Sander's Reflexions

Social spheres and social media

2011-01-30T12:55:00.003+01:00

(Yes, I'm back after a 3 years retreat)

Recently I created a Facebook account and was faced with some of the complexity of live, or rather the simplicity of social media. I wonder if other people here recognize my 'problem' and how they handle it.

I would say that my life has many dimensions. I'm a philosopher with philosophical friends. I'm a dancer with friends from zouk and salsa. I'm daddy of a wonderful daughter and thus also one of the parents at school. I've got my profession giving me colleagues and professional relations. I'm a neighbor active in the neighborhood. I'm a sailor. I'm a son and a brother. I'm living in several completely different spheres. I'm glad to have multiple spheres to choose from. I wouldn't like to live in only 1 sphere. And then there is only 1 Facebook account!

Some things you like to share with one group of people, other things with other people. I don't think my philosophical friends are interested in my party pictures. And my dancing friends might not be interested in my philosophical reflexions. (http://sandersreflexions.blogspot.com/2005/04/reflexion.html)

What I'm really missing is a way to create views or spheres in the social media. Especially, because some spheres are more active than others. I want to be able to choose one of the spheres and see the updates of those friends and share things with them and only them.

So, friends out here in the virtual world. How are you handling this?

An Inconvenient Truth

2008-01-20T21:18:00.000+01:00

After my previous posting on energy I searched for some more figures on energy consumption. I wanted to get a rough idea of the energy consumption of families (in The Netherlands). So I looked for the figures for energy consumption per year of gas, electricity and petrol.

An average car drives 13000 km/year. With an efficiency of 15 km/l the total usage of petrol is 866 l/year. The energy (more correct heating value) of one liter of petrol is 35 MJ, which is equal to 9.7 kWh/l. The average energy consumption of a car is thus 8400 kWh/year.

An average Dutch family uses 1600 m3 natural gas a year. The heating value of Dutch natural gas is 32 MJ/m3, which is equal to 8.9 kWh/m3. The average energy consumption on gas is thus 14200 kWh/year.

An average Dutch family uses 3300 kWh/year electricity. However, this is the net usage. Power plants have an efficiency of nearly 60%. The gross usage is thus 5500 kWh/year.

The total power consumption of those three resources is 28100 kWh/year, with a distribution of 30% petrol, 50 % gas and 20% electricity.

What do we save if we replace a 60 W electrical bulbs by an energy saving 10 W CFL? The saving is 50 W * 3 hours/day * 365 days = 55 kWh/year net, or 92 kWh/year gross. This is only 0.3% of the total energy consumption of a family! I think we're often not focusing on the right topics for energy saving.

Note, that I assume there is only 1 car per family. The current figure is already somewhere between 1.0 and 1.1 car per family. I also do not take care of the energy loss due to transport and refineries.

References:
http://www.vrom.nl/Pagina.html?id=9288
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heating_value
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardgas

Polar bears or Autism

2008-01-08T22:42:00.000+01:00

Have you ever wondered why polar bears in the zoo pace up and down? In Dutch we even use the expression ‘ijsberen’ for pacing up and down. Why do they do that? It’s just because they have to walk. It’s not a choice. It’s their default behavior. Just like many people have to talk, even when there is nothing to say.

I just read a wonderful book, ‘The curious incident of the dog in the night-time’. It’s very well written and read it cover to cover without interruption. It’s about a boy who seems to have some form of autism. It’s written from his perspective. It shows a world where emotion is mostly limited to fear, except for the happiness created by mathematics. It’s a world that has very strict logical rules. However, most rules don’t make sense to ordinary people.

I intentionally wrote ‘seems to have some form of autism’, because nowhere in the story the word autism is used. The behavior of the boy looks like autism, but his thoughts are not. His thoughts are too rational, too conscious. E.g. in the book there is a passage

because there were too many and my brain wasn't working properly and this frightened me so I closed my eyes again and slowly counted to 50 but without doing the cubes.

Eric Chen has rewritten this passage to a more realistic autistic reaction

There are too many lines striking me. I tried to cover my eyes and scream so that these lines would go away, but they won't.
I screamed more.
The world became flashes and dots of light and lines. That mades me sink into darkness and sleep.
[Quote from Autism Myths]

People, even autistics, do not think ‘my brain wasn’t working properly’. They just start doing something ‘strange’.

The film Amadeus gives an example of such uncontrolled behavior. Mozart’s mother in law is giving him a lecture. Her fulminating words fade out and the Zauberflote fades in. The creation of the music just seems to happen to him. (I’m not saying Mozart is autistic. A guy that flirts with all the girls can’t be autistic.)
I believe that’s what happens with autistics too. They lose control and start doing something they can do well. It’s not their intention to do so. They don’t decide to do so to relax. It just happens.

Polar bears just have to walk. Doing mathematics is the default behavior of some people. I have to admit. I sometimes have the strange habit to check (large) numbers on divisibility by 9. I see a number and just want to know whether it can be divided by 9. No, I’m not really autistic. I failed the test, low AQ. I’m using a trick for the division by 9. An autistic would just know, without doing any computations.

For those interested in autism I suggest to visit the site of Eric Chen. He gives an alternative description of the Theory of Mind for autistics.

Finally, I would like to note that there is a strange mathematical mistake in The Curious Incident. In one of the mathematical pieces it says that it is not very exceptional to have 5698 times head when throwing coins. If everybody on the world would be throwing coins there will be a million people with 5698 times head. Well, that’s a big mistake! The chance to throw 5698 times head is 1 out of 2^5698 = 1.9 * 10^1715. Yes, a number with 1715 zero’s There are only 10^80 atoms in the universe! and it’s barely 4.3 * 10^17 seconds old! So, a sequence of 5698 heads is a good approximation of impossible.

Melting Ice

2007-12-30T20:40:00.000+01:00

Several years the environment was not an issue. Suddenly, this year it returned to the headlines, mainly due to the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. So I thought, let me contribute a tiny bit to the discussion. I wrote a letter to the Dutch newspaper Trouw and yes, it got published. What’s the point? A 5 km large open air ice skating rink, Flevonice, has been opened. It uses coolers with a total capacity of 9.6 megawatt, which is equivalent to the reduction that can be obtained by replacing 1 million ordinary light bulbs by compact fluorescent lamps (CFL).

OK, the calculation in my letter is a bit biased. Of course the coolers are also not working at full capacity. They needed this capacity for initial ice creation at 10 °C. After startup the machines are probably running at 10 to 20 % of their capacity. But I had to make a statement. I could also have stated that it is equivalent to the capacity of 200 cars (50 kW), but that wouldn’t make a statement. Or, I could have said it is equivalent to 5 wind turbines (2 MW), but that would not impress at all, since there are about 500 wind mills in that province.

Let’s fiddle a bit more with those figures. The cars use maybe only 10 to 20% of their capacity when they are cruising. But also the average power of a wind turbine is 10% of its capacity. And light at home is also switched on for about 10% of the time. So let’s compare these capacities. One running car is thus equivalent with the saving 1000 CFL’s. And 40 cars are equivalent one wind turbine. Why is everybody talking about wind turbines and CFL’s? There are millions of cars out there and a saving of a few percent on the energy consumed by cars will have more effect than can be obtained with CFL and wind turbines.

Want some more interesting figures? An average boiler used for the heating of a house has a capacity of 25 kW, a small car. And, shame on me, I have still 6m2 of single glazing in my living. These are hung sash windows. Isolated glazing with two layers of glass does not fit in the frame. The heat transfer of non-isolated glazing is approximately 6W/m2K. When it’s near 0 °C outside this results in a heat transfer of 6 * 6 * 20 = 720 W. A figure that outnumbers any savings that can be made by CFL’s. Luckily I’ve recently found some thin isolated glazing, Van Ruysdael glass. I know what I’m going to do in 2008!

Instructions

2007-10-14T21:04:00.000+02:00

Last week my daughter’s school distributed a little procedure. It was quite simple and I’m sure it will work. But I realized that it will only work with humans. I mean, if these instructions are translated to a computer system they will probably fail at the first use of the procedure. And most people don’t understand why the computer system should fail. Well, I’m amazed these instructions don’t fail with human operators. I’ll explain this with the procedure I received from school.

This procedure is meant to inform all parents as soon as possible of an urgent event, e.g. when school is closed because all teachers have got the flu. The procedure is illustrated with the scheme on the left. The school calls parent A on top of the list. He (she) calls parent B, C and D. They call the next parents in the scheme and finally on the bottom of the scheme parent B, C and D are calling parent A. In case some parent cannot be reached the next parent on the list must be called and after a while a second call should be made to the parent that could not be reached.

This procedure sounds quite solid. Care has been taken of parents that cannot be reached and at the bottom the loop is closed when parent A gets called. I’m sure this will work with humans and nearly every parent will get the information and it will probably be known at school which parents could not be reached.

Now, imagine that the parents have smart phones and the instruction can be programmed into the phone. When a parent has received a message he/she presses a special button on the phone to repeat the message to the other parents. The scheme is put into the phone and we don’t need the printed scheme any more. The instructions are very simple, so it shouldn’t be too hard to translate it to a piece of software. Well, there are many things that will go wrong with this automated system. Just some examples:

There is no instruction for 2 unreachable parents in a line. If parents E2 and E3 cannot be reached, and parent E2 also not on the second attempt the instructions end. No attempt will be made to call parent E4. Parent B will wait indefinitely for a call of parent E4 (or E3). Parent A will also wait indefinitely for a call of parent B. The school will never be called.
The example above assumes that the parents B, C and D at the bottom will wait for both parents to call them before they will give their report to parent A. Likewise parent A will wait for three calls. This is not in the instruction! In another valid implementation B immediately calls A when he receives a call from F4. And parent A on his turn immediately calls school. This will result in 6 calls to school (if none of the lines is broken).
If E2 cannot be reached on the first attempt and E1 passes the message on to E3, but E2 can be reached on the second attempt, the instruction says he has to call E3. Then E3 gets the message twice. And the second time he will again pass the message to E4. There is nothing that says that a message should only be passed on once.
There is no explicit instruction for A to call E1 and F1 if B cannot be reached.
If parent A is not reachable, the school will probably call parents B, C and D directly. However, it is not in their instructions to call school at the end. They will try to call A twice and stop.
The instruction says nothing about informing other parents that someone could not be reached. Humans will likely do it and the names of parents that could not be reached will be known at the end, but it’s nowhere in the instruction. A computer system won’t do it.

A computer programmer who wants to make a solid implementation of the procedure will have to take all these (and more) problems into consideration. But, to get to a satisfying result he has to know the intended result of the procedure. How many parents must get the message? What is an acceptable loss? How long should parent A, B, C and D wait for all calls to return? Is it required to know which parents could not be reached in the first attempt? Should it be known if they didn’t get the message after two or three attempts? It could even happen that they have received the message, but that the information about it never gets back to school. (This is a fundamental problem. Two parties can never be sure that a communication was 100% successful in finite time. If P1 sends a message to P2 and P2 sends a confirmation to P1 and confirmation message gets lost. P1 doesn’t know whether P2 has received the message or not. And P2 will not know whether P1 has received the confirmation. P1 can send a confirmation of the confirmation, but that message might also get lost. Etcetera.)

When the programmer knows what the requirements of the procedure are he can work out the instructions that will meet the requirements (as long as the requirements are feasible). However, these instructions will be much longer than the 5 lines of the instructions for humans. They will contain details for every exception that might occur. If these instructions are given to ordinary people they will not work. Humans get confused by the details. They will be afraid to do something else, because they have got such a detailed instruction. They will stop following the instruction, and just say ‘I don’t know’.

One of the big differences between humans and computer systems is the way they handle instructions. Humans can very well cope with vague instructions. In general, humans perform excellent when instructions have very little detail. With computer systems it’s the opposite. The origin of this difference is that humans understand the intention of the instruction. They will act according to the intention and not exactly follow the instruction. The instruction is only a guideline. It’s different for a computer system. It doesn’t have any clue about the intention of an instruction. It just follows every letter of the instruction.

