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I write, therefore I am

With this variation on a famous statement by the philosopher Descartes, I would like to express that the act of writing about what happens in my life is important to me.

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Official reports of the voting

Yesterday, I discovered that the official reports about last Wednesday voting are available. A copy of the official report for polling station 673 (in Enschede) is the PDF: 0153_Stembureau_673_Ravenhorsthoek34_PS23.pdf. I compared the number with the number I noted down last Wednesday and I found no differences, except that I noted down a 20th party with zero votes while there were only 19 parties. I also downloaded the EML file with the counts. Yesterday, I spend some time to write a program based on IParse using the unparse function, but that did not work out very well. This evening, I spend writing a program (using some files from IParse) to read the EML file, which is in the XML format, into a more readable format. I also compared the numbers for polling station 673 in the output with those in the official report and I found no differences.

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Drents Museum

Conny and I went to Drents Museum. We first visited the exhibitions Dying in beauty: The world of Pompeii and Herculaneum. I found the following works or objects noteworthy: We were a bit disappointed about this quality of this exhibition. I felt that it lacked a lot of technical information. For example, there was some blue glass in the exhibition and we wondered why it was blue.

Next we saw the exhibition Wegzehr with works by Neo Rauch. I found the following works noteworthy:

It was rather busy at the museum.

CODA Museum

Later, Conny and I went to CODA Musuem, a museum in Apeldoorn. There we first saw the exhibition Behind the Screens. The works (almost all of them, I think) in the order I noted them down: (The last six are also part of the exhibition Coderen: ambacht van de 21e eeuw, I understand.)

At the De Van Reekum Galerij the following works by Peter ten Lohuis were on display:

Form the exhibition 005 Apeldoorn Art, I found the following works noteworthy:

Wednesday, March 15, 2023

Counting ballots

Today, we had provincial and water boards elections. Tonight I went to watch the casting of the votes at polling station 673. I arrived at the polling station at 8:56 pm. At 21:00 counting according to the CRAFT Counting method started with the turning over of the container with the ballot papers for the water authority elections. They were divided by the people at the polling station on even and odd party numbers. At 21:17 they were done with that.

At 21:18 they did the same with the ballots for the provincial councils.

At 21:35 they finished and distributed ballots per party. This was done at two long tables with someone standing in the middle with the bills, which were then placed on piles of left and right by two helpers. Parties with many votes (e.g. lists 7 and 13) were moved closer.

At 21:57 they were done with that. The ballot papers for each party were then counted by two different people. Once from the left side of the note and once from the right side. Equal numbers were found for all parties.

At 22:12 they were finished and the provisional result was determined. The result was: list 1: 23 votes, list 2: 23 votes, list 3: 37 votes, list 4: 35 votes, list 5: 42 votes, list 6: 39 votes, list 7: 49 votes, list 8: 28 votes, list 9: 13 votes, list 10: 9 votes, list 11: 6 votes, list 12: 22 votes, list 13: 87 votes, list 14: 9 votes, list 15: 22 votes, list 16: 6 votes, list 17: 13 votes, list 18: 14 votes, list 19: 2 votes and list 20: 0 votes. That makes 479 valid votes. With a blank vote and an invalid ballot paper (with all the boxes of a party colored) the total came to 481, which corresponds to the number of voting passes submitted. Three people from the municipality also came by to see how the counting of the votes was going.

At 22:20 this was finished and the number of votes per candidate were then counted. This was done with forms on which the number of votes per candidate was tallied. One person always read the numbers of the candidates and the other did the tallying.

Subsequently, the distribution of the ballot papers for the water authority elections among the parties was started while someone was busy transferring the numbers on the completed forms to the official report. Around 22:57 the distribution of the ballot papers over the parties was finished.

The votes for each party were then counted. Someone found one ballot that was in the wrong pile. It also turned out that the number of the second count did not match the first and the banknotes for this batch were counted for the third time by a third person. That number was found to correspond with the second censuses. All this was noted on the forms and the total number of ballots (including nine blank ballots and one invalid ballot) were added together and the number matched the number of ballots received. With finished this around 23:21.

Finally, the candidates were counted. This had to be done twice for two batches, because the number of ticks did not match the previously determined number of notes per batch. This was correct in both recounts of the candidates. In one of these recounts I counted the number of votes for the first candidate and that turned out to be correct with the number of tally on the form.

At 23:55 the counting was completed and the counts were transferred to the official report. Then all ballots and completed forms were placed in sealed bags and envelopes in one of the containers used for collecting the ballots. I didn't wait for these containers to be picked up to take them to the collection point where all ballots will be counted again tomorrow.

