Chinese Supercomputer Embarrasses U.S. Supercomputer; U.S. Supercomputer Gently Weeps and Vows to "Go SkyNET"

Chinese Supercomputer Tianhe-1A Bumps U.S. Out of the Lead - NYTimes.com

Flemish Is the New Freedom

's-Gravenhage (The Hague), Nederland - 
Popular fast food throughout western Europe, "french" fries are served in paper cones with healthy dollop of mayo or just about any other sauce you can think of. These street stalls are open late and provide fortification for uninhibited partying. It is important to note here in The Netherlands, when the menu says "Vlaamse Frites" or "Flemish Fries" it usually means these are no ordinary fries. Vlaamse connotes they were made from cut potatoes, as opposed to reconstituted potato pulp (and heaven knows what else) found in Donor Kebab and other fast food venues. They are usually more expensive but significantly tastier.

A ferocious Lynx (possibly high) destroys some "Vlaamse Frites"

Being on a single income, Maggie and I don't have the discretionary money for such luxuries. Instead, we decided to ring-in mussels (rhymes with Brussels) season by making our own Vlaamse Frites at home. Of course, we turned to Mark Bittman for the recipe and had a delicious, decadent meal. I highly recommend you try this "slow cook french fry recipe". Just bring your Visa card to the grocery store because you'll feel like you need a 55 gallon drum's equivalent of olive oil. The preparation is not messy or smelly at all. Aside from moving the vat of oil around, no trouble to clean up. You can even reuse the oil because of the low temperature you cook the fries. The downside, that Bittman notes, is you cannot make vast quantities (unless you have a giant paella pan). I tend to view this as an upside since we destroyed the batch in one sitting. We somewhat resembled the scary flemish fry lynx pictured.

Booking Hotels in Private Homes

Of course, I have been crashing on friends' couches (and overstaying my welcome) for most of my adulthood. So when I heard that there was a formalized way to achieve this, I thought our travels to The Hague would be the perfect time to try out some of these new ways to lodge and to connect with people. We used AirBnB.com, found a great place, paid half as much as we would have with an equivalent hotel. Best of all, we got to meet a great Dutchman.

The frugal traveler had talked about using couchsurfer, but that did not seem like an option for Maggie and I, unless the couch was a sleeper or sectional (she takes an awful amount of space for being so small!). Instead, we found a place through airbnb.com. Besides being half the price of a three star hotel (priced in dollars to boot), the arrangement included a delicious dutch breakfast (cheese, muselix, yogurt, etc.)  every morning.The guest room was in a beautiful old house with a "garret" on the third floor (American 4th floor). The room had a nice view of the tip-top of the Peace Palace (http://goo.gl/Wz0m) and was near the downtown area where we were looking for an apartment. Our host even provided the use of his house phone for making calls to real-estate agents. Given we did not want to use our mobiles (calls on European mobiles pay on outbound but not inbound), that was a huge money saver as well. The owner even provided some insights into the forming of the Dutch government, advice on bike-buying, and permitted the use of his well-equipped kitchen.

The downside of this place was that, while we had a private bath, the toilette (separate from most *bath*  rooms in Holland) was on the floor below. Going up and down a steep, Dutch staircases in the middle of the night is a perilous trek. The other problem is that while our host was great, we did not exactly feel as if we had the privacy/anonymity you would have in a hotel. Purely in our heads of course.

I would definitely try it again and would even consider placing a spare room of mine on there as a way to open my own home and make a little extra bread. Friends can breathe a sigh of relief that I will be taking advantage of their hospitality a little less often.

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

Without fail, I encounter things when I travel that I cannot understand why they have not made it state-side and vice versa. Of course, this is an age old phenomenon. It's probably why Marco Polo traveled back to the West because the things he found in the far-East like spaghetti, paper, and feng shui. Mark Twain wrote about the efficiencies of German stoves and their failure to diffuse. What with the internets and iPhones today, there is absolutely no logic to it. I am going to compile a list, and then get rich on arbitraging a few of the items when I head home:

Needed There (The United States)

Towel warmers / heaters - New England homes commonly have water boilers but I cannot think of a time when I saw towel warmers connected to one of them

Beer glasses of different sizes - Here it is Fleisja and Glaasja (frankly, ordering a beer is still a bit confusing) at the bar. Au contraire! These small glasses are not just for the ladies! Sometimes I can only drink five and a third pints of beer and that's when the economy of the smaller glass comes in handy.

Bike lanes with bike signals - In most places I have seen these in the U.S. they are inconvenient, often double-parked, going one way, next to car parking, etc.. In the Netherlands and Germany they are often separated from the road and well-signed. I read that bikes carry forty percent of the people traffic in dutch cities. I feel like I am in first grade because I cannot wait to get a bike.

Pay bathrooms - I will gladly pay to have clean, public bathrooms

Convection ovens - Seemingly standard here judging by the apartments we saw

Tilt Windows - Most buildings have these nifty, double-glaze windows that open two ways (1) like a door (2) tilting in to form a "V" with the frame

Needed Here (The Netherlands)

Tap water - Would it be so much trouble to have a glass of water with my 15 euro cheese burger in a restaurant? And... yes. I know. I'll risk sterility...