God in Culture

2007-09-15T23:41:00.000+02:00

I know Persia as a very religious country. I’m not just referring this age with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Persia has a long religious history. Zoroastrianism originated in Persia and was the dominant religion in the early history of the Persian Empire from the 5th century BCE till the 7th century CE. The Persian Empire reached from the Mediterranean to the borders of India. It included the area that is nowadays known as Iraq. This area was the origin of Manichaeism (Saint Augustine was a Manichaean before becoming a Christian) and Mandaeism. Christians and Jews have lived there (and still do). From the 7th century on the Islam was the dominant religion. So when I went to an exposition on 30 centuries of Persian art and culture I expected quite some objects with religious imprint.

This exhibition of Persian art and culture was in the Hermitage Amsterdam, a small branch of the famous Russian museum. I had a look at the 200 objects that were displayed. After the first round through the museum I thought something was missing, so I made a second round. I was not mistaken. There were only 2 objects which related to the religious history of Persia, two calligraphies of a text from the Koran. No other objects referred to religion. There were even a dozen objects from around the 12th century with animals on it. Something that would not have been done by Islamic artists.

So, either religion has not been that important in Persia after all, or.. our Russian friends with their communistic background have removed or disregarded all religious objects.. Are the communists still manipulating history in their aim to eliminate religion?

Prehistory

2007-09-11T22:13:00.000+02:00

Last month my daughter and I have visited Archeon. We had a look at the way people lived in the prehistoric age.

"Daddy, why are those people so poor?"
"They didn’t know how to make things."
"Why didn’t anybody tell them?"
"Nobody knew it. It was not yet invented."
"But God could tell them how to do it."
"Yes, that’s something to think about."

Bewitched

2007-09-11T22:04:00.000+02:00

I never knew that real magic existed, but last weeks I’ve been enchanted. Or do I have to say that I was bewitched. There were lots of other things I had to do, but I couldn’t free myself of the magic. I was trapped. Trapped in a book. But now, the book has been read. The spell is broken.

I had something like a symphony, those 7 books. Yes, I know a symphony generally has 4 parts. But there are several themes and at the end all themes come together is a big final, an adagio with some loud chords like the end of Beethoven’s symphonies.

Well, okay, it’s just a children’s book. Nevertheless, it was funny to read those 7 books in the last 3 months.

Emoticars

2007-06-27T22:08:00.001+02:00

The revelation of the face makes a demand. The face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon. Levinas teaches us that we are most human in the encounter with the Other. But what happens when we sit in a car? We are armored. We don't see the face of the other. The other doesn't see our face. We can't smile. We can't wink. We can't even give an angry look. We are not there. The other is not human anymore.

So, wouldn't life be much better if a car could express emotion? Imagine a car that senses our emotion and smiles, or winks, or frowns. It could swing a little on a happy song when we're happy. Or even better, it would even smile at us when we are sad to make us happy again.

Really with emoticars our life would be much better. A traffic jam would be less boring. It would be a social gathering with smiles and gestures. Less aggression on the roads. More relaxed people.

Rumpelstiltskin

2007-06-23T22:39:00.000+02:00

Once upon a time, when kings were still kings and dwarfs were dwarfs, when good and bad was obvious, then the fairy tales were simple. But alas, those times are gone. In our postmodern time things are less simple. Let’s take a simple fairy tale, Rumpelstiltskin. Let me give you a very short summary.

Long ago there was a miller who told the king that his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king wanted to marry her if she really could. Of course she couldn’t. But as usual in fairy tales the (un)expected creature, a dwarf, appears and turns the straw into gold. However, his price is her first born child. After her marriage to the king and after the birth of her child the dwarf returns. She can only save her child if she guesses his name. At the end she discovers his name is Rumpelstiltskin and they live happily ever after.

Times have changed. How can such a fairy tale be updated to version 2.0 or 2007? We don’t believe in dwarfs anymore. So, who is going to turn the straw into gold? What about this version?

The king enters a village and sees a pretty girl. He starts to flirt with her. A moment later he encounters a miller who lies that his daughter can spin gold out of straw. The king says he’s going to marry her if it’s true otherwise they will both go to prison. Then he discovers that the pretty girl is the miller’s daughter. He knows that the miller was lying. How’s he going to save her? He locks her up into his castle with a pile of straw. At night he disguises himself as a dreadful creature, goes to her room and tells he can turn the straw into gold if she gives him her first born child. [Gold enough! Who cares about another lie?] A nice reflection in the story: the creature wants to have straw instead of gold, because gold is cold and straw keeps you warm.
The girl marries the king and they get a child. The young mother however is very scared that the creature will return. And the king is upset, because she lied to him about the gold and did not tell about the creature. Then she’s tells the truth to her dad, the miller. The miller goes to the king to explain what happened and ask for help. Of course the king cannot reasonably belief the story of a creature turning straw into gold. He tells the miller that he’s a liar and is going to arrest him. Then the miller discovers that the king must be the creature. Finally, the king admits and together they make up a plan. The king will disguise again as the creature and ask for the child. She can save it if she guesses his name. The miller prompts the name to his daughter. The creature disappears. So, in the end they still live happily ever after.

Nice rewrite, nice turns, isn’t it? Good and bad isn’t that obvious. A little lie here another lie there. This all just happens because king and creature are turned into one person. Little change, large effect.

Of course I did not work out this story. I’m not that creative. This version has been written by the creative people of Xynix. They made a libretto on music by Händel, turning the whole into a wonderful and humoristic opera. Unfortunately they have already revised their website that contained some nice pieces out of the opera ‘Gold’ http://www.xynixopera.nl/2004/xynixopera/xynixopera.html

Inspiring and entertaining

2007-06-19T22:04:00.000+02:00

Since last week nothing around me is safe any more. I’ve started tapping on everything. Every object has its own sound. There is rhythm everywhere. You just have to listen. And I listened to and watched STOMP. These guys are great. Watch this:

Basketball and kitchen,
Floating metal drummers,
Pail drummers,
Waterphonics,
Brooms,
Many other things...

Thinking soup

2007-04-22T12:38:00.000+02:00

My daughter fell on the ground and had hurt her hand. One full drop of blood came out of the palm of her hand. A little catastrophe. After many tears and some tender care there was a serious problem. ‘Daddy, is it my left-hand or my right-hand?’ ‘Don’t you know anymore? Which hand do you take your pencil when you make a drawing?’ ‘My right-hand. But is this hand my right-hand or my left-hand?’ ‘Do you use that hand for writing?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I handed her a pencil. Of course she took it immediately with her right hand. ‘So, this is my right-hand?’

This is one of the smallest experiences of what I think might be called embedded cognition. Jelle can tell you much more about this. See his weblog ant on the beach.
In brief my understanding is that our knowledge is not completely in our brain. Our brain contains little pieces of knowledge, associations between events. We don’t have a complete program. The responses of our brain depend on our previous response or thought, the signals it gets from the body and the situation we are in. In fact it depends on the complete environment.

Another example is the performance of a dance, for example salsa. A dance is the result of the actions of 2 people, the music and small events in the environment, such as a slippery floor. It’s very difficult for me to tell exactly what all the moves are in certain figures. But still I can dance them. I know the move when it’s time to make it. I happen to be in a certain position, my lady happens to be in a certain pose and then I know what to do. Sometimes it happens that my lady is in a slightly different pose and then (when I’m lucky) I also ‘know’ what to do and make another move that I thought was the right one. The figure suddenly evolves into another figure. After such a figure my dance partner sometimes asks to do that again. Quite embarrassing, because I can’t even remember what I did. The figure just emerged.

So how do we think? Do we think? Are our actions just reflexes? (Ah! finally I’m back on reflections/reflexions). Last week I was browsing through one of those piles of papers that are scattered through my home and I found a reference to an interesting idea that has not yet been taken seriously enough. It’s very simple mathematical model of the associative brain by NG de Bruijn: A model for information processing in human memory and consciousness (1994).
In brief, the model contains two mechanisms: a huge number of simple cells that are able to store a simple relation A->B and an activation mechanism that enables those cells randomly for a certain time window. Enfin, the result is a ‘thinking soup’ that is able to store associations and might be able to (re)produce knowledge. With the computing power we have today it must be possible to make a simulation of this ‘thinking soup’. And I think this thinking soup might be fit into the embedded cognition theory.

Storyteller

2007-03-29T23:50:00.000+02:00

Telling stories is an important part of our life. It’s a daily activity I wrote about before. See Stories and The emperors new clothes. Now, I just came across some interesting research. Dr. Michael Gazzaniga has located our storyteller in the left hemisphere of the brain. In his research with split-brain patients he discovered that they would tell stories with facts that were known by the left brain and made up a story for the actions done by the right brain.

Dr. Gazzaniga and Dr. LeDoux showed P.S. a picture of a chicken claw in his right eye and a snow-covered house in the left eye. P.S. pointed to a chicken with his right hand and a snow shovel with his left.

''I'll never forget the day we got around to asking P.S., 'Why did you do that?''' said Dr. Gazzaniga. ''He said, 'The chicken claw goes with the chicken.' That's all the left hemisphere saw. And then he looks at the shovel and said, 'The reason you need a shovel is to clean out the chicken shed.'''

Dr. Gazzaniga hypothesized that P.S.'s left hemisphere made up a story to explain his actions, based on the limited information it received. Dr. Gazzaniga and his colleagues have carried out the same experiment hundreds of times since, and the left hemisphere has consistently acted this way.

''The interpreter tells the story line of a person,'' Dr. Gazzaniga said. ''It's collecting all the information that is in all these separate systems that are distributed through the brain.'' While the story feels like an unfiltered picture of reality, it's just a quickly-thrown-together narrative.

From "A Career Spent Learning How the Mind Emerges From the Brain",
New York Times, May 10, 2005

Experiments on split-brain patients reveal how readily the left brain interpreter can make up stories and beliefs. In one experiment, for example, when the word walk was presented only to the right side of a patient’s brain, he got up and started walking. When he was asked why he did this, the left brain (where language is stored and where the word walk was not presented) quickly created a reason for the action: 'I wanted to go get a Coke.'

From The Ethical Brain by Michael Gazzaniga

So storytelling is on the left side. It’s generating an ‘afterthought’. But does this also imply that our cognition and our consciousness are in this same area? Is all linguistic processing in this area? What about this woman who could still write with her left hand.

Kathleen B. Baynes of the University of California at Davis reports another unique case. A left-handed patient spoke out of her left brain after split-brain surgery - not a surprising finding in itself. But the patient could write only out of her right, nonspeaking hemisphere. This dissociation confirms the idea that the capacity to write need not be associated with the capacity for phonological representation. Put differently, writing appears to be an independent system, an invention of the human species. It can stand alone and does not need to be part of our inherited spoken language system.

From The Split Brain Revisited by Michael S. Gazzaniga

Did her writing still have a storyline? Or was she just writing down what she heard? It could be that the story telling is not specific for the left. But that only the speech part is. That is not really surprising. It would give problems if both hemispheres control speech. That would be speech with a double tongue.

Ah!! Still so many questions. But I getting more convinced that our storyteller is important to give meaning to our life. Or is it just telling stories, because it is the only thing it can do. Just like apples falling from the tree? Life has a meaning, because the storyteller tell so?

ITHAKA

2007-03-28T23:50:00.000+02:00

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that one on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon - you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbours you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfumes of every kind -
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean

Constantine P. Cavafy

Exit office

2007-02-25T22:02:00.000+01:00

About a month ago Microsoft launched its newest version of Windows. Vista is the new mastodon ready to drown you. 100 more ways to go astray. "It’s like a digital candy store", states Microsoft. That’s an appealing thought for technicians, but what about the 99% of the normal people? My mother, my nieces? They will make a mess of the system in a few days if they are not already lost within a day. I don’t believe that it’s the revolution we’re waiting for. Well, what happened with other dinosaurs?

Maybe the real revolution is near. Last month I wrote about the One Laptop per Child project. They are not only reinventing the laptop. They are creating a new device with a new interface. They have left the desktop, office, managers and other administrative analogs. Children don’t live in offices. Creative thought is not stimulated by offices.

The new concepts of OLPC interface are the neighborhood, journal and activities. Exit desktop, exit file system, exit applications. Hey, is this revolution not already going on? What are the main activities of most people on a PC? They browse on the internet, communicate with friends (chat, mail, msn), write weblogs, and share pictures and movies. They do this in interactive environments like hyves, MySpace, flickr. Wikipedia is another example of a collaborative environment where people share their knowledge, without being bothered by an administrative hierarchy.

