New Phaistos

Counting the invisible Let's play a little game: how many electronic chips do you have in your home? Give it some thought. Many people will answer something between 5-10: one for the TV, one for the remote, one for a computer, and 3-4 for the phones and tablets of the people in the household. But there is much more technology hidden in plain sight. In fact, it's so interwoven to everyday life that we hardly even consider the chips within. Here are (some) examples: air-conditioning, smart home systems, kitchen equipment, smartwatches, audio systems, garage door controls, video game consoles, a camera (if you still have one), a router, electric toothbrush and/or shaver, coffee machine,... The list seems endless and all of this, nearly magical, technology enables our modern way of life. For the fans of statistics, the average European household has now more than 20 connected devices - so the total number of electronic chips is probably higher. Good 'ol Moore had a big idea Mak...

The problem with "human nature" statements "All people are inherently good/selfish/bad..." - a phrase that we have all heard, with multiple variations, many times in our life. While it might be comforting to be able to so easily generalize the world, such statements are rarely true by themselves. Believing in them however is costly; it makes change hard and can make us miss huge opportunities (think of how many "Nobody would pay for that" resulted in companies skipping on big profits). Let's discus this and find out why it is very difficult to say any factual statement about the whole population. Our environment shapes what we do The answer partly lies in our environment. People are not perfect, rational, thinking machines. We instead live in the real world and we interact with it with all of our 5 senses. Think for example, about food - rarely do we decide on how much we like a plate based on its nutritional values or even how much our taste buds get ...

Story time Many things happen behind the scenes for a blog post to happen online. Most of it is boring activities like note taking, writing and researching. Recently however, I had the pleasure to host the writing of a friend . So my friend really wanted to include a story he was passionate about. But we faced a problem when, during the review phase, he couldn't find any sources that backed the story up. Yet, he clearly remembered hearing the story. We ended up removing that part from the blog. But this interaction also got me to reflect on how memory works and how technology influences our memory and our culture.  From spoken stories to written records What happened to my friend is pretty normal. Humans have lived in oral cultures for most of our history. In such cultures, stories are co-created rather than fixed. Each telling is unique; something is always added or lost, depending on the moment. Great epics, like Homer’s poems or the Norse sagas, reached us only after many adapta...

The super power of modelling In this time of change, I have been part of many discussions where big, complex problems are discussed. Our culture prides itself on information and intellect: can't we put that scientific way of working to use to solve our problems? Well, yes and no! But what we certainly can do, is harness the super-power of engineering to understand problems better and develop actual insight.  What super-power I am referring to? It's what engineers always do when they encounter complex problems: create a model that represents all potential interactions of a system. The bay rights use case Let's try demystifying the idea of "a model". I often find that the best way to understand a concept is through an example. The problem described in the previous post is a great fit. In blog #67 a real life problem of many southern European resorts was described: rich yacht owners are visiting en masse, enjoying the landscapes and the tourist services offered to ...