July 17, 2003
Steven Berlin Johnson identifies three holes in Google: shopping pages score too high, dominant meanings crowd out the rest, and we're drifting away from book knowledge. The first two are arguable — maybe popularity is the point. But the third one stings, and the surprising rescuer might be a company nobody thinks of as a search engine.
July 16, 2003
More than half of new American homes are guarded in some way. The instinct is to read this as paranoia — Americans hiding behind gates. But what if gated communities are something stranger: a revival of the Greek city-state, philosophical experiments in how to live, browsable like websites? If you don't like the rules, switch to a different one. Even Kant could have his.
July 15, 2003
PageRank isn't just an algorithm — it's a political system. Google calls linking a form of voting, which makes it a technocracy of webmasters. Overture is more openly capitalist: pay for position. So what other regimes could a search engine run? A populist one based on traffic, an oligarchy of market cap, a fragmented democracy where you vote on the voters. Pick your favorite.
July 13, 2003
New color scheme on the site, all derived mathematically from a single hue — loosely Goethe, who lost the famous color argument with Newton but wasn't entirely wrong about aesthetics. The twist: the site's color is going to evolve. Each visitor gets a nudged variant, and if they stick around, their version pulls the central color in their direction. Slow collective drift, in CSS.
July 12, 2003
Two new toys. GoogleBattle pits search terms against each other by counting how often each appears in the other's top results — a sort of PageRank cage match. And Archean, the self-organizing colored-string experiment, just learned to breed: run four variants in parallel, click the one you like, and the others mutate toward it.
July 10, 2003
On the internet, there can only be one of anything — one bookstore, one second-hand shop, one search engine to rule them all. Which means Google has quietly become the arbiter of who counts as *the* Bob, *the* painter, *the* bank. Man used to be the measure of all things. Now it's an I'm-Feeling-Lucky button. So what's the most-the thing on the whole web?
July 08, 2003
Pink Floyd had a point. Ask any adult what they remember from secondary school and you'll get a shrug — some English, maybe, but possibly that came from Springsteen. The uncomfortable truth is that the years are mostly wasted: kids aren't interested, the material is forgettable, and high school doesn't really prepare you for anything. So what would actually be worth teaching a sixteen-year-old?
July 07, 2003
Grammatical evolution plays out over thousands of years, which makes it hard to study. Accents, though, are a snapshot you can grab today. George Mason University has hundreds of non-native English speakers reading the same paragraph, transcribed into IPA. Plot the distances between them, draw the shortest paths, and you'd have a map of languages. Would it look like the one we already know?
July 06, 2003
You can't beat the index — by definition, since the index is the average. So if everyone wised up and dumped active funds for trackers, who would actually decide where the index goes? Somebody has to do the trading that sets the prices. The answer leads to a slightly uncomfortable conclusion about who's left in the room.
July 05, 2003
The dot-com bubble pumped the web full of content like a rainforest on steroids. Then the money stopped. Now the great dying has begun, but the dead trees aren't falling — they're still ranking on Google, still being linked to, still freezing the whole ecosystem in amber. A meditation on the coming web ice age, and who's quietly making it worse.
July 04, 2003
The EU keeps agonizing over which language to use, which is silly: Europe already has one. Everyone speaks it — except the British, who haven't joined the Euro either and may yet come around. Put a Frenchman and a Czech in a room and they'll chat away happily. Add a guy from Liverpool and the whole thing falls apart. A modest proposal.
July 03, 2003
Three out of every four mails in the office is spam, and everyone and his brother has a clever fix. Here's one more — but this one only works if you happen to run Hotmail. The trick involves setting up bait accounts, getting them onto every spam list on earth, and then doing something faintly devious with the inbound mail.
July 02, 2003
Cheap flights and cars are slowly killing the train. Sad — but the most valuable thing the railroads ever built isn't the tracks, it's the right of way straight into the heart of every major city. Cut up that network and you lose it forever. So what do we do with all those rails once the trains are gone? An idea involving cars that sleep while you do.
July 01, 2003
Stopping counterfeiters doesn't need fancy holograms or color-shifting ink. It just needs a central bank willing to keep four times as much cash in the vault as out in the wild, and a phone line you can call to ask: is this serial number really out there right now? The math does the rest — and the would-be counterfeiter is suddenly playing terrible odds.
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.