On top of these concepts OLPC placed education. Education is their prime objective. They want to challenge children. Not only discover and communicate. Creativity should go beyond expression in text and images. Children should be able to create their own activities. Invent their own games, to stage their own stories, like they do on the playground. So, not unsurprisingly, some ‘scripting’ environment is being provided as well. On an OLPC children can play with eToys. Squeak Etoys was inspired by LOGO, PARC-Smalltalk, Hypercard, and starLOGO. It looks like LEGO is a digital virtual world.

Digital LEGO? That reminds me of LEGO Mindstorms. The idea of the ‘programmable brick’ originates from Mitchel Resnick’s research group at the MIT Media Lab. Yes, the MIT Media Lab is where several OLPC people come from and Resnick is one of the advisors of OLPC. Resnick is also the designer of starLOGO and author of Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams(1994). I’m reading this book.

Resnick’s research group is called ‘Lifelong kindergarten’. That’s a nice vision for the future. No more offices. Just kindergarten!

Vision

2007-01-24T23:36:00.000+01:00

Some people have got vision and a drive. Sometimes this really thrills me. The people of OLPC do. They wanted to improve education, especially of children in the poor countries. Their vision: A new concept for learning using latest technologies. They called it One Laptop per Child. But they did not just want to create a cheap laptop. Their focus was a new concept. The principals are people from the MIT Media Lab and other brains. They are specialists on education, connectivity, content, media and finally software and hardware engineering. First the concept, then technology. They reinvented the laptop!

This week, 2 years after the start of the project, the first devices have been delivered for testing. They are simple and effective, appealing to children. This is elegant design. It costs a fraction of an ordinary laptop and does not have the burden of a bloated operating system. In fact it has very few in common with an ordinary laptop. They reinvented everything. Everything? No, they stuck to the QWERTY keyboard. It inspired them for a nice parable on their wiki.

Wow! This thing is cool.
I want to go back to school!

Zoo

2006-12-29T23:19:00.000+01:00

When people visited my place for the first time they often asked me 'where is yours?', 'don't you have one?'. My daughter frequently asked for it. I had one, but I didn't like it and kept it on the attic. So finally I bought a new one. A totem in the center of my living. Regularly, about once a day, we sit down in front of it, e.g. to watch a nature film. My daughter likes them.

She likes polar bears very much. Lately she saw a lion having a zebra for diner. 'Daddy, why is he eating the zebra?' 'Well, lions eat a lot of meat. They hunt animals like zebras.' There was fear in her eyes. 'In the zoo. Do they also eat them in the zoo?' Fear that there are not that many zebras in the zoo. She was delighted that the lions in the zoo get their meat from the butcher's.

System

2006-11-28T23:02:00.000+01:00

Imagine your car has got a technical problem. Not just cosmetic damage like my car had after it had been hit by some idiot who could not park his own and didn’t leave a note. (I’m still angry about it! I could have bought a nice telly for that money.)
No, I mean some problem with the engine. Let’s say it gets heated from time to time. It is a very rare model and there is no obvious solution. What could you do with it? You could
A. spend a lot of time tuning the engine to reduce the heat production,
B. add a bigger fan to improve the cooling circuit,
C. stop speeding,
D. not use the car on hot summer days.

From the system point of view these are all good solutions. People will advise you to do one or the other, but no one would argue that you’re doing it wrong if you prefer another solution. From the car designer’s point of view there could be one best solution, since the car has been designed for a certain use and one could point out the abuse or malfunction.

Of course the example above is a metaphor. As usual it’s a bad one; I’m good in bad metaphors. What if you don’t have a problem with the engine of your car, but with your head? Sometimes under certain conditions you get overheated. What could you do? You could
A. spend time with a psychotherapist,
B. take some medication to soften your temper,
C. take a break when necessary,
D. move to an environment that suits you better,
E. go running for an hour every day.

In this case most people have very strong opinions. They say it’s really bad to go running, or take medication, or move to another environment. "You should face the real problem, the source of your anger."
The mind into a body is much more complex than the engine of a car. It’s hard to say what the real problem is. Maybe the 'cooling circuit' in your head is not functioning properly. Maybe you’ve got very much physical energy that needs to be burned; otherwise it will heat up your nerves. Maybe you’re always extremely eager. But does it matter that much what the ‘real’ problem is. The mind-body system is not functioning properly and since we don’t know much about our design, we don’t know whether it's abuse or some malfunctioning. Anything that makes it function better would be good. Or not?

Arithmetic

2006-10-16T23:16:00.000+02:00

My daughter had carried the oranges on our way home from the supermarket. She counted them. ‘Daddy we have twelve oranges.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yes daddy, but when we left the supermarket we had twenty oranges,’ she was joking. ‘Oops, how many have we lost?’ I was wondering if she could make that calculation. I continued unpacking the other things. She was staring out of the window. Suddenly she said ‘Eight!’ ‘Eight what?’ ‘We lost eight oranges.’ ‘Very good!’ She made the calculation. Now I was wondering again. How could she have done it? I never explained her how to do calculations with numbers above ten. She had been staring out of the window. She didn’t use beads or anything else. I asked her to explain how she did it. ‘I just count the numbers, daddy.’ ‘Count the numbers?’ ‘Yes, 13 - 1, 14 - 2, 15 - 3, 16 - 4, 17 - 5, 18 - 6, 19 - 7, 20 - 8. So we lost eight oranges.’

A Babel fish bicycle

2006-09-19T22:05:00.000+02:00

I’ve not yet been able to record my daughter’s bicycle song. But maybe I’ll have a real video clip soon. I’ve started some preparations. One of the things I needed is an English translation of the lyrics for the world wide release of the song. Luckily, there some great pieces of software available. If it’s done by computer it can’t be wrong... Here is the translation made with Babel Fish Translation:

Bicycles, bicycles, bicycles,
cycle is this way nice.
Your buttocks on the saddle.
Your hands to the wheel.
Bicycles, bicycles, bicycles,
cycle is this way nice.

Of course it would have been much better if I could distribute some real Babel fish with the record. Unfortunately, I’ve not yet been able to catch some real Babel fish. I would really like to have one, since if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. At least in the universe of Douglas Adams.

42!

Any questions?

It’s been some years since I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But it is among the best books I’ve ever read. It’s definitely the best science fiction. The absurdities in the story are very humorous reflexions on our daily life. Like most fiction it’s about the facts of life. I wouldn’t call the Somebody Else’s Problem field a fictional field.
When somebody, or something, is surrounded by a SEP field, the human brain perceives it as "somebody else's problem", and therefore will be incapable of paying attention to the object (or even seeing it, or recognizing its existence) unless it is being specifically looked for.

By the way, if you have a rainy Sunday and you want to some completely different answers to the meaning of life you should check out this page.

Fietsen

2006-08-27T21:05:00.000+02:00

I’ve had a ‘short’ break. I’ve been very busy with my vacations. But I’m back, just like Jelle, who also had a short break.
Last year I wrote about my daughter’s bicycle exercises. She likes sport as much as I do, which is not much. She complains always when I want her to ride her bike. Nevertheless she composed her own bike song, when she was riding her bike. Maybe she got her inspiration from Winnie the Pooh.

Fietsen, fietsen, fietsen,
fietsen is zo leuk.
Je billen op het zadel.
Je handen aan het stuur.
Fietsen, fietsen, fietsen,
fietsen is zo leuk.

Southern hemisphere

2006-06-27T23:53:00.000+02:00

I’m living in Gouda. It’s somewhere on the northern hemisphere. Quite regularly I have to go to my office on the southern hemisphere. Early in the morning I leave. I follow a path on the globe, take the meridian, cross the equator and stop halfway the southern hemisphere. In the evening I cross the equator again and go home. I’m doing this several times a week… by bike. Well, it’s not that far. Just 10 minutes. Now, the really funny thing is that the southern hemisphere is on the northern hemisphere. And someone has made a mistake when he positioned the equator south of the southern hemisphere. You have probably already guessed what I’m talking about. The address of my office is Southern Hemisphere 1 in Gouda. It’s the name of the street. The Meridian, the Equator, Northern Hemisphere, they’re all streets. It’s just a matter of definition.

Mixing up definitions is one of the big problems with my job. Someone reports that the alarm is not properly handled by the system. Which one? There are many different alarms on several levels. Or someone has found an error in the exported data. I look at the exported data, but cannot find the data he’s talking about. After some enquiries it turns out that he’s talking about the table in the website, not about the export files.

People are often very careless in their communication. Somehow we still succeed to understand each other. But most of the time we just think that we understand the other. It’s the art of miscommunication.

Due to my experience with improper definitions I always pay much attention to what I’m saying. So is my daughter. Yesterday she gave me a little lecture.
“Daddy, this is not what you told me.”
“Sorry, what’s wrong with the carrots and the burger? I asked whether you wanted fennel and chicken or carrots and burger. You opted for the carrots and chicken.”
“Yes, but this here”, she’s pointing at the rice, “you didn’t mention that.”
“The rice? What’s wrong with the rice? It was part of the both options.”
“Yes daddy, but you didn’t mention it.”
“You mean you didn’t expect it. Did you want tortellini with carrots? Sorry, I didn’t think about that.”

The practice of requirements engineering in a nutshell.

Hu's the new leader of China

2006-05-21T17:05:00.000+02:00

The most hillarious miscommunication I've every heard:
Hu's the new leader of China

Original text by James Sherman: Hu's on First

The Truth...

2006-05-17T00:24:00.000+02:00

I ran into a nice follow up of my previous postings. People are inclined to believe everything they read on internet or see in the media. So why shouldn’t you create some unbelievable stories to provoke some critical thinking, to let people reflect? For example with this story on climate technology. The creators of are The Yes Men. Hurray for the naïf people.

On the other hand, how can one find out what is really true? One way you will definitely not find it is by googling for ‘the.truth’. But this will give you a great night reading incredible conspiracy theories, backbiting, and other stories.
My rule: if somebody claims he knows the truth, it’s time for a big question mark.

PS. I just found the truth, the naked truth. And some more naked truth can be found here.

Know.not

2006-04-22T21:18:00.000+02:00

One of my favorite writers is Umberto Eco. His works are pieces of philosophy of science. He mixes fact with fiction and complete nonsense. He doesn’t forget to add some commentary on the nonsense. In his famous book, The Name of the Rose, a Franciscan friar (for the illiterate: Sean Connery in the film) researches some murders. He constructs hypothesis and finds the murder. At the end he admits that it was mere luck, because his whole theory was wrong. The book Foucault’s Pendulum is a satire on occult traditions and spiritual conspiracies. It’s older and much better than The Da Vinci Code, which uses the same themes. Foucault’s Pendulum starts with a kind of fantasy game by a few people at a publishing house. They deliberately mix occult texts and fiction for their story. At the end they can’t distinguish truth from fiction and are trapped in their own story.
I just read The Island of the Day Before. The story plays in the 17th century. The 17th century, the Dutch Golden Age, the time René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Blaise Pascal and Isaac Newton lived. The age of the birth of science... In his book Eco mixes some science with quack science and superstition that were very common in that time. People still believed that a wound can be cured by treating the knife that caused the injury. A major issue was several different methods to determine the longitude when traveling around the world. Most of the methods are absolutely ridiculous for people living in the 21st century.

Today we are living in an age of scientific truth, isn’t it? Research has been done on so many things. We’ve got good libraries and internet is a great source of information... and nonsense (See vegetarians). The unreliability of internet is a big problem for high school students who are writing papers. Very often they copy something without any verification. A few Dutch have started a counterattack on the website weetnet.nl (know net). Maybe a better name would be weetniet.nl (know not), because they are not trying to correct all the nonsense on internet. No, they are deliberately writing plain scientific nonsense. As expected those stories pop up in high school papers. ‘Poor’ high school students... trapped by know.not.

Vegetarians

2006-04-11T23:25:00.000+02:00

Today someone told me Plotinus was a vegetarian. I’ve read several texts of this philosopher but I had never read he was a vegetarian. So I did a quick search on the internet. The results of a few minutes research were very surprising. I found lists of famous vegetarians with not only Plotinus, but also Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Einstein and many others. I’m just naming the philosophers and scientists, because I find their thinking more interesting than the artists that are in the list. The list is still long, so I restricted my little research to the Greek philosophers Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus.

