The first commercial computer sold in the United States was the UNIVAC in 1951. Supplied with 125 kilowatt, it could do 1,905 operations per second, which translated into 0.015 operations per watt-second. That last metric wasn’t very important for the UNIVAC, since power wasn’t a bottleneck as much as performance or weight was. With 5,000 […]
There’s a sport that’s more popular than football, that has more participants than basketball, and that can be more beneficial than going to the gym. It doesn’t feature in the Olympics, and it doesn’t need medals. Lotto, the leading Italian company in footwear and clothing for sports and leisure, believes it’s time to embrace the […]
Yesterday, plenty of brands jumped onto the International Women’s Day bandwagon, and among the worst I’ve seen are McDonald’s, which turned it’s golden arches upside down, and BrewDog, which released a pink label for their beer. If only equality was that easy. While these are extremely superficial attempts to grab some retweets and likes, they […]
Climbing the pyramid: Advertising in a richer world
Apart from a few (looking at you, CO2-levels), all statistic show an insane progress in the world. Extreme poverty fell from 37% in 1990 and is well under 10% now; illiteracy fell from 65% in 1950 to just 15% now; and average life expectancy upon birth went up from 31 years in 1900 to 71.5 […]
Three simple suggestions to make Dutch train travel even better
Dutch train travel is fantastic. It’s affordable, pretty much always on time (despite what the naysayers say), and it has nearly four hundred stations in our tiny country. Here are just three simple suggestions that can make it even better. 1) Make the screens of entrance gates flicker when you swipe your card During rush hour, […]
Nowadays every generic brand video wants to remind us that ‘we live in times of change’, and startups love to tell us about Moore’s law and exponential growth, and how the smartphones we have now are a million times more powerful than NASA’s computers with which it landed Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969, […]
Countries need collective stories to shape their identity. ‘De stilte en de storm’ tells about the history of the Dutch Remembrance Day (4th of May) and Liberation Day (5th of May). We take for granted how the fourth of May remembers war victims of all kinds, and that the fifth of May celebrates the freedom […]
It’s nice to inherit certain things from someone, but it’s not nice to inherit everything. Often, those left behind are left in a mess, with thousands of things to sort, pass on, sell or dump. It begs everyone to take responsibility for his or her own death. If you don’t have the time or will […]
For Virtual Racing School, I wrote over fifty articles and interviews, with successful simracers and professional racing drivers. Together with the other staff, we started an online knowledge database labelled ‘the academy‘. I helped VRS to built its online presence and promoting its telemetry and collaboration software for iRacing. In two years, VRS grew to […]
Rob Schmitz writes about the residents of Changle Road and personifies modern day Shanghai (and to an extend, China) through these different generations and backgrounds. The focus on a single street is clever, and the stories are compelling. Street of Eternal Happiness is also both a good history lesson as well as a context-provider of […]
This book combines the stories of six Chinese, born across China in between 1985 to 1990, and follows them in their lives until 2015. At times, Ash’s writing is incredibly sharp, but his style alternates as if the blend of six into one isn’t a seamless one. The book tells through inner personas, and provides context […]
