Black Rebel Whiskey (Grass)
We're back from two weeks in Thailand and Laos. It was excellent as expected; This part of Asia has this perfect mix of tourist friendli...
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Saturday, December 3, 2005
Why high taxes don't make people work less hard
In conservative circles and more and more outside of them, it seems to be a popular thesis that lowering taxes is good because it gives peop...
Monday, November 14, 2005
Moving out the grey masses
The old Europe is getting older. Not only the old, apparently the New Europe isn’t quite that fresh anymore either. The simplest solution ...
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Collective ownership of the land
There was a time when a lot of land was commonly owned. Not because people back then were all communist; it just made economically and socia...
Monday, November 7, 2005
The high cost of free education
I used to think that university education should be free. As luck would have it, for me it was. Better than that, our government back then e...
Thursday, October 27, 2005
douwesinga.com
Somebody registered the domain douwesinga.com and put a bunch of spammy looking ads on them. It's a great compliment and honour to join ...
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
European trips
When people think about the life of a Googler engineer they tend to think of the glamorous activities; the espresso powered late night debug...
Sunday, October 9, 2005
Government Granted Monopolies
One of the fundamentals of old school capitalism is assumption that property is absolute. Property is not something that is defined by the l...
Sunday, September 25, 2005
On killing our leaders
Pat Robertson suggested a few weeks ago that the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela would be an easy way out for the U...
Thursday, September 8, 2005
Crowds beating the market
There have been a bunch of books on the wisdom of mobs . The basic assumption is usually that the average behaviour of a group is for a lot...
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
US$ 197 or the ecosystem of mobile software
These smart phones have the drawback that they can do everything and have many options, but then after a while you find yourself using only...
Thursday, August 25, 2005
How to end terrorism. Part II
As promised my other plan to end terrorism. I think this one is better than the last one , but I don't expect a lot of support for it, s...
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
How to end terrorism. Part I
I thought of two ways to end terrorism. Neither will be popular I'm afraid. The second one will require heroism. The first one, discusse...
Friday, August 19, 2005
Trees with USB Connectors
The more we go wireless, the more we need wires to charge all those gadgets. It is really a drawback. Let's say I'd wanted to put a ...
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
On not decaying in the cold clay
I sometimes worry about the Netherlands. It's a great country with a long tradition of tolerance and pragmatism, but lately with all the...
Thursday, August 4, 2005
At the wikimania
So I'm at the Wikimania . When I first heard about it, I did ask to be a speaker; always seems to be a good way to get to know people. U...
Friday, July 29, 2005
It's a Chinese Kid!
If you talk to parents they often utter surprise about the fact that their children have started to follow traditional role patterns even if...
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Taxis and Nighttrains
About a year ago, a double confusion involving trains having a different schedule on Sunday than on other days and the similiarity between t...
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Time to side with the Republicans
Ah those Americans are at it again. The UN debates on the future of how the Internet is run; currently this is done by an American organiza...
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Income distribution and communism
Some might think seeing the title, here he goes again. I do seem to mention communism a lot in this blog. It is just that I like the market/...
Thursday, July 7, 2005
Art in the Train
During our trip in Albania my wife and me got to talk about art and how museums tend to attract less and less people for their regular coll...
Tuesday, July 5, 2005
The lack of Open Source Creativity forced Software Patents
I think it is always good to try to look at things from a different perspective, so please bear with me when I make this argument against Op...
Thursday, June 30, 2005
The key to commercial filesharing
Grokster lost and the Big Guys won. What happens next is anybody's guess, but one thing that seems possible, is that the movie & re...
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Blogging on Cellphones
A couple of days ago I had a little time to kill and I had my cell phone with me. So I thought I'd give blogging a retry. Now I didn...
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Project Resurection
Two projects belonging to the group of all time favorites among visitors had been off line for ages. I just patched them and they seem to wo...
Sunday, June 19, 2005
More Albania impressions
I've been back from Albania for about a week and still haven't gotten around blogging about it in some more detail. I think I'm ...
Saturday, June 18, 2005
World66 and the press
Of course it is mostly due to the success of the Wikipedia , but Open Content is hot. World66 , the Open Content Travel guide I helped found...
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Using the other nerve cells too
It is often said that we're only using 10% of our brain or so. Might be true. But of course in general we're only using 10% of our b...
Monday, June 13, 2005
Albanian Espresso
The espresso in Albania is of surprisingly high quality. It is one of the good things about being an ex-Italian colony. You see things like ...
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Time travel
So we're back. It was a nice trip. Albania looks better in real life than on paper, more about that later. Apart from the destination, i...
Wednesday, June 1, 2005
Switzerland is expensive
Switzerland is expensive. Not a very original title, of course. But if you live here and you weren't born here, from time to time you ha...
Monday, May 30, 2005
Non
So the French have voted 'No'. And I suppose so will my fellow country men. The end of the EU constitution. The interesting thing of...
Monday, May 16, 2005
Fame and fortune
A couple of weeks ago, a reader send me a scan from an article in PC-Magazine. In the list of the 100 websites you didn't know you could...
Monday, May 9, 2005
Closing Time
Visitors to Europe from the US are often confused by the opening hours in Europe. Why are shops closed on Sundays, but not bars? What about ...
Saturday, May 7, 2005
60 years
60 years ago the Second World War ended. I just read in the economist that three quarter of German soldiers that died, did so on the east fr...
Saturday, April 30, 2005
On the road
I'm on the road a lot lately. To SES Munich, then to Hannover last week for a pub conference on search engine optimization (yeah, pub co...
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Mapsonomy
Around the beginning of this year, my brother came around for a visit. Now his blogging about this trip might have been more adventurious t...
Monday, April 18, 2005
Sechseläuten
Zurich's answer to Burning Man is Sechseläuten. There is a bunch of parades from the guilds (the groups of professionals that have run ...
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Changing Times
I'm just back from the SES Munich 05. The total amount of food I got from Swiss during the flight added up to one piece of chocolate. I ...
Saturday, April 9, 2005
Communism might have been right after all
Last week I wrote about income distribution. Poorer people in richer countries might be worse of if they were poor in a poorer country. Mos...
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Income distribution and the cost of living
One of the first things visitors notice about Switzerland in general and more specific Zurich, is that it is expensive . It happens to be al...
Friday, March 18, 2005
Summer's here
Zurich is a very pretty city. Especially if you walk around in the old time during the winter with snow covering the old city, it is like wa...
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Seinfeld teaching French
I like watching old Seinfeld reruns. I like it to the extend that I have a complete collection of them on my hard disk. You know, for when I...
Sunday, March 13, 2005
100 dollar is too much for a computer
A while ago Negroponte presented a plan on the World Economic Forum to supply everybody in the third world with a 100 dollar laptop . It...
Tuesday, March 1, 2005
Philosophy Hacks
I recently received a message from O'Reilly that they are indeed going to use one my hacks in their upcoming book 'Mapping Hacks....
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Working in a coal mine
Even though cheese and chocolate fondue gathered some fame outside of the borders of Switzerland, the local food and especially the food fro...
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
2005Feb15_1
So I gave up waiting for the Benq P50 or the Motorala Mpx . They are great phones, but they have one drawback: you can't buy them in th...
Saturday, February 5, 2005
Should you switch?
A couple of weeks ago, two friends of mine came over to visit from the Netherlands. It was great of course, but one of the things we ended...
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