So what is so remarkable about these lists of vegetarians? First of all they are mainly found on websites promoting vegetarianism (not very surprising though). Secondly, they are all different.
The Pendulum mentions Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates and Aristotle
Buzzle.com mentions Pythagoras, Plotinus and Plato.
The Vegetarian Society mentions Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus and Socrates.
The International Vegetarian Union mentions only Plato.
Veggie Sport Association mentions them all.
Finally, the Wikipedia contains a (disputed) list of vegetarians containing Pythagoras and Plato.

So I did some research on these philosophers.

Pythagoras is widely believed to be a vegetarian. He teachings had several dietary restrictions. However they are not undisputed as this study of Pythagoras’ life shows in section 4.3.
"A second characteristic of the Pythagorean way of life was the emphasis on dietary restrictions. There is no direct evidence for these restrictions in the pre-Aristotelian evidence, but both Aristotle and Aristoxenus discuss them extensively. Unfortunately the evidence is contradictory and it is difficult to establish any points with certainty."

I found no reference to vegetarianism in Plato's works. But found an interesting section in Plato's Republic Book 3
"My meaning may be learned from Homer; he, you know, feeds his heroes at their feasts, when they are campaigning, on soldiers' fare; they have no fish, although they are on the shores of the Hellespont, and they are not allowed boiled meats, but only roast, which is the food most convenient for soldiers, requiring only that they should light a fire, and not involving the trouble of carrying about pots and pans."
This doesn’t sound favorable for vegetarianism.

Almost everything we know about Socrates comes from the dialogs in Plato’s writings. The text above comes from one of these dialogs.

Aristotle says something about meat in ARISTOTLE'S PROBLEMS – Of the stomach:
"yet this rule is to be noted touching the order of meat, that if there be any dishes, whereof some are light of digestion, as chickens, kid, veal, soft eggs, and such like, these meats should be first eaten; but gross meats, as venison, bacon, beef, roast pork, hard eggs, and fried eggs, should be eaten last."

I have found one clear mention of Plotinus’ vegetarianism. In his biography, written by his student Porphyrius, there is one line saying that for him the eating of meat was not acceptable. Plotinus’ own writings, The Enneades, don’t mention any dietary rules at all.

The conclusion of my little research is that vegetarianism is not supported by Greek philosophers, at least not as much as the vegetarian societies pretend. Secondly, internet is a source of disputable and erroneous material.
The vegetarian claims tend towards religious fanaticism, which moulds facts to their desires.

I’m not against vegetarianism, not at all. Sometimes I cook a vegetarian meal, which leads to some protest of my daughter: “Daddy, I can’t find it! You have forgotten something. Isn’t there another pan in kitchen?”

Thinking smothered

2006-03-26T14:07:00.000+02:00

Left … right … left … bump … brake … BUMP … touchdown!
I’ve been skiing. I’m not very good at it (low AQ). But during my vacation I noticed something quite interesting. I was not thinking when I was skiing! I mean, there were no spontaneous thoughts floating through my head. No ideas, nor arguments. Jelle stated in one of his blogs (I can’t find this text anymore) that we are always thinking. We can’t control it. Thoughts are coming without request and are always there.
So, I experienced it is not always true. Are thoughts can get smothered by other activity, or inactivity. Inactivity? Yes, I became aware of this when I was in the sauna. I had one feeble thought… Jee… it … is … hot … I … can’t … even … … … think…

What happens when I’m skiing or in the sauna? I guess there is one thought screaming ‘hey, this ain’t comfortable, better get out of here’, while there is another thought screaming ‘hey this is cool, great sensation’. These thoughts get into a deadlock. That ends when you’re at the bottom of the piste or when it’s time to leave the sauna.

Well, I’m back and the thoughts in my head are having a good time again.

Spirit

2006-03-02T00:13:00.000+01:00

“Daddy. God must send souls back to earth.”
“Sorry darling, what do you mean?”
“Well, if all the souls stay in heaven there will be none left on earth and then there will be no more living people. There will only be plants, but no people. They need a soul.”

Did she invent reincarnation all by herself? Anyway, the thought is quite interesting. As a physicist I’m used to fixed quantities of matter and energy, but what about spirit? Is there a limited amount of spirit and how much spirit is needed for one soul? Is spirit reused after ones death, just like matter?

Spirit is not really a subject for scientists. But we can ask the same question for information.

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."
-- George Bernard Shaw

But can we exchange ideas unlimited? Is there an unlimited stock of ideas and information? Can a limited amount of matter contain an unlimited amount of information?

I don’t know the answer. When I find it I'll post it here (and in Nature).

Snow

2006-02-12T17:45:00.000+01:00

It has been snowing all day in Gouda. If you think snow is made of all similar crystals you’re mistaken. There are many different forms. Which form is falling from the sky depends on temperature and humidity.

Yeah, physics is cool. :-)

If you’re going to make a walk in the snow it might be interesting to take this guide with you (and a microscope ;-) You want to stay inside? Ok. Have a look at these pictures.
All information is coming from the site: http://www.snowcrystals.com

And no, I have not yet checked the form of the snow that has fallen today.

Ladybug

2006-02-10T23:00:00.000+01:00

"Daddy, are ladybugs kind?" ["Papa, zijn lieveheersbeestjes aardig?"]
"I like them." ["Ik vind ze aardig."]
"But, are they kind?" ["Ja maar, zijn ze ook aardig?"]

Dijkstra

2006-01-31T22:43:00.000+01:00

I’m not really the person to have idols. But there is someone that I really admire. Edsger W. Dijkstra is one of the higher gods of the computer science pantheon. I would have liked to meet him and work with him. Unfortunately he died in 2002. Dijkstra has invented several fundamental principles in computer programming (the semaphore and the shortest path algorithm). But above all he had a vision on computer programming; a mathematical approach with emphasis on simplicity and elegance.

I can try to explain it, but you can better watch the video 'Denken als discipline' made by VPRO Noorderlicht. You should also read his parable on computer programming. It is very illustrative. It’s one of the 1300 EWD’s (notes) he has written. Have you ever been wondering why software is so expensive? Well read this.

By the way, there is also one EWD on the theorem of Pythagoras. Reading it is quite inspiring, but makes me feel very humble too.

Structures

2006-01-26T00:15:00.000+01:00

How many notes does a piece of music have? How many notes can a piano player play? I guess it’s several hundred, up to 1000 keystrokes a minute. Well, Google returned a.o. this link for the fastest piano player in the world. He could play 6000 notes in 2 minutes.
Imagine the amount of notes that a piano player plays during a concert. 100,000?
How can someone remember all those notes? Every note with it own tone, length and loudness? They don’t. At least they don’t remember individual notes. They remember phrases, rhythms, climaxes and turning points.
I’ve just been to a concert. Of course, there was some Romantic music on the program. I’ve got something with the 19th century. The pianist was Daniël Wayenberg, someone who really knows how the every note should sound. Anyway, during the concert I noticed how many of the notes were predictable. I had never heard those particular pieces of Beethoven, but everything was so familiar. BTW this is not uncommon with Romantic music or with Romantic paintings. Romanticism has a focus on the emotional and particular nature of things, but meanwhile it is extremely predictable (and beautiful).
If I can predict a large number of the notes, what about a concert pianist? Why can I predict some notes? Well, there is so much structure in the music. There is an overall structure with the introduction of a theme, variations, some repetitions and a final. There are microstructures like rhythms, chords and sequences in scales. A bit larger are the common chord sequences, melodic phrases.
Every composer has his own vocabulary with structures, his idiom, and his expressions. Every age has its expressions and every instrument has its vocabulary. A musician has a toolbox filled with those structures. For a piece of music he only has to know these structures and some particular notes that make the piece unique. Over 99% of the notes are just there, because they have to be there. They are the only ones that fit.

The same applies to other art forms. An actor can remember his text, because he knows the general structure of a play. He knows the character he is playing. He knows the idiom of the writer. Most words are there, because they are the most logic thing to say at that moment.

What about computers and software? Do I remember all those lines of code I have written? Do I know all functions of the operating system by heart? I only remember those things, because they have a structure, micro structures and overall structures. Sometimes I have even never seen a certain call of a system, but I simply know it is there, because it has to be there. The structure implies it. Of course there are some exceptions. Those are the things you have to remember. Yeah, and really sometimes you encounter something without structure or with such mixed up and inconsistent structures that it’s simply impossible to get it into your head. Those are the things I just really want to forget completely.

The temple of science

2006-01-24T22:43:00.000+01:00

In the temple of science are many mansions -- and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there.
Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would still be some men of both present and past times left inside -- . If the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have existed any more than one can have a wood consisting of nothing but creepers -- those who have found favor with the angel -- are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other than the hosts of the rejected.
What has brought them to the temple -- no single answer will cover -- escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

The passage is from a 1918 speech by a young German scientist named Albert Einstein.

-- And I copied it from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an inquiry into values.

Pythagoras

2006-01-24T22:34:00.000+01:00

There is a lot to say about the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. His theorem is well known. Few people know the very simple proof of this theorem. It's so elegant. I want to share it.

A square with side A + a square with side B + 4 triangles

= a square with side C + (the same) 4 triangles.

Thus A² + B² = C².

That's all.

New Year

2006-01-15T23:01:00.000+01:00

This afternoon I went to a concert of the Pythagoras Trio, a remarkable name for a string trio playing romantic music. Pythagoras is far from romantic. Anyway, the concert reminded me of a little story I still wanted to write down. Because I was very tired after last night’s party, it reminded me of another little story. BTW, we had a great party, dancing and singing with music of U2, Tears For Fears, Doe Maar, Prince and other 80’s artists.

Just after Christmas I went to a lunch concert of with some friends. The sister of one of them was performing. She plays the violin. My daughter really loves music. So, I took her with me. It was her first classical concert. She liked it a lot. But afterwards she told me that I should say to the violinist that “she must not make such a wild movements with her fiddlestick. She might drop it!”

On New Year’s Eve early in the evening we were walking outside. There were a lot of youth with firework. My daughter didn’t mind the firecrackers. She liked the rockets, until there was one burning on the street. “Daddy, let’s go inside. Quick. The street is starting to burn”.
She couldn’t stay awake till midnight, but I promised I would wake her up for the big fireworks at midnight. Unfortunately, she was sleeping like Sleeping Beauty and I’m not a prince. So, I couldn't wake her up. She woke up at 5.30 in the morning when I was fast asleep. But she is a little princess, so I woke up. “Daddy, when is the big party?” Very disappointed that she missed it all she started to cry. Never before I felt so broken on New Year’s Day.

Big Boss

2006-01-10T00:07:00.000+01:00

My daughter and her friend were quarreling about a toy.
“I want to have it.”
“No, give it to me”, commands my daughter, “I’ll tell my daddy. He is the boss in this house.”
“Well I’ll tell God. He’s the Boss for everything.”
“No not everything. Sinterklaas has given this to me. He is the Big Boss.”

Designer

2006-01-08T00:07:00.000+01:00

The painting proves that there is a painter. The watch has a watchmaker. My computer has a designer...
Let’s have a look. I see a QWERTY keyboard patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868. It certainly was a very good design for the mechanical typewriter, but is it good for a computer in the 21st century? I see a dozen different connectors. Each of them well designed a decade (or two) ago by different companies, but all together? I see a display with Windows. Does the operating system have a designer? A group of designers? Not even that! It’s a collection of bits and pieces of designs made by thousands of people from different companies and organisations. Most of the designers would not have imagined that their designs would get into such a system. Other designers complain about the designs that are already in the system they have to use. My specialization is internet and web applications. Almost every day I have to find my way through specifications and designs (hundreds!) made by unrelated designers. (html, xml, javascript, css, svg, tcp, ip, http, mime-types...). I’m putting my designs in this web of other designs.

My computer does not have one designer, but several thousand designers and the only thing they have in common is that they were born on this planet in the 20th century. What about a city or the society? Who designed it? Lots of people have done bits and pieces, but who has put in the poverty and terrorism?

But a painting ...? Well, there was someone bringing the paint on the canvas, maybe with an assistant. Someone made the canvas, somebody else a frame. Somebody produced the paint that has changed colour over time. Probably there was a client ordering the painting. There were colleague painters who inspired the painter and a wife that brought him in a certain mood.

All the painting proves is that there is a creative process or processes. So creation proves there is creation. I never liked logic.

Romanticism

2005-12-30T22:57:00.000+01:00

The dark days at the end of the year, a time to light candles. Candles. It’s so romantic. One would not expect that I, a man of science and technology, would light candles, but for people like me there are new candles, electric ones.

