I saw this video with Bruce Sterling a couple of week ago, and something really stuck: mobile is the device that’s flattening the world. Poor people have mobiles, or they figure out ingenious ways to timeshare a mobile. For the first time in history, here’s a technology that’s truely leveling the field. The growth of [...]

Dat het Christendom springlevend is kan gelamenteerd worden. Dat het Vaticaan nog steeds gedoogd wordt, is een raadsel. Het zou spijtig zijn voor het prachtige werk van Michelangelo en Bernini, maar een laagje graffiti is niet voldoende, vrees ik. In elk geval, onze jongens in het grote heiligdom blijven er tegenaan gaan, als geitenwollensokkendragers in [...]

Tijdens de laatste verkiezingen had Groen! een interessante slogan. I herinner me ze niet meer verbatim, maar het kwam erop neer dat een vegetariër met een Hummer groener is dan een vleeseter met een Prius. You better believe it! Uit onderzoek blijkt dat de productie van 1 kilo vlees evenveel C02 in de lucht stoot [...]

Voelen mensen zich nu het meest comfortabel in een hiërarchie? Willen we stiekem allemaal behoren tot een rangorde? Gaat politiek werkelijk, zoals Carmiggelt beweerde in die leuke commercial voor De Standaard, om het op de hoogste stok zitten, om daarna om de anderen hun kop te kunnen kakken?
Naarmate staten egalitairder werden, werden ze zwakker, of [...]

Since the sight of Paris Hilton makes me want to throw up, I tend to avoid her. Good to see that there are people thinking about her (as a phenomenon), and making valid points along the way. This is the sort of insight (Hilton’s a ‘platform’) that my wife immediately catches onto as well. It’s [...]

I’m a sucker for research results that result in the sort of statistics that proof nothing, but for the general outcome that support your own doctrines. Last time they told me I was handsome, this time it’s proven that I’m funny:
He said University of California research had suggested that, because younger children had not had [...]

I’ve have a (short) list of (consumer electronics) brands that I would never buy. Somehow these companies are always trying to box people, and feed them their tie-ins. Sony is first on that list. Quite often I like the design, but I’ll never buy anything Sony. Microsoft, unsurprisingly. I’ve been using their crappy stuff for [...]

Naïviteit, ingegeven door jeugdig idealisme, kan best vertederend zijn. Maar iemand zei ooit: naïviteit sluit altijd in een gebrek aan kritiek en aan bewuste doordenking. Platte domheid, zeg maar, als gevolg van gebrekkige opvoeding en het aangeboren impetus ontbrekend om niet je hele leven te gaan navelstaren. Onderstaande is een parel:
Misschien benik een dromer maar [...]

With the food industry fast becoming the new supervillain, in a world where we hold corporations responsible for our unhealthy lifestyles, you’d think McDonalds would be very careful serving up those large chunks of meat. Not so! Thanks to this beatiful provocation of a burger: the Fifa World Cup Burger! Great idea: slowly killing soccer [...]

I don’t like Lost. Rafe has the same problem:
I have been watching Lost obsessively since the series premiered, and one of my great worries has been that there will never be a satisfying conclusion. That’s what happened with the X-Files — the creators of the show didn’t know how long it would last, so they [...]

The last thing we need is more confidence. Everything written, everything read, is nothing less than a hypothesis, a conjecture. Truth has eluded us with the persistence of a hermit, and every Being has proved nothing but it’s own antipole. The ever populist derision of ideology is a mere plume from the blackhole of the [...]

It’s stories like this that get me going in the morning: Testing Drugs on India’s Poor. Whenever I read something unnerving about the pharmaceutical industry, the same names keep coming up: Pfizer, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline. Why are these companies trying so hard to look like the world’s worst scumbags?

I wonder if the biggest news of the day will get picked up by the mainstream press. One by one, South American countries are shedding the yoke. This is Corporate America’s worst nightmare.

On a related note, Microsoft is hell-bent on bringing Big Brother into your home. The problem with a centralized monitoring system, like the 1984 book has, is that it is logistically nearly impossible to execute and maintain. Historically, the best systems for monitoring citizens, as demonstrated by the SS and Stasi, were decentralized. It was [...]

Bill Gates gives a small percentage of his vast fortune to Africa. The rest is invested in Big Pharma, who is slowly killing Africa by denying it the rights to produce cheap medicine. Billy himself is doing his share by fighting poor countries to distribute open source software to the poor, on the grounds that [...]

According to a BBC article, I’m smack in the middle of one of Europe’s pollution hotspots. Where I live, the air contains large quantities of nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, sulphur dioxide, small particles, as well as tropospheric ozone. That doesn’t sound too healthy. It certainly doesn’t sound like a place where I’d like my children to [...]

Conspiracy nuts, gather around: TiVo is planning to put an RFID-Aware PVR in your living-room.
In the not-so-distant future, RFID tags will be everywhere. They’re steadfastly replacing barcodes, they are tiny enough not to be noticed, they are leaking into your house. They will be in your clothes, in your food-packaging, in your furniture.
Now combine this [...]

Study turns pot wisdom on head. From the article:
Most “drugs of abuse” such as alcohol, heroin, cocaine and nicotine suppress growth of new brain cells. However, researchers found that cannabinoids promoted generation of new neurons in rats’ hippocampuses. Hippocampuses are the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory, and the study held true [...]

Bush ‘caught short’ at UN summit
GWB simply can’t help it, can he?

Research in Psychology is bullshit as it is, without researchers adding their crock opinion. Some psychiatrist from New York has decided that depression among teenagers is the result, not the cause, of their experimenting with sex and drugs/alcohol. (I don’t have a link, I read this in the paper.) Apparently, teetotalers run the greatest risk [...]