(follow-up)

Monday, March 13, 2023

Link

Sunday, March 12, 2023

More Dune reaction videos

During the past week, I watched some more reaction videos to Dune 2021 film. On Wednesday, I watched: On Thursday, I watched: On Friday, I watched: Yesterday, I watched: Today, I watched:

Friday, March 10, 2023

Snow

It has been raining almost the whole day. But around four in the afternoon, the rain slowly changed into snow. When I biked home, around half past five, the snow started to accumulated at more and more places, even at the streets, where it usually is the last place where it stays. I guess about 1cm of snow fell. During the evening, some of the snow melted again. In the past two days we had some wet snow.

Thursday, March 9, 2023

Link

Tuesday, March 7, 2023

Wet snow

This afternoon, when Conny and I went for a walk, it started to snow. Actually, it was more something in the middle of light hail and wet snow. At some point it did stay at the ground at some spots. I felt that most of it had disappeared when we arrived at home. Later in the afternoon, I saw some more white stuff falling from the sky. There are some forcasts for some considerable amount of snow, but it is mostly in the southern part of the country and it seems that we are just at the border of it.

Cyber Resilience Act

I came across the article The EU's new Cyber Resilience Act is about to tell us how to code. I understand that this act goes covers a lot of software. I wonder to which extend this could also involve softare that I have developed both professionally and privately.

Monday, March 6, 2023

More Dune reaction videos

I watched some more reaction videos to Dune 2021 film. Yesterday, I watched:

This evening, I watched:

Saturday, March 4, 2023

Into the city

I went biking to the city center. I walked to Fotogalerie Objektief where I saw the exhibition Mensenleven (Dutch for 'people and life' or 'peoples lives') with photographs by Marty van Dijken. Next, I walked to Concordia where I saw the exhibition Doublet #3: Heike Gallmeier en Roos van Haaften. I liked the light installations by Roos van Haaften. I also spend some time at Bookshop Broekhuis, but I did not buy anything.

Thursday, March 2, 2023

Estates of Twickel foundation

In the afternoon, Conny and I visited the Twickel park again. There I bought a map of the estates of Twickel foundation. The foundation owns about 57.79 square kilometers of estates in various locations in the Netherlands and just across the border in Germany. The largest part of it being around the city of Delden. The foundation is the 14the largest land owner in the Netherlands according to this Dutch overview on the website of the Volkskrant newspaper. Although there are foundations with more land, it looks like it is the largest foundation coming from a single private land owner. We walked around the park for over an hour.

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Jupiter and Venus

In the evening, Conny and I went outside to take pictures of the Jupiter Venus conjecture. I used a tripod and shutter delay to take the pictures. The camera used a shutter time of about five sevonds. I had to make the lighting about 2 stops darker for the best result. One of my pictures is shown below:

Saturday, February 25, 2023

Dune reaction videos

I watched a lot of reaction videos to the Dune (2021) movie. Interesting to see how people response to the different scenes and how much they understand of it. I watched the following reaction videos:

Friday, February 24, 2023

Link

Friday, February 17, 2023

Election fraud

There is a political party in the Netherlands that is doing badly in the polls who now say that if they lose it will be because of electoral fraud. In the Netherlands voting is done on paper. For some time we did have electronic voting machines, but they were abolished on the basis that there is a theoretical possibility for eavesdropping. At the end of the voting day, all the votes are publically counted at the polling station. They always count all the votes for each party and optionally can also count the votes for each candidates. An official report is made of the count. Then the next day, all the voting forms and the reports are collected at the townhall and checked again. If the votes per candidate were not counted, they are counted. If there is any doubt about the correctness, the voring forms are counted again. Any one, can raise objections against the counts and voting commision has to deal with them. Again this is all done in public. The counts per polling station are published per party. The counts are entered into a database and summed to arrive, about a week later, the final outcome of the voting. All the counts, down to the level of the number of votes for each candidate in each polling station are published and can be downloaded for verification. For the last national voting, from 2021, they can be downloaded here: Verkiezingsuitslag Tweede Kamer 2021. They are in the Election Markup Language. The software that is used from adding all votes up and producing the above data files, is called OSV2020. More information about this program, including links to the source code, can be found at the page Eisen, specificaties en toetsingsrapporten Ondersteunende Software Verkiezingen 2020 (OSV2020). The GitHub repository sj/ondersteunende-software-verkiezingen contains the version of the software from 2018 and some modifications to attempt to run it because it was missing some of the dependencies. I do not know if the current version that can be downloaded does have information about the dependencies and can be build into an executable version.

