It doesn't always have to be an app.

A young designer from Eindhoven has created these beautiful toys to be used in hospitals to explain procedures to children. His toys contain the 4 most commonly used pieces of medical equipment: X-ray, CT-scan, ECG and an echocardiograph. Each machine has light and sound so the kids get a pretty good idea of what is going to happen to them. Now all he needs is a business angel to finance him. (copyright Hikaru Imamura, Fast Company)

Avinash Kaushik, the usability guru, tweets about WTPh, What the Phonics, street installations in Kopenhagen, that are attached to streetsigns to help people pronounce the streetnames.

I understand why he would find that a great idea: for foreigners all streetnames in most European cities are unpronouncable (or how pronouce Jan Van Rijswijcklaan (Antwerp), Chemin de la voierie des trèfles (Paris), Prilaz Dure Dezelica (Zagreb and I don't have special characters to make it more unreadable) or Haarlemmersdijk (amsterdam)).

So yes, it's a great idea but there's only one drawback: you have to have found the street first before you can learn how to pronounce it's name. Which doesn't solve the problem of having to look for that streetname you can't pronounce in the first place.

WTPh? - What the Phonics from Andrew Spitz on Vimeo.

The Web fought Nature and ...Nature won

Most people find it scary but I find it oddly comforting: Nature ran into the Web twice in two days and won convincingly each time. 


First there was this devastating weather in the US. They didn't call them wild storms for nothing: they left sweltering heat and massive power outages in their wake. Not only were millions of people affected, one of the casualties has been the Internet. Power interruptions at the big data center operated by Amazon.com in Virginia crashed other popular websites that rent out Amazon's computers. No Instagram, no Pinterest, no ..
how many lawyers would be pouring over SLA's and contracts right now? The Cloud being blown away by clouds: there is justice in that.


And then Nature pulled another one.

On July 1st a leap second was added to adjust global world time as close as possible to the solar time or the Coordinated Universal Time. Sensitive computer systems that run on milliseconds don't like leap seconds at all. Google was prepared but others weren't: they're not as technology geek as Google I suppose. LinkedIn, Foursquare, Stumble Upon, Gawker, ... they all went down. Mozilla 'choked on the leap second': not tech-savvy enough? 


Or, to paraphrase Forbes Business: locusts are next :-)

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.