Today I wanted to talk about the superpower of building your own tools. Animals who have been using tools since way when of course have always had this power. …

In my last post I lamented the fact that it sometimes seems that fewer tech companies have a clever bit and that it seems it is more and more just about applying some known tricks to existing industries while driving software’s mission to eat the world forward. And that maybe…

My last day at Sidewalk Labs, the company where I worked on making cities better for the last four years, was December 31st 2021. I’m going to do something new. It’s cool and exciting and I’ll write about it some other time. Today I want to talk about the clever…

When I was at Google Zurich for a while I was part of the crew that introduced new hires. As part of that we’d always ask them what their hobbies were. The most common reply was “photography, hiking and travel”. So it’s no wonder that people in tech often come…

Something like 15 years ago I put together some geographical data I found online containing European elevation and created a GIF out of it showing how Europe would be impacted at various amounts of sea level rise. …

Rock stars die young. This used to be common knowledge. Of course with every year that the Rolling Stones refuse to retire and every concert where Mick keeps jumping this seems less true — the Stones tour for 2020 is postponed, but only because of Covid. …

The Cat Sìth is a fairy creature from Celtic mythology, said to resemble a large black cat with a white spot on its chest. During Samhain, the Gaelic festival that the Catholic church converted into Halloween, it roams the lands and if you leave a saucer of milk out, your…

On April 11, 2020 John Conway died of Covid. Conway made contributions to many branches of mathematics, but is most famous for his invention The Game of Life. Reading about The Game of Life in the Dutch popular scientific magazine “KIJK” made a big impact on me and was one…

A consensus arises from my Facebook stream that 2016 was one of the worst years ever. This consensus is the result of the same sort of echo-chambering that is blamed for bringing us Trump and Brexit. It therefore only seems reasonably to fight this echo-chambering with facts. …