Alright, I’ll be honest about it. I didn’t find it myself. Someone else handed me this oddity, thought it would interest me. And indeed, it is a very interesting thing. Not from the perspective of the technology and absolutely not from a scientific point of view. But, philosophically it is an interesting object. The question is: can an electric candle be romantic?

These plastic electric candles make one thing clear: we lost contact with nature. Hey, wait a minute. When started the age of Romanticism? Wasn’t this in the middle of the Industrial Revolution? Romanticism had its break through when engines were becoming part of our life. We were gaining control over nature. Romanticism was possible, because we were getting less dependent on nature and nature was not dangerous anymore. Before there was electric light a candle was a necessary item. So it couldn’t be romantic; it was common. If you don’t have a warm house, it is not romantic to sit outside next to a fire. It is just like the blues. Singing the blues is really great if there is somebody at home waiting for you.

I’ve just been to a nice exposition on Romanticism: Masters of the Romantic Period, Dutch painting 1800-1850. Looking at those pictures one thing struck me. There is a passion for nature and man is above nature. Nature is chaos, wild. Nature is beautiful, but only just now, because we are gaining control over it. Even in storm and rain there is still a brilliant light and peacefulness. Look at the people on Romantic paintings. The people are not really affected by the cruelty of nature. They are mostly satisfied. Why? I think it is because they can choose between rough nature and comfort at home.

Another interesting point about the Age of Romanticism is that the first organisations for the protection of nature were founded in this age. So, Romanticism became possible due to technology and control over nature. I would say Romanticism is to choose (temporarily) for less control: no engines, no clocks, just let things happen.

Back to the electric candle. It is not romantic, because it has a power switch giving very simple control over its functioning. Finally, the thing I don’t like about this electric candle is the lack of power. You can’t play with it, melt something or burn something. That’s what a scientist likes.

Merry Christmas

2005-12-25T16:50:00.000+01:00

Merry Christmas! With some reflexions in Gouda.

If you’ve got friends in Gouda it is very likely that you’ll get a card with either the coloured town hall or the Christmas tree for Kongsberg. This year we had another 'Gouda bij Kunstlicht' event. It starts right after Kaarsjesavond and is more fun. With Kaarsjesavond they turn off all the electric light and burn only candles on the market place and in the town (which is on the centre of the market place). The next day (to compensate the day before?) they turn on many electic lights, because 'Gouda bij Kunstlicht' starts. The town hall is illuminated with coloured drawings made by the French artist Patrice Warrener. At first I thought it was kitsch. But after a second look I liked it. I saw details I never saw before. The artist gives you a new perspective. After years I rediscovered the town hall again. It even seems that in the 15th century when the town hall was built it had quite colourful painting. Well, maybe not so colourful as last night. But it was not the pale grey building it is since the 19th century.

If you want to see it yourself you have to visit Gouda next year. This year’s event has ended. However, the Christmas tree of glass will not be there anymore. It will go to Kongsberg, the city that offers a real tree to Gouda every year.
There are some more pictures on my homepage Gouda bij Kunstlicht.

Cooking

2005-12-07T23:45:00.000+01:00

"When a Dutchman prepares a dinner he follows the recipe strictly and tastes it when it is ready to be served (he is satisfied when he has succeeded to follow the instructions); a Belgian looks which ingredients are available and makes a dinner after a recipe that he has once heard, meanwhile he tastes and adjusts: he is only satisfied when it tastes good." This statement is not mine. Paul Wouters, a Belgium author living in The Netherlands, made it. I don’t know if there is any truth in it, but it’s a nice illustration of my previous posting about art. It’s the difference between the artist and the engineer.

The Dutchman works like an engineer. He applies the instructions. The Belgian works like an artist. For him cooking is a creative process. Every dinner is unique. The result depends on available ingredients, what he remembers of a recipe and his taste.

Note that when the engineer has found a good recipe, he can give it to his neighbour engineer, who will be able to make the same dinner. However, if the recipe is of a poor quality it will remain so. The artist on the contrary will take the poor recipe and make a good dinner, but is also able to make a very poor meal with a good recipe.

Anyway, it’s better to have an engineer or artist in the kitchen than a scientist. The scientist can make an awful dinner and afterwards be very happy, because he learned something new and argue that he has found out why it doesn’t taste good.

Art

2005-11-25T22:32:00.000+01:00

Lerner & Moguilevsky, two Jewish musicians from Argentina with their roots in Russia and Poland playing klezmer. I’ve just been to their concert. It was great. It’s not really the popular kind of klezmer, the jiddish festival music. They use the tunes and rhythms. Every song has many unexpected changes with influences of jazz, tango and contemporary music. Nearly every note is a surprise. It moves you! They play with passion and don’t eschew unusual sounds. That’s what art is to me. An artist knows where to put the dissonant notes to let it sound great. Painters, writers, all artists have this quality. They surprise you with the unpleasant, create a tension. Art moves you, makes you reflect.

I’ll never be an artist. I can’t use dissonant notes the right way. When my hands touch the piano only very dull children songs will be heard. I usually call myself an engineer. It sounds like the Dutch / French ingénieur, from the same root as ingenuity, but I’m not really comfortable with this name. Engineering is not at all ingenious. It is just applying the right procedures. That’s not what software development is like. I’m also not a scientist either. Science is just analysis without application of the knowledge. I’m applying knowledge, but can’t use procedures for this. I have got to think up procedures to solve problems.

Writing software is not a structured activity. If software could be written by the simple application of a set of rules, we didn’t need software developers any more. Anybody could just fill a form with requirements and let the computer generate the software. Well, it’s not like that at all. Software development is a creative and dynamic process. The result of this dynamic activity is structure and procedures. This interaction of something dynamic on static structures is part of the Metaphysics of Quality, developed by Robert M. Pirsig (his life and more...) in his second book Lila, an inquiry into morals. The first book of this author is more famous. It is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an inquiry into values. Well, this brings us back to the topic: art.

Pirsig does not learn you much about Zen or Motorcycles, but he talks about art.
A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. (chapter 8)
"Look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you'll see the difference. The craftsman isn't ever following a single line of instruction. He's making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he'll be absorbed and attentive to what he's doing even though he doesn't deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn't following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind's at rest at the same time the material's right."
"Sounds like art," the instructor says.
"Well, it is art," I say. "This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural."(chapter 14)

Hey, I’ve read something like that before: Donald Knuth’s speech Computer Programming as an Art. Knuth explains that the Latin root of art is ars, artis meaning skill. The corresponding Greek word is τεχνη, the root of both technology and technique. "The word 'science'", he says, "seems to have been used for many years in about the same sense as 'art'". Furthermore he says: "A scientific approach is generally characterized by the words logical, systematic, impersonal, calm, rational, while an artistic approach is characterized by the words aesthetic, creative, humanitarian, anxious, irrational. It seems to me that both of these apparently contradictory approaches have great value with respect to computer programming." So I'm a scientist and an artist?

But still, the artist creates a work with tension in it, ‘unpleasant’ surprises that makes one reflect. My software should not have surprises and certainly not disturb the users or make them reflect when they use it. Needless to say that I’m not working for this company that makes this well-known word processor that surprises you all the time, because it does something that could be helpful, but never is what you wanted. Certainly this is not a work of art or science either.

Maybe the reality is that I’m trained as a scientist, work like an artist and deliver a piece of engineering. But that is a bit long for a business card.

Dinner compliment

2005-11-21T21:56:00.000+01:00

"Daddy, when I’m older, old enough to take care of myself, you should start a restaurant." It's the best compliment I can imagine for a simple meal with spinach. My daughter likes it when I make it. She also has solved the pepper problem (see Dinner Logic). "Daddy you should put salt and pepper on the table. You should not add it when you’re cooking."

AQ 2

2005-11-13T21:54:00.000+01:00

Maybe some of you thought I was joking about the Athletic Quotient, AQ. Well, that’s what I thought as well. Okay, I’m convinced that if you move your body well, you’ll be more healthy and successful and enjoy life better. I’ve done Tai-Chi and Kung-Fu for quite some years. I’m also dancing quite regularly. If you know how to move, or (even better) if your body moves in a natural way without thinking, it will give you a profit in the same way as high EQ or IQ. But I didn’t have any intention to give much attention to AQ in this sense. Why not? Well, I’m 100% mediocre on AQ. Whatever I do, I’ll never be a sportsman. So, I don’t want to know my AQ. No, the serious thing about AQ is ... my daughter, of course!

Last Friday I had a talk at school about my daughter. She’s 5 years old. The talk was not about her IQ, just a little about EQ, but most about AQ. The teacher did not use any of these Q’s. She spoke about the way my daughter moves when she’s playing. She wondered whether her left and right-hand side where in balance, whether my daughter’s meticulous movements were at the right level and whether she’s capable of making a drawing of a flower. Then I realized that the teacher was evaluating her AQ. She also spoke about the interaction with other children, the EQ part. Small children are evaluated most on AQ and EQ related subjects. It’s a big difference with high school, where youth is evaluated almost only on IQ related subjects.

In my previous posting I mentioned the SQ, the spiritual quotient. I still don’t know about that one. Do we ever get an evaluation on that level? Anyone any suggestion?

AQ

2005-11-09T23:36:00.000+01:00

No, the title is not a typo. It is AQ I wanted to talk about, not IQ or EQ. You all know what IQ and EQ are, I suppose. Today I learned about a new form of intelligence that would be the ultimate human intelligence. It’s spiritual intelligence, or SQ! Just a quote from the author Danah Zohar:
"Spiritual Intelligence is.....
Our access to and use of meaning, vision and value in the way that we think and the decisions that we make. The intelligence that makes us whole, that gives us our integrity. The soul's intelligence, the intelligence of the deep self. It is the intelligence with which we ask fundamental questions and with which we reframe our answers. Our transformative intelligence."
Unfortunately, the author of this book shows her knowledge of intelligence by stating that IQ is something that computers have. I wish my computer had some IQ!

Nevertheless, I think SQ is an interesting notion. Of course I would say so. It’s about reflection on ones behaviour and existence. I would like to put those Q’s in an order (a Q-queue): EQ, IQ, SQ. The emotional quotient has to do with social capacities; it is something a dog has as well. IQ has to do with more specific rational thinking. I don’t think a dog is capable of this kind of thinking, but some animals, e.g. apes have a bit of it, humans a lot. Then there is the spiritual, this very unique human capacity. Well I assume it’s something uniquely human.

Still I’m missing something. Before anything else a human is a physical being. We move around, eat and do our things. Shouldn’t we have a quotient for that as well? I propose to use AQ. No, it’s not standing for animal quotient, but Athletic Quotient. It’s about muscles and bones.

So finally we have the sequence AQ, EQ, IQ and SQ. However, be careful with the Dutch. They pronounce EQ as AQ, IQ as EQ and AQ sounds (a little) like IQ.

The emperor's new clothes

2005-11-07T23:28:00.000+01:00

I guess you all know the tale ‘The emperor’s new clothes’. My daughter does! I told her last week. For her it was a very funny story. The emperor walking in his underpants and a small child telling the truth about it. How could the emperor be so foolish?!
For me it was another view on storytelling and belief I wrote about before. With this tale we tell our children not to be fooled by nice stories and not to believe something because everybody believes it. At the same time this story tells us that children do not need this message, since they already speak the naked truth. Is this a tale to remind us what we have forgotten since we were young?

What struck me most in this tale was that the emperor continued his procession while he knew he was wearing nothing at all. How often do people carry on while they know they are mistaken?

Wikipedia has a nice analysis of the tale. Other versions of the tale exist in other cultures as well.

[A note for my faithful readers: my daughter has learned to ride her bike by now. Since last week she can also lace up her shoes. Today she wanted to try roller skating. It was not a success...]

Self-awareness

2005-10-25T21:31:00.000+02:00

I’ve got the most wonderful daughter of this world. (Of course. Any father would say that about his daughter.) Really, she is very sweet. But sometimes she can be stubborn and disobedient. This week I had to address her with paternally authority, “No darling! Just listen to me! … and don’t start crying.” “No daddy,” she said with a very sorrowful face, “I’m not crying. The expression on my face is only changing.” I couldn’t keep my stern expression anymore.

