I don't want pizza

When reading about the way Google looks at the world and how it will look in 20 years (as if you could possibly predict that) I get this creepy feeling (again ...). 

Marissa Mayer explains in a recent interview: " It may not be that you search for pizza, but we know you tend to like pizza places, or you tend to like more casual, loungey bars, so we can suggest things." Now why would I be hàppy with that? If I tend to like pizza places and feel like going to a Spanish restaurant for a change, why would I appreciate this meddling in my life and the choices I want to make?


Mayer takes it one step further: "On the social front, can we suggest someone that we think that you should know because you have so much in common that we think you'd like each other?" Nightmare!


I know, I'm being naive: I never liked the 'others who bought this also bought' advice from Amazon. It's not because I like reading J. Eugenides that I absolutely want to read more of the same. I never click on 'most read' or 'most liked' articles on website. If everybody keeps clicking on most read links they remain most read. 


What I do like is to surf the Web. Isn't that what it was designed for? To explore? To be surprised? To learn new stuff? To travel in cyberspace? To be informed, annoyed, shocked, saddened, happy, ... or amused instead of being told what to do, where to go and what to see? 


Former CEO Schmidt once told the Wall Street Journal "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next," and got a lot of flak for that. He also told CNBC in december 2009: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place". 


Wake up, Europe, but don't over-act(a).


(And by the way: they are looking into self-driving cars. I wouldn't want to be in one when it starts driving to a destination I didn't pick :-) )

Lieber Schatz! That's how Albert Einstein wrote to his cousin, the woman he was divorcing his wife for in 1914. ("Es ist für einen ehrlichen Menschen nicht möglich, eine Frau zu lieben und mit einer andern verheiratet zu sein." Collected Papers of Einstein, Princeton University Press, 1998)

To be a student now. Still a bit flabbergasted by the Van Eyck initiative and here's the next one, lovingly offered by the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University (AEA) and the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech (EPP): the Einstein Project. You will not only find all Einstein's writings (scientific ànd other handwritten stuff like diaries, letters and the like) but also photo's, audio etc. We're talking more than 80.000 items from the Albert Einstein Archives being uploaded for consultation on a website. True, they have just started two days ago with 2000 items but the work will continue all through this year. Nothing else to do but check once in a while, right? I wouldn't mind reading a lovenote by Mr. E=mc2 or a shopping list instead of a dissertation I'm not going to understand anyway. Or are we stripping dear Albert from his godlike status if we do? I don't think so.

you can't get closer to Van Eyck than this

Last weekend De Standaard wrote about an incredible, 100 billion pixel, project sponsored by The Getty Foundation. Amazing stuff and nobody, as far as I know, bothered picking it up. Check out http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/#home and be blown off your feet by the rendering of the famous Ghent Altarpiece now available online.

The project itself consisted of 3 elements: urgent renovation,an assessment of the state this masterpiece is in today and an exercise in technical documentation. The result is a truly amazing website, offering the Ghent Altarpiece in all its detail. You get macrophotograpy, infrared macrophotography, infrared reflectograpy and x-radiography views. No stuff for simple devices: loading images can take quite some time but boy, is it worth it! The site also contains reports on the restauration work, statistics, information on dendrochronology, analysis, ... But it's the images that are magic. Impressive!

Remembrance day

On February 15, two years ago, we lost a colleague in a train crash. I wrote about it then and I'm remembering Sebastien now, being shocked at how much time has past and how quickly it did. Sebastien is never very far away: his name still pops up regularly in meetings or on work events ...

Tomorrow morning a small ceremony will be held at the location of the accident in Buizingen. I'm not attending but my thoughts are with my colleagues who are and of course with Sebastien's family.

Weird Google Stuff

Interesting article on Huffington yesterday: Google Earth's 'Atlantis' has disappeared after an upgrade. Google has been quality checking their 3D Ocean tool and now claims to have 15% of the ocean floor visible at a resolution of 1 km. Before the upgrade, images existed that were rumored to be images of the long lost city of Atlantis. 


Fake Atlantis isn't the only strange image recorded on Google earth; in the same article Huffington refers to 36 different weird ones. Google Maps finds some pretty weird things too. 


More importantly Google Earth itself is up for an extensive upgrade later this year which is said to result in twice the accuracy it has today.


Still, removing these images: they do have a censorship reflex, don't they?