Douwe Osinga's Blog: July 2003

Thursday, July 31, 2003

Worldsizer

A short update: I added Worldsizer to the projects. It's a flash applet that lets you resize the continents (or rather subcontinents) a...

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

The four stadia of Internet Enlightenment

According to the Diamond Way Buddism , there are five paths on the way to full enlightenment. On the Internet there are four stadia. The nov...

Monday, July 28, 2003

A legal way to do Napster

In his latest column, Bob Cringely explains his idea how to create 'Son of Napster', a complicated scheme with shared ownership of C...

Sunday, July 27, 2003

The power of the Internet

It seems if I go for a beer with a couple of friends, I'll meet more new ideas than if I would have watched TV for a week. But then, if ...

Saturday, July 26, 2003

Killing an elephant

I came across this weird story . This year it is a hundred years ago that Topsy the elephant was electrocuted. Not by accident, but as a way...

Friday, July 25, 2003

What's with Scandinavia?

If you're like me and you like statistics of all kinds, then you probably have noticed that when it comes to the well being of countries...

Saturday, July 19, 2003

Why America is losing the peace in Iraq

A comparision with the rebuilding of Japan and Germany is often made in regard to the conflict in Iraq. Why did that work so great and doesn...

Friday, July 18, 2003

Color scheme project

I added the color scheme thing as a project . Color evolution is alive and kicking. I also added the option from the color scheme page to s...

Thursday, July 17, 2003

Google holes

Steven Berlin writes an interesting piece in Slate about the holes in Google. He sees three: Shopping pages score above average Synonyms ...

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

The gated community as the new Polis

According to the conclusion of the international conference on private urban governance, more then half of all new homes in the U.S. are g...

Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Googles political system

In a discussion on nettime , the question of the political structure of Google's algorithm came up. Before you reject the idea that ther...

Sunday, July 13, 2003

Colors

I implemented a new color scheme for the site. All the colors are derived from one color using a mathematical scheme, loosely based on Goeth...

Saturday, July 12, 2003

Updates

I just added a new project, GoogleBattle. GoogleBattle lets two search term battle by searching the top 10 of term1 OR term2 for occurences....

Thursday, July 10, 2003

There can only be one

Like they say, there can only be one on the Internet. One big book store, one second hand store and one search engine to rule them all. Acco...

Tuesday, July 8, 2003

We don't need no education

Pink Floyd sang it so many years ago. Secundary education, do we need it? If you ask around, you notice nobody remembers a thing what they w...

Monday, July 7, 2003

Language evolution and accents

A couple of weeks ago , I wrote about language evolution and where complexities in languages come from if they seem to go away when times go...

Sunday, July 6, 2003

If index followers win, who will lead?

You can't beat the index when it comes to the stock market, that is, not everybody can, because then the index would be doing better, th...

Saturday, July 5, 2003

The coming Internet ice age

Slowly but unstoppably, the Internet is freezing over. Sites that used to be changing daily with fresh content produced by professional writ...

Friday, July 4, 2003

A Pan European Language

The issue which language(s) to use in the European Union has taken up a lot of time already and will probably do so more in the future. This...

Thursday, July 3, 2003

Battling spam

It seems that everybody and his brother  has solution to the growing spam problem these days. At out office, three out of every more mails i...

Wednesday, July 2, 2003

Driving and riding

It seems that the days of the great trains are nearing the end. The car and the plane are eating into the realm of the iron horse. The door...

Tuesday, July 1, 2003

How to make money counterfeiting very hard

I came across this article  that describes a scheme to stop money counterfeiting and then it hit me that this can be done rather simpler. He...