Stories

2005-10-09T16:08:00.000+02:00

Every evening I have to tell my daughter a story. It's taking her away from daily life. It makes her laugh of think (reflect). We are storytellers. People are storytellers. We do not only tell stories to our children. Everyday we are telling stories to our family, friends, colleagues, neighbours. I suggest to all of you to observe this during the day. Even large part of the news on the TV is story telling. That's why calamities are so interesting. They contain personal stories.

Stories are a way to transfer emotions. First we describe a context, the environment and the actors. Then there is a sequence of actions that influence the situation in a pleasant or unpleasant way. Stories are also a way to define our conceptual world. If you ask someone the meaning of compassion he will probably tell the story of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-33). Would you know what a hero is, if you've never heard a story about a hero? Stories give meaning to our life. Throughout the ages men all over the world have been telling stories about history and creation.

Teachers are storytellers. Through stories they inspire children and transfer their culture. Historians are storytellers too. They are even story writers. They collect facts, but these facts themselves do not tell the story. The historian makes the story about what has happened. Archaeologists are even better in it. Also detectives and lawyers create and tell stories using a limited number of facts. Fyodor Dostoevsky is a great story teller. His book The Brothers Karamazov has many interesting aspects. The main story line is about the murder of the father of the brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky tells the story with a large number of detail, except for the murder. After the murder the persons in the book make up their version of the event. Their story. During the trial the public prosecutor and the defending lawyer have two completely different stories both using the facts in a reasonable explanation. At the end of the book it is still not clear who's done it. The truth is not known. Well in this case the truth might be that it is just a piece of fiction by Dostoevsky.

People need stories to give meaning to their life. In his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat : And Other Clinical Tales Oliver Sacks describes a man who has lost his memory due to the Korsakoff syndrome (chapter 12, A Matter of Identity). He has not only lost his memory, but also the story of his life. He is continuously inventing stories to create a context for himself to live in.

I'm also a storyteller. Well my stories are not the most scintillating. But engineers are also story tellers. When a customer observes some defects in a system. He asks me what's wrong with it and expects a story. Sometimes it is difficult to make clear that there is no story yet. I need more information. So, after some analysis I can make a story about the defect with a good explanation that it has been fixed. That's the easy case. Often there is not one story, there are several stories. Independent causes that result in similar problems. At worst these stories are interfering. Some facts fit in multiple stories. Some facts do not fit in any story at all. These facts are most disturbing me. At least in a computer system there should be a logic explanation.

Also in real life the unexplained facts are most disturbing the mind. We want to have a story that explains why things are happening. Some logic in our tragedy. A story that gives sense to the our life.

The Change; a brief philosophy of sailing

2005-09-20T23:25:00.000+02:00

Last week I’ve been busy with The Change. The Change is quite big, but not bigger than I had imagined. The Change is a ship, or more precise she’s a skûtsje called De Verandering. With 14 people we’ve been sailing her on the Frisian waters. De Verandering. It’s a good name. At least it’s a change for the people sailing her. For a week we were ‘confined’ on an area of approximately 70 m², i.e. 5 m² each. Yeah, it’s almost like the Big Brother TV show. Luckily, we did not have to single out anybody. Sailing has a different philosophy. Time for a brief reflexion on water.

First of all, the crew has to be a team. Discipline is needed. Confidence is essential, you have to rely on each other. The shipper and mates (the 3 M’s) exercised their faith when they gave control to a bunch of no-no’s. They literally handed over the strings (de touwtjes uit de handen geven). They are true philosophers, although M,M&M will probably deny it. But someone who prefers sailing as a volunteer to a well paid job must have a philosophy. They are inspired, one of the shipper’s favorite words: bezieling.

Crew is only one part. The other part of sailing consists of the elements. One has to respect the wind, waters and ship. There has to be a balance of wind, sails and rudder. ‘More is better’ is not the guiding principle. It’s like performing a dance, or tai-chi. It’s close to wu-wei, no forced action, which means an acceptance of the conditions. You can go were the winds will bring you. And this week we were lucky that the winds brought us to the IJsselmeer, where we good experience the force of the waves.

Apart from sailing, there is also life on the ship. Life on the ship is almost ascetic. An exception to this life style were the meals, they were excellent. For the rest, the ship lacks any comfort. Ok, we had a toilet and everyone had a corner to sleep. It’s a contrast with our luxury daily life. No need to go to a monastery for an ascetic life. Meditation? Well, when all your attention is on the wind, sails and course of the ship your mind gets freed from any distracting thought. To be honest, I sometimes even forgot that there were other people on the ship.

So, on the ship I did not talk much about philosophy. Sailing is philosophy without words. One can study books, but they only contain words...

It was great to sail with De Verandering. It’s a challenge to steer a ship of 18 tons on the IJsselmeer with wind force 5. The (Dutch) saying is ‘three times ship right’. Well, maybe it’s due to her name, but I was continuously pushing and pulling the helm with all my force to get her on the right course. On the same time it’s great to see her dancing on the waves when you’re holding the helm. Every wave she swings, dips her nose in the waters, and flushes the front deck. Even the people sitting there, i.e. in the showers on the front deck, confirmed that it was a great experience.

Back home after a week sailing I encountered the void and a sudden sadness. No more wind and water, but a quite house. It’s hard to say goodbye.

So, did it change my life? Well, it changed my haircut. Although it will be quite difficult to maintain my Frisian Waters hairstyle without the refreshing bath in the Frisian waters in the morning.

To conclude a reading suggestion: Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad.

And some nice quotes on sailing:

"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails".
-William Arthur Ward

"Men in a ship are always looking up, and men ashore are usually looking down".
-John Masefield

"Out of sight of land the sailor feels safe. It is the beach that worries him".
-Charles C. Davis

"A ship is always referred to as "she" because it costs so much to keep her in paint and powder".
-ADM. Chester Nimitz

"Bad cooking is responsible for more trouble at sea than all other things put together".
-Thomas Fleming Day

Copied from http://www.winddancer.tv/Quotable Sailing Quotes.htm

Killer Whale

2005-09-19T19:45:00.000+02:00

“Daddy, why is a killer whale black and white?” A very usual question during breakfast, ain’t? I guess she heard something about it. Let’s give it a try, “They want to look like cows.” She is surprised. She smiles, “No, there are also brown cows.” Yep, silly answer, silly remark. She’s got the wit. Let’s continue, “Oh, but maybe the killer whales don’t know about brown cows.” Another smile. “No daddy, they don’t want to be seen. They are harder to see if their back is black and belly is white.” I wonder who told her that.

BTW, she does not only play with Lego and trains when she’s with me. She also plays with Barbies, as you can see.

Sudoku

2005-09-11T15:56:00.000+02:00

Last weeks I spent some time with this popular number puzzle, Sudoku. For those who have never heard of it, have a look at the Wikipedia. I don’t really like to spent my time on puzzles with a known solution. I prefer puzzles that have not yet been solved. But the Sudoku is interesting, since it contains many unsolved questions. I was not interested in a particular solution, but the general solution of Sudoku’s. I had the following questions:

Is there a logical solution method for all Sudoku’s? I mean, is there a set of rules to find the numbers without trial and error?
How many Sudoku solutions are there?
What is the minimal number of givens needed to have one unique solution?
Can I create a Sudoku grid in a mathematical way, i.e. (again) without trial and error.

Well, these turned out to be the real tough questions. I found only an answer for question 2. There are 6670903752021072936960 = app. 6.671×10²¹ valid Sudoku grids. And even this answer was not found with a pure mathematical method. It involved quite some number crunching on a computer.

I also found an answer on the third question. I turns out to be 17. But again, there is no mathematical proof. I found no answer for the fourth question. Unfortunately I’m not that good in mathematics (I’m a physicist) to help the world with some nice solutions on the questions.

What about the first question? I do not have a complete solution for every Sudoku. But I found and implemented several rules. I started with a small program to solve the Sudoku of the daily newspaper. It contained one rule:
1. A number may occur only once at a row, column and block (3x3 cells).
This rule reduces the number of options for a cell. With the first Sudoku I tried this rule was enough to solve it. I was quite disappointed that the puzzle was that simple. The next day the puzzle was more difficult. I had to add a second rule.
2. A number must occur one at a row, column and block.
This rule was a great help. About 95% of the puzzles in the newspapers can be solved with these two rules. The figure below shows the solution process. The white squares represent the remaining options in a cell. A square in upper-left corner represents a 1, next to it is 2 and upper-right is 3. Number 4 is underneat the 1, 5 is in the center of the cell, etc.. The black squares indicate that that option is the only remaining option for the number in a row, column or block.

A few days later I found some more difficult puzzles. And I found some rules to solve these.
3. If the remaining options for a number in a block are on one row/column, that number must be in that block on that row/column. The options for that number can be removed from the other blocks of the row/column. In the figure below this is depicted by the cyan colored options for number 6 on row 7. The red options can be removed.
4. Rule 3 can also be reversed: If the remaining options for a number in a row/column are in one block, the options for that number can be removed from the other rows/columns of the block. This is shown in the south block. Number eight must be on column D, and can thus not be in cell F9.

These 4 rules were quite easy to implement on the computer. If I had to write a complete automatic solver, then I would start a trial and error from this point. The number of options has been dramatically reduced and only a few options have to be tried. I found some other rules to solve the Sudoku manually, but these rules are computationally quite expensive. But our brain, especially visual cortex, is well equipped to recognize the patterns. I found a good description of those solution rules on this very good Sudoku site. My last two rules are:
5. Disjoint chain: if a set of two or three numbers occur only in two or three cells (respectively) then these numbers must occur in these cells and other options can be removed. E.g. the dark green 2 and 3 in the east block are a disjoint chain. The yellow 8 can thus be removed, leaving a single (dark blue) 8 in cell G7. The light green 1, 5 and 8 are also a disjoint chain (on column I).
6. Disjoint subset: if 2 (or 3) cells on a row/column or block contain the same subset of 2 (or 3) numbers, then these numbers must occur in those cells and can be removed from the other cells.
(I do not have an example of this rule.)

That was enough about Sudoku for me. Any questions?

Great models

2005-08-14T22:43:00.000+02:00

Internet is great. This week I found pictures of great models, including stripped ones. Yeah, men are all the same, especially engineers. They say a man gets educated three times. First by his mother, then by his wife and finally by his daughter. I must admit this is very true. But only the last one is successful. And above all she never complains that men often behave like children.

My daughter is also becoming an engineer (and a doctor, and an artist, and a trainer of animals, and ...). This week she’s been working for hours. Look at her model. She’s got engineering skills. Okay, for some of the more technical problems she hired a consultant, paying with several hugs. That's her quality as manager!

I also had a great time. I must say I’m not only proud of my daughter, but also on my own design of a car with front wheel drive with suspension.

Homeopathic hamster

2005-07-28T23:07:00.000+02:00

If you hit a finger nail with a frozen hamster the nail will become black (or blue). However, if someone has a black nail most people will think the finger has been squeezed by a door or hit with a hammer.

Iris has written a nice posting on this kind of logic. In brief, there is deductive reasoning which has the form:

If A is true then B is also true.
A is true.
B is true.

If sentences 1 and 2 are true, then sentence 3 must be true as well. Thus:

If you hit a finger nail with a frozen hamster the nail will become black (or blue).
You hit your finger nail with a frozen hamster.
Your nail becomes black.

Or:

If your finger gets squeezed by a door your nail will become black (or blue).
You squeeze your finger.
Your nail becomes black.

Another kind of reasoning is abductive reasoning. It works the opposite way:

If your finger gets squeezed by a door your nail will become black (or blue).
Your nail is black.
Your finger has been squeezed.

Or:

If you hit a finger nail with a frozen hamster the nail will become black (or blue).
Your nail is black.
You have hit your finger nail with a frozen hamster.

This form of reasoning is logically unsound.

(Many thanks to Menno Steketee (NRC Handelsblad) and Iris for this example.)

So far about hamsters. Let’s have a look at homeopathy.
Homeopathy works according to the law of similars, i.e. treating “like with like”. The practitioner considers the totality of symptoms of a given case. He or she then chooses a remedy that has been reported to produce a similar set of symptoms in healthy subjects.

Thus:

If you’ve got disease X then your head aches, you transpire, and have red spots on your nose.
You’ve got disease X.
Your head aches, you transpire and have red spots on your nose.

And:

After eating herb Y your head aches, you transpire and have red spots on your nose.
You’ve eaten from herb Y.
Your head aches, you transpire and have red spots on your nose.