Free museums and buildings - I admit it. I am spoiled after having lived in DC where virtually all the great museums and public buildings are free to tour (except for the Newseum). We went on a one hour dutch-only tour (sorry. no English tours available) of the Binenhof for 6 euros each (approximately 30 USD at current exchange rates ;^) ). That is not the best value in the world.

Free public libraries - There is an annual subscription and a price for just about everything including new books, audiobooks, reserved items, and even VHS cassettes (really?!). Free health care though.

Target - Actually, there is a store called Hema that is close to Target. Unfortunately it is 1/3 cafeteria. I think Target beats Carre Four and Tesco too.

Send me yours. If I take it to market, you can ride on my yacht when I make my fortune

Ons nieuwe huis!

The people have spoken, all eight of you (including me). We are renting the place on the canal and we moved in already. The street is called Veenkade and we are already settling in after an obligatory run to IKEA (with the USD/EUD exchange rate swiftly moving to 1.4 dollars per euro, not such a bargain).

Veenkade as one word does not appear to mean anything but if you look up "veen" and "kade" separately in Google Translate, it compounds as "peat-wharf", which seems appropriate. Although, I don't see any peat and you cannot really call it a wharf if there is only a boat with a pull-start outboard motor moored.

Most canals and streets seem to have the same name here, but this one does not. Also, the streets have different names on either side of the canal. The nearest intersection has a congested and weird traffic pattern. I never know who I am supposed to yield to: tram, bike, car, boat, etc. I am sure it will somehow lead to my early demise. Also, there are two coffee shops and a really nice vegetarian cafe that seems ripped right out of Portland, OR.

Our place is on the edge of the city center (aka centrum), on the cool tram line, and next to the palace gardens (Paleistein) and what everyone refers to as the "royal stables." Although heavily guarded, I have not heard any neighing nor seen any Phaetons coming or going. I'll be sure to note any royal sightings.

Babel Redux

Google Translate is another one of these developments that Google seems to roll-out, for free no less, and no one seems to blink an eye. To me, it is further proof of not being evil. It makes Yahoo babelfish look like some sort of throwback translation algorithm in the eighties. The translations seem very accurate, at least the English translations of the Dutch things I have looked are coherent and require little additional decoding and it is tightly integrated with Chrome.

I had been using this a little since Google introduced it, usually for work assignments to research competitors or learn information posted by partners for marketing purposes. Now that I am living in Holland, it has become critical daily tool. Even one of those things that you wonder how you could live without it.

The translation box "instantly" translates (duh!) the words as you type them and is Google-ized, meaning it is clutter-free. It also will try to auto-detect the language you are typing (very cool). There is a robotic pronunciation which I don't find very helpful, but usually entertaining. You can also copy and paste multiple lines and it will keep it nicely separated (babelfish made it hard to do this before)

Not only does Translate provide a copy and paste box web-page, but in Chrome, it automatically translates pages as you surf them. Once it sees you are translating a lot of pages into a certain language (e.g. Dutch), it automatically starts translating without even asking you. Of course, you can turn it off. Equally helpful is the mouse-overs/tooltips/hovers contain the original text, so that you can see what words it is translating, in case there is confusion or you want to learn the word in the original language.

The browser translation is not perfect by any means. For example, when I am looking at sites in Dutch, like marktplaats.nl (local equivalent of craigslist), it will not translate all of the frames or the picklists, yet. Still, it is a leap above what we had before, and will help homogenize the world, for better or worse.

A View of Delft

Delft, The Netherlands

We took the day off from the hustle and bustle of apartment searching and Den Haag chores and did some sight seeing in Delft. Delft is approximately 30 minutes from The Hague by tram, 20 minutes by intercity train. It is a very cute town, well worth visiting. Some of the guidebooks recommend staying there and visiting The Hague by day. I can certainly see that.

Delft, besides being the namesake of a famous, impressionistic Johannes Vermeer painting, is Vermeer's birthplace and deathplace. There is a museum dedicated to him (without any of his approx. 33 attributed paintings) and a few "Vermeer painted here" markers clustered in the Catholic part of town. Besides some really impressive churches/cathedrals that have all sorts of the House of Orange buried in them, there are also a number of lively, open air markets.

I posted some of the pictures in Picasa. The day was much sunnier that the pictures evoke. You'll see some pictures of the square and the statue of Hugo de Groot (aka Hugo the great). He is the godfather of international law. That was news to me but it seems appropriate that it is here in The Netherlands, where there is so much international lawyering.

I'll try to post some more pictures once we get the desktop up and running.

Parental Misunderestimation

I really like these articles about how our cognitive brain fails to estimate risk. Here is a good piece in the NYTimes that talks about how parents underestimate and overestimate all at the same time.

Apartment Hunting in Holland

The Hague, The Netherlands

We have arrived in The Hague. This will be our fourth day of apartment hunting and hopefully our last. Having never really spent that much time in Holland, I forgot how steep the stairs are in most homes. I think it is a space saving / space generating measure to allow Dutch to build higher and tighter. We have been climbing and climbing all week. Some of the rooms we climbed into were literally ladders like the one you have on your attic that fold down from a hatch. The only guidance given by the agent showing us the apartment with the hatch and ladder was "watch your step." Ha!

We have seen a lot of apartments and just as with any house hunting, you never find the perfect mix of price and size. The plan is to make a final decision today. It is a fun equation because we are balancing a furnished apartment, city center location, gas/electric inclusion, and price. Use the poll to let us know which one you think we should take.