guard in green spots the suspicious bulge in his pocket and threatens to involve the police. The negotiation that follows turns on a surprisingly small request.
November 20, 2003
Naively, you'd expect the Internet to flatten markets: everything open, prices transparent, Froogle uncovering the best deal in seconds. But sellers really don't want clear markets, and the same data trail that helps you compare is helping them quietly do the opposite. The global supermarket may be drifting back into something older, noisier, and a lot more like a bazaar.
November 19, 2003
Dedicated cameras lose to phone cameras for one obvious reason: the phone is already in your pocket. By the same logic, the iPod should lose to whatever device people are carrying anyway. So how close is a Nokia 3650 to replacing a Walkman? Armed with a 16MB card, some ogg files, and a brave little pre-alpha player, I went to find out.
November 18, 2003
Hunt-pecking this into a Nokia 3650 on a third-class train rattling between Magauo and Cochin at an optimistic 40 km/h. GPRS roaming refuses to roam, SMS refuses to send, and the carriage looks suspiciously like a prison. Plenty of time, then, to work out why the south of India is booming while the north is not — and what the Soviets and air conditioners have to do with it.
November 01, 2003
One side wants to protect the poor from capitalism with subsidies and safety nets. The other wants to set entrepreneurs loose and trust the rising tide. Both, somehow, end up failing the people they claim to care about most. The bureaucrats and the free-marketeers each have their reasons — and a surprisingly similar blind spot about who actually knows best how to spend a poor family's money.
October 31, 2003
Visual Poetry, the Google hack that turns sentences into image-search slideshows, just escaped from Windows. The new online version skips the install and renders your poem as a wall of Google thumbnails on a single screen. Feed it a line and see what the web thinks it looks like.
October 30, 2003
A US-funded lab has cooked up a souped-up mousepox virus that kills its hosts even when they're vaccinated and on antivirals. There may well be a medical upside hiding in there somewhere, but the downside reads like a comic-book villain's lab notebook. I'm broadly pro-science, but designing improved plagues feels like the sort of curiosity we could maybe leave on the shelf.
October 29, 2003
Ten years ago, one Nigerian fax offering me 15 percent of five million dollars seemed almost worth a moment's curiosity. Now they arrive three a day, signed by dead dictators and confused warlords — I once got mail from Charles Taylor and his lawyer in the same week. The mechanics of the 419 scam I've since figured out. What I still can't work out is the business plan.
October 27, 2003
Bush's case for invading Iraq as part of the War on Terror never quite added up — Saddam and Al Qaeda were barely on speaking terms. And yet, post-invasion, Iraq has somehow become the world's busiest terrorist hangout, with jihadis flying in from everywhere to take a shot at the Great Satan. Maybe that's the accident. Or maybe it's the plan: a country-sized mousetrap, baited and set.
October 26, 2003
Two projects out of the drawer and onto the web. ZAmazon is a Zope product that lets you run Amazon searches from inside Zope. SixMovies is a Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game played on actors and films — except Amazon's database turns out to be a bit too shallow to make it really sing. It works well enough to show you what it wants to be.
October 25, 2003
The actor playing Jesus in a certain controversial film got struck by lightning on set. Statistically unlikely, sure, but explainable. Less explainable: it was the second time it happened during the same shoot. If he gets a third, even an atheist might concede that Someone is trying to send a memo.
October 24, 2003
A printer that doesn't print but cuts through wood and plastic with a laser. Amazon quietly scanning 120,000 books so you can full-text search 33 million pages. And, because we live in the future, a USB-powered air purifier. The USB port, it turns out, has become the cigarette lighter of the computer.
October 23, 2003
A modern Pentium is roughly ten thousand times faster than the 6502 in my old BBC Micro. That's the difference between a snail and a highway. So why does Word still take forever to start? The initial state is the same every time, after all. There has to be a trick the OS is missing.