The homeopathic practitioner compares symptoms, the effects. He looks for something which produces the same effect. His (abductive) reasoning is as follows

After eating herb Y your head aches, you transpire and have red spots on your nose.
Your head aches, you transpire and have red spots on your nose.
You should take a potentization (a special kind of dilution) of herb Y.

Note that the cause of the disease is not considered at all. It is not important what causes the symptoms. Homeopathy focuses on the remedy for the symptoms.

[NB: Vaccines also work with similarity, but there is an important difference. Vaccines work with something that is very similar to the cause for the disease, but does not cause the disease nor the symptoms (or very weak symptoms). However it does activate and train the immune system. The similarity is in cause, not in symptoms.]

Now, if my finger has been squeezed by a door I will get a black nail. According to the homeopathy I should consider a treatment with something that causes the same effect. Well, our frozen hamster... Will a male hamster give a better result or a female? I’ll put them in the fridge.

Final Note:
I tried to discus homeopathy with a brilliant scientist, M.D. Ph.D. professor and physicist. The only answer he gave me was, “I know nothing about this kind of medication. I can’t tell you anything about it.” It was hard for me to believe him, but after a while I realized this was the only right answer. For a scientist there is not much to say about a matter of belief.

There is no proof stronger than faith.

Focus

2005-07-22T22:06:00.000+02:00

My daughter is learning to ride a bike. She can on a tricycle, but now it’s time for a bicycle (without any assisting wheels). She’s nearly 5 years old. Her friend, who is just a few months older, can already ride a bike for more than a year. She did it almost without effort, without fear. However, my daughter is a bit scared and she looks at her front wheel all the time. And if you look down, that’s where you will end up, on the street. Humans move in the direction of their focal point. So now, I’m teaching her to focus on the point at the end of the street. When I told her to focus, I realized that this is one of those basic lessons for life:

“If you want to get somewhere you should focus on it.”

Well, almost. A bicyclist can focus for the sky he will never fly. It’s more likely he’ll end up in a river or a stream.

Mare

2005-07-19T21:28:00.000+02:00

With my daughter I was walking through a castle. I was telling her that there are no ghosts in the castle. Suddenly there was a noise. A scream of an animal. My heart was throbbing. I blinked with my eyes. Everything was dark. I was lost in darkness. I heard some noise from animals. Then I felt my sleeping bag. “Oh yes, I’m camping on a farm.” Again I heard the same sound. A horse was neighing. It was a mare. A real nightmare.

The rest of the week was great. Camping on a small farm with about 10 other families is very nice. At least, if you have small children that are fond of animals.

Water

2005-07-08T23:02:00.000+02:00

"Daddy, the tree is washing its leaves. Also a tree needs to wash itself".

"There are no sharks in the North Sea. That's because they are afraid of the elephants." Right... I didn't dare to ask why there are no elephants in the North Sea. They must be afraid of the sharks...

Tied up

2005-07-03T20:36:00.000+02:00

In these turbulent times there is one international standard that hasn’t changed for about 80 years. See the following pages for the history of this British American standard that has conquered the world without any standardization committee.

BTW, I didn’t know there were so many ways to knot a tie.

Logic or belief?

2005-06-22T23:30:00.000+02:00

When I was a young boy I choose to study physics. Pure science, rational. Theories can be confirmed by observations. A scientist produces evidence for his theory. Quite simple, not? Well, no, it’s not that simple. Soon I learned about Karl Popper and falsifiability. Every theory is true ... as long as it is not proven to be false. Therefore a scientific theory must be testable. It should be possible to do an observation that contradicts the theory.

A very strong point about Popper’s theory is that it is scientific according to its own definition, in itself it is testable and falsifiable. Yet, quite soon after its publication many examples were given of theories that did not match all observations. Nonetheless, people still held these theories for true, even when there were serious discrepancies between theory and observations. They argued that is was still the best theory they had. A classical example is the Newtonian mechanics. Long before Einstein published the Special Theory of Relativity there were many observations that did not match Newtonian mechanics. So, everyone believed Einstein when he published his theory that explained those observations? Not really. Many people didn’t want to believe it, among them some well-known physicists. Later, Einstein himself didn’t want to accept certain consequences of the Quantum Theory. "God doesn’t play dice with the universe", he said. (Stephen Hawking's lecture about it)

Thomas Kuhn postulated a new theory about the evolution of scientific theories. He described it in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (Unfortunately, according to Popper this theory is not scientific, since it is not falsifiable.) A new scientific theory is not accepted easily. It should fit in man’s conception of the world. If it doesn’t there has to be a paradigm shift. It takes time for people to change their understanding of the world. They always tend to stick to their old ideas. Slowly, sometimes after a generation or two a new idea gets accepted.

During my studies and the academic work I did later it became clear to me that science is not just about theory and proofs. In science you have to promote your ideas, convince people that your theory is important, that your solution is better. Improved! New formula! Whiter than white! Science is a market activity and you need alliances. As a scientist you have to be a little bit of a politician. (It would be good if a politician has to be a little bit of a scientist…)

Maybe that's why I left science and moved to software development. There you build something and a computer executes it. It’s pure logic. One of my first project leaders quite often replied "RTFM" (Read The <bleep> Manual) to people bothering him with questions about software. Then I was still young and innocent. Later, I had commercial training and answered, "Please, check the reference book. On page 243 you find a similar problem with an example.... You already read the book?! ... It’s not working?... Oh, you’re using Microsoft! OK. Forget about the manual. Forget about logic. Forget the standards.... Let’s see how we can work around this problem."

Slowly I discovered that also software development is not just pure logic. It’s done by people! There are people and organizations with influence and power. There are trends. There are commercial interests. You need strength to defend your ideas. Sometimes you’re surprised that someone easily accepts your idea, because you’re an authority for them. Sometimes you just have to live with poor concepts, because you can't beat them.
Enfin, Software development is just like science or any other human activity. It’s not just ruled by logic. It’s influence that counts.

Construction work

2005-06-13T23:35:00.000+02:00

For those who didn't know. I'm an engineer, not a carpenter.

(Nearly finished...)

Spinnathon

2005-06-06T23:24:00.000+02:00

Mad? Slightly. With some colleagues and almost 100 other people we did a spinnathon. I've been spinning for 3 hours. Some did even 6 hours. Spinning? Sweating on a home trainer, listening to a heavy beat and an empowering instructor. We did it for fund raising for the Richard Krajicek Foundation and of course also for the challenge. The challenge to go further than before, to feel your limits. Just before I started I got interviewed. The journalist wanted to know what is important for a successful ride. Well, drink enough and pay attention to your heart frequency.

First hour: it’s easy. A normal exercise. Just keep the heart beat a bit lower. 85% of the maximum heart rate is ok. Above it the amount of lactic acid in your blood raises. Above 90% is exhausting the body. One will not even complete 1 hour. At 95% not even 15 minutes. The exercise becomes anaerobic. Sport is something you do with your brains as well.
Second hour. The start is OK. But the beat is too fast. I’m riding my own ride.
Third hour. I’m feeling great. It’s endorphin. Can’t trust the feeling in my muscles. Can’t rely on emotions either. I’m feeling high, runners high. There is no coach here. My reason and the heart rate monitor on my watch are my guides. 94%! Well there only 15 minutes left. Just keep going. A cold trembling? Am I getting too hot? Slow down, 10 more minutes. Finally it’s 4 o’clock. Another song? Ok, cooling down. We did it. Time for muscle stretching. Ai ai ai….

Ok slightly mad…

Enlightenment

2005-05-26T22:59:00.000+02:00

“And if there is a man among the younger generation
That never strives for vacancy nor seeks an occupation
Who sets his mind on science and shows a thirst for knowledge
Or God himself fills him with inspiration
To creativity in art,
They scream: «Disaster! Fire!» and acknowledge
The man to be a dreamer and dangerous at that.”
Gore ot Uma from Griboyedov

I wanted to make a short remark on Enlightenment. Before I posted it I checked some resources. That was two weeks ago. The little remark grew… Last Saturday during my monthly course on philosophy I read this quote from Gore Griboyedov. I found the links to my remark on Enlightenment in Russian literature. Curious, isn’t it? Yes, because Russia was not really involved in the Age of Enlightenment. That’s what makes the quote so interesting. It contains Enlightenment (“Who sets his mind on science and shows a thirst for knowledge”) and Romanticism (“with inspiration to creativity in art”). Enlightenment and Romanticism, the sisters that need each other in strife. Ratio and emotion.

Age of Enlightenment? The name given to the 18th century with thinkers like Voltaire, Newton, Spinoza, Locke, Hume and Rousseau. But is there a philosophy of this enlightenment? In philosophical treatises I could not find a movement of enlightened philosophy. It’s not one movement. It’s a period of divergence! The first movement is Rationalism, started by Descartes. It emphasises reason. With systematic reasoning one gets knowledge. It is very idealistic. Through thinking we can discover the idea, the truth. The second movement is Empiricism, with Locke, Hume and Berkeley. They emphasise that we learn through experience.
Rousseau is also often mentioned among the philosophers of the Enlightenment. But he was the beginning of the Romantic philosophy, the third movement. Romanticists belief that men are good by nature and damaged by culture. Romanticism encourages people to follow there impulses and be primitive. Knowledge is innate.

Although Romanticism is quite different, I like to include it in the overall development of Enlightenment in the Western world, because all the movements I mentioned above have one very common characteristic. They abandon tradition. The sophisticated culture of people wearing wigs is attacked by revolutions. They also abandon the old religious dogma’s. Society and church are no longer considered to be the major forces directing our lives. Since the Enlightenment the individual is directing himself.

First remark
Now the remark I wanted to make. It’s a short statement to open the discussion (please comment). I’ll try to elaborate it in some future postings. My first remark is that since the enlightenment we think that we are individuals directed by (low level) physical impulses and (high level) rational thoughts. We simply ignore the enormous impact of the social environment. We do and say many things that the people around us do and say. We want to be accepted. We are reflections of our social environment.

It is interesting to read Kant’s explanation of Enlightenment:
„Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Selbstverschuldet ist diese Unmündigkeit, wenn die Ursache derselben nicht am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Entschließung und des Mutes liegt, sich seiner ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Sapere aude! Habe Mut dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch der Aufklärung.“
KANT: (1783) Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (An Answer To The Question: 'What Is Enlightenment?')

I like to introduce a metaphor. The physical level can be located in the lower part of the belly. The rational thoughts are located in the head. The social level is located just in between, in the heart. Kant says that we do not lack intelligence (head). We need determination (will, belly) and courage (heart). So enlightenment is not just a thing of the head.

Second remark: are we enlightened?
In a eastern or mystical meaning of the word, being enlightened means to have insight. To Know. Some characteristics of enlightenment are peacefulness, contentment, wonderment.
In a Buddhist description:
“Enlightenment is sometimes described as complete and perfect sanity, or awareness of the true nature of the universe. At this moment, all greed (lobha), aversion (dosa), delusion (moha), ignorance (avijjā), craving (tanha) and ego-centered consciousness (attā) are extinguished.”

Looking at our society I see materialism and stress. Did we have an Age of Enlightenment?

Some more links:
Encarta on the Age of Enlightenment.
Wikipedia on the Age of Enlightenment.
Wikipedia on Enlightenment.

Nostradamus

2005-05-25T23:58:00.000+02:00

Hi hi readers, I’m still there. I’ve just been very busy with many different things, sports, dancing, philosophy, music. Enough input for many reflexions, but not enough time to write.

Have you every heard of Kayak? Yes? Then you’re probably not the youngest here. They are not the youngest either, but they still make good music. Heavy, bombastic, just the way symphonic rock should be. Delicious! They have made a new rock opera, ‘Nostradamus – The Fate of Man’.
A rock opera telling the story of Nostradamus, the famous astrologer. Man is always intrigued by his prophecies and doom scenarios. Do you need more inspiration for two hours of music? Ok, just add the Templars to the story. The Templars are popular, you know. Dan Brown used them for a best seller. Rudy Cambier’s linked Templars and Nostradamus in his book ‘Nostradamus and the Lost Templar Legacy’. At least it is a very interesting plot for a symphonic rock opera.

My favourite books on the Templars is still Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. In the beginning of this book Belbo discusses the characteristics of imbeciles, fools and lunatics who write a book. A characteristic of the lunatic is that sooner or later he conjures up the Templars….

My favourite quote from ‘Nostradamus – The Fate of Man’: “There is no proof stronger than faith”.

Proof? Faith? More on that tomorrow!

Voicemail

2005-05-12T22:29:00.000+02:00

Today she called on the phone. I couldn’t answer her call. She had to speak a voicemail. “Papa?…. Papa??? … Papa!!….” “Just tell papa how you’re doing,” says her mothers voice. “Papa, you’re very sweet. No problems here. .” Voicemail is magic for a 4 year old child.

She’s in Israel now. Her first journey to another country. Her first travel by air. “Aren’t you afraid? She’s so far. Isn’t it dangerous?” These questions I hear regularly. No, I’m not afraid. Well there is a higher risk to get an accident there. The taxi drivers really drive like idiots. Other people as well. Looking at the figures one has to be worried about the traffic. That other risk? Well, London has a high terrorism risk rating like Jerusalem. A few years ago I was in London just some months after an IRA bombing. One could really feel the fear in the city. Luggage depots were closed. In Israel I could store my luggage at a bus station. Ok, my backpack got checked at every station and shopping centre. And there are lots of men hanging around with little earphones. Maybe that’s why it’s such a chaos on the roads. They can’t pay attention to everything.

Of course I checked the news more often than usual. I was very happy to hear her voice.

Computation, a note for teachers

2005-05-07T23:22:00.000+02:00

With my daughter I was reading one of those books that teach children how to count and add numbers. She’s always interested in numbers and very often picks books with numbers in it. In this book there was a picture of two flowers, one with 4 leafs and one with 3 leafs. The question was, how many leafs have these two flowers? The answer: “One flower is missing a leaf!” Another picture shows 3 smiling bears and 2 sad bears. The answer: “The two bears should smile. Why are they sad?” Without the book she would immediately give the right answer when you ask her to add 4 and 3. The problem is that many books add to much distracting details. Adding detail is not the way to simplify computation. Simplification is the way. It remembers me of a fragment of the book ‘Mr God, this is Anna.’ Anna is also having computation lessons at school. Her teacher asks her, “if you’ve got 4 sweets in one hand and 5 in the other, how many sweets do you have?” “I’ve got none,” replies Anna. “And your question is not fair. It’s mean to say I’ve got sweets when I’ve none.”
Computation is not easy to learn. It is very abstract. It doesn’t help to write stories and add details that move away from the abstraction. For me, mathematics became more difficult when new methods were introduced that wrapped the questions in little stories. In general it took me one minute to cross out the details and 2 seconds to answer the mathematical question.

There is another thing that most books do not teach children. It is one of the fundaments of mathematics. I was very pleased when my daughter started discovered it herself some time ago. She started counting with 0. Her reasoning was simple. Before you’ve got one thing (apple, finger, balloon or whatever you’re counting) you’ve got zero. So you start without anything, thus zero, and then comes one. I’ve never found it in one of her books. I don’t know if somebody else told her, but I was surprised. This week I was even more surprised. “Daddy, 0 + 0 = 0,” she said with a special look in her eyes. She noticed that there was something special with this computation. I complimented her for this discovery. I did not explain her how essential this computation is for mathematics. I’m also not going to explain it here. I just state that there is a need for the identity operation in mathematics.

Mister God, this is Anna.

Just a little note about the book I mentioned above. It is written in 1974 and I would characterise it as a romantic tale that illustrates many mystical insights. It’s romantic in the sense of the noble savage. In this book it is the pure child Anna who has unbelievable mystical insights. I still have the intention to make an analysis of all the mystical insights and philosophical ideas that presented in this book. There is a section on mirrors and reflections…

I like the Introduction by Vernon Sproxton, especially where it comes to the Truth question.
Some reviews at amazon.com

Escalator

2005-05-01T21:08:00.000+02:00

Never underestimate an infant. Yesterday she concluded that escalators are very practical for people that have a broken leg. I fully agreed. “People with a wheelchair can also use it”, she said. I said that it would not be possible, because the wheels do not fit on the steps. She looked at me. “They have to use a flat one without steps,” she replied sharp-wittedly. “Like the one we used with skis.” (A ski belt conveyor lift).

Knots

2005-05-01T21:04:00.000+02:00

In the next few weeks I’ll be more late than usual. I already have an excuse. My daughter has taught herself to knot shoelaces. She is very proud of it and wants to demonstrate it every day with the shoes she finds. Unfortunately, when I want to leave I have to untwine shoelaces that have been transformed into a big knot.
Children often do the same things as their parents. Some things they copy. Other things are innate. My mother can tell nice stories about my skills to make knots everywhere and in everything. Listen to the stories of your own childhood and you know how your children will be. How long will it take until my daughter has transformed the laundry in one big knot?

Silence

2005-04-30T23:30:00.000+02:00

It’s been a strange week. Yesterday I’ve seen Mozart’s opera ‘Così Fan Tutte’. Wonderful music and a very simple story. A farce or comedy where two lovers test the fidelity of their fiancées. The title ‘Così Fan Tutte’ (They are all alike) already unveils that the women will fail in this test. A scenario that was considered highly immoral at the time it was written and still makes one frown his brow. But the libretto has many subtleties that make you laugh and think about love. For me this was some light relief.

It was much lighter than last weeks performance of The Elementary Particles by ‘Het Nationale Toneel’. There was enough humour in the play, but is was not cheerful. Although, it was easier to digest than the book written by Michel Houellebecq. It is a story about two brothers struggling with life and love. One is lost in his scientific thoughts, the other in his lusts. Both are not capable to really love another. It’s questioning real love in modern society.

Than, just between those two clamorous artworks about love and life. There was this dreadful news. A very nice colleague lost wife and baby and stays behind with his two year old daughter. Reality without logic. Pitiless. There are no words for it. Just silence….

Elephant

2005-04-19T23:26:00.000+02:00

I was listening to a CD of Miles Davis. "Is that an elephant making music?", was the positive reaction of my daughter. Positive, yes. She usually says, "I don’t like papa-music. I want children music!" This time she listened with interest. "Darling, it is not an elephant. It’s a famous musician playing the trumpet." She looked at me. "No daddy, you’re joking. It is an elephant. They sound just like a trumpet."

Quote of the day: "Good music is like making love". Fernando Lameirinhas.

Free choice or coincidence?

2005-04-18T00:54:00.000+02:00

Roos already replied that my decision to start these reflexions was my own. It also was my own decision to reply on Jelle’s posting. But is it a coincidence that he posted this text exacly 25 years after the dead of Sartre? And why did I associate this text with Sartre? After posting my comment I read an article about Sarte in my newspaper and became aware of this remarkable coincident.
Sartre wrote: "Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth." (from L'Être et le Néant / Being and Nothingness, 1943)
So our freedom implies that we are responsible for our own destiny. We must build it ourselves. The nasty thing is that we are not free to pick the ingredients, the things we encounter on our path.
More Sartre here.

An automobile

2005-04-13T22:55:00.000+02:00

Did you ever buy a car? It’s not an easy thing to do. This time I have put some more constraints. At least I want enough space for luggage and I have restricted my budget. So I looked around for a car that suited me. Most car vendors talk about the qualities of the cars they have. But yesterday there was a young boy, age 12, that came to me and said "Isn’t she beautiful?" He’s going to be a good merchant. It’s not a car. C’est une voiture! Féminin. C’est de l’émotion! L’emozione! And even the British know that. Look at their cars. Jaguar, Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin, MG, Rover and so many others. It’s passion. You don’t buy a car with your brains. You don’t buy it with your heart. You buy it with your .. ehhh .. maybe it’s your tan tien. An automobile should swing and rock and move you with passion.
Once I had a Twingo. The most luxurious one with leather seats and air-conditioning. When I offered to give a ride to a lady, she replied that public transport was okay. Before the Twingo I had a Rover. Everybody enjoyed it.
So finally I know the most important requirement for my new car. The only problem is that if I also want enough space I get problems with my budget.

Echo’s

2005-04-13T21:47:00.000+02:00

Reflections of sound. My head is full of it. Rhythms, melodies, harmonies. Some simple, some complex. I’ve been to a great concert, a performance of Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage. It was my first Zappa. I know very little about him, but he is a genius, madman and a freak. After a few songs my head was overloaded. I tried to follow the musical lines, but lost them. When the intellect fails, emotion is still there. I didn’t know what they where doing, but it was fun. On my way home my head was filled with echo’s. Small fragments of sound that just before had made a song. They say Mozart could reproduce a piece of music with 6 voices that he had heard only once! Well, I can’t. Not even 1 voice. I’ve tried for a long time. Last night, one of my teachers was playing the keyboards. He can. I can’t. He enjoyed it. So did I! There should be more composers with this mad genius.

Existence without perception?

2005-04-12T09:35:00.000+02:00

Today, just one of my favorite pieces of philosophy. As a scientist I put a high value on perception. How could we know that something exists if we cannot perceive it? One of the great founders of Empiricism is George Berkeley (1685-1753). [You’re right. It’s when Newton lived.] But can things exist when they are not perceived? Well, says Bishop Berkeley, God perceives everything. Ronald Knox (brother of Alberto in Sophie’s World?) summarized Berkeley’s answer in the following limerick.

There was a young man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."

"Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the Quad
And that's why this tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by Yours faithfully, God."

But what if God takes a nap? Fortunately, today we have Internet and people all over the world can still perceive us. Hey, I exist!

For Jelle, I have found a special student version here.

Dinner logic

2005-04-11T00:02:00.000+02:00

My best beloved is my wonderful daughter. She’s a bright and shining mirror. A reflector that lets you reflect. Yesterday we had dinner. Like most children she complains about vegetables. She likes meat though, but this time it was a bit spicy. "There is too much pepper in it", she said. "Well, pepper is good against your cold," I said. "It frees your nose." One bite later she asked: "Are there any vitamins in pepper?" "No, not really. Why?" "You see, it’s not healthy to put pepper in the food." I had to honour this point. She looked victorious and I got her meat. But her smile faded when I said that her spinach does contain a lot of vitamins. She is fair. She honoured my point and ate her spinach without further complaints. But I still regret that the pepper will be banned for some time.

She likes meat, especially sausages. She also wants to know everything. Some time ago we had lamb. "Does this meat come from the lambs?", she asked. "Yes, that’s why it’s called lamb meat." "Do the lambs make it?" "Yes, they do." "Do they like it?" "Ehh, not exactly." "Why not?" "These are the lambs buttocks." It took her a second. She said, "Oh…", and took another bite. Yesterday she picked up the topic. She had understood that a horse can be brought to the butcher who makes horse meat. She wanted to know if it hurts when the butcher cuts away the meat. "No, the horse does not feel it, because it is already dead. They let it die before they cut the meat." "Oh. But they may not do that with a mama horse having babies", she said with a firm look. "Don’t they do it?" "No dear." Ethics at the age of 4.

Reflexion?

2005-04-09T23:29:00.000+02:00

I decided to start a blog a few days ago. It took me some time to really start blogging, but I would rather call it a reflex than something I reflected on. It was Jelle who gave me the trigger. He said I should do it and I thought I'll do it. However, I'm not sure that his words were spoken before the thought came into being. This two things might even be unrelated. It’s hard to prove that his words caused my thought. It’s very likely that I already wanted a blog before he said it. I definitely was conditioned, because a year ago another friend said I should start a weblog. It could also be that Roos smiled when I heard the word blog. Who knows? Anyway, on my way home I knew I would start a weblog.

The most difficult part was still to come. What would be my first story? There are so many irrelevant things to start with! There was one thing I was NOT going to do. I would not start with a My First Blog explaining why I wanted to write. No, my first story would be given by my best beloved. And this evening she gave me something to write about. So tonight I created my weblog. But things don’t always (or never) go as you expect. Before I could write my story Blogger asked me the title of my blog. A TITLE? I wasn’t prepared for that question. The answer was not given in a reflex. Lots of transpiration till I got the inspiration, or rather, hit the right word in the dictionary. But that needed some explanation. You’ll find most of it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_(computer_science)
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=reflection
The spelling? Do we reflect on the things we do or are our actions just reflexes?

Honestly, I’m very pleased with the title. It allows me to write about philosophy, mysticism, physics and even computer science.

Why do I write in English and not in Dutch? Just because I want to share some thoughts with friends outside The Netherlands. Forgive me this small mistake.
And the story of my beloved? Tomorrow….