Humans are not yet defeated by AI

It was Sunday, March 12, 2016, that AlphaGo beated Lee Sedol at playing Go. Later, deepmind developed AlphaZero an even stronger AI. This effort was also repeated by Leela Zero and KataGo, which is currently one of the strongest Go playing AIs that is freely available. But accoring to Adversarial Policies Beat Superhuman Go AIs a strategy has been found to beat these two AIs by a strong amateur player. Now it looks like this shows that Go AIs do not have the 'deep understanding' of Go as they were thought to have. It seems that many amateurs Go players can learn the tricks to exploit these weaknesses. In some sense it is more sensational than Lee Sedol beating AlphaGo, because it shows that Go is not yet beaten by AI and that this is only the true start of the battle between humans and AI with respect to Go. On Hacker News, Adam Gleave, on of the authors of the paper, mentions that the creator of KataGo already has started a training run with the strategy and succeeded to tipple the balance in the other direction. But as Gleave mentions, it is still not clear if KataGo just learned an easy trick to defend against the strategy or now has achieved a real deep understanding of the game. The search for new weaknesses will probably continue for some time.

Link

Sunday, February 12, 2023

TARt-festivals

I have been reading in some of my old diaries during the time that I studied and worked at the University of Twente. I found something about the TARt-festival, which was held several times during that period. I found that the university weekly paper can be searched online. In the edition from March 27, 1986 I found an annoucment on page 4 for the exhibition in 1986. The edition of May 14, 1987 has some articles on page 3 about the TARt-festival on May 21-23, 1986. One of the articles mentions Peter Geerts who created kinetic sound objects. I remember having seen some of these kinetic sound objects in several exhibitions at the university. In the edition from May 27, 1987 there is some mentioning of it on the front page (which mentions the 'Time' performance by Joep Neefjes, which I attended), page 7, and page 16. The front page of the edition of March 3, 1988 mentions the IJsprisma by Aris de Bakker being on display at the Rijksmusem Twente after the production of it failed from the TARt-festival. The edition of September 21, 1989 on page 5 has an announcement for the TARt-festival that will be held on October 9-14, 1989. It mentions the artist Peter Haartsen and his probject "Roterende Monitoren" (rotating monitors). During the year, I came in contact with him and helped him with writing a program for a prototype consisting of one rotating television flanked by two static televisions. The rotation television was made with some parts from a washing machine. The software ran on an Atari ST. I wrote a program that read the position of the monitor (using a three or four bits Gray code encoding) and displayed a bouncing ball. The prototype was not shown on the exhibition. The edition of October 5, 1989, contains some articles on page 5. The edition of October 12, 1989 has some reports on the front page and page 3. On the last page, it mentions that there will be an exhibition after the festival about some of the art works and/or their construction. The edition of October, 1991, has an articke on page 2 about the TARt-festival that will be held from October 4 till 9. I remember seeing The Electric Swaying Orchestra at the university.

Friday, February 10, 2023

Links

Thursday, February 9, 2023

Ithaka

I saw the Ithaka documentary film on Dutch television about the Julian Assange. It gave me the eerie feeling that we here in Europe are not as free as we think we are and also the feeling that here journalist are prosecuted for revealing the truth. The film also has a fragment of the inaguration address of Joe Biden. But what is value of stating truth is one of the common objects that define America when you prosecute a foreign journalist for reporting about war crimes commited by American soldiers?

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Book

At 17:36, I bought the following two books from charity shop Het Goed, both for € 1.50:

Saturday, February 4, 2023

Museum MORE

Conny, Annabel, her boyfriend, and I, visited Museum MORE. (This was a present from Annabel and her boyfriend for my birthday last year.) There we saw two exhibition. We first watched the exhibition Streetview with photographs and a short film by Bas Losekoot. I saw the following pictures (in given order):

Next we watched the exhibition Realism From 1900 To Today with works from the collection of the museum. This exhibition was divided in a number of topics. The works I found notable, per topic are listed below.

Monochroom

Realistic and Abstract

Nostalgia

Just like the real thing

Uneasy Reality

Skin and Hair

Suspense

Representative?

At 15:20, I bought the book Philip Akkerman Kunstenaarsdagboek written by Philip Akkerman in Dutch and published by Nai010 Publishers on Friday, October 9, 2020, ISBN:9789462086098, for € 19.95. Conny bought a Pigma Micron fileniners set | 3 pens, 0.3 mm + 0.4 mm + 0.5 mm, black for me.

Afterwards, we went walking in the Marke Gosselse Heide, an area with heather. We walked around the heather area for about 4.7Km. Next we drove to a parking area near Deventer opposite of the river IJssel and took the ferry across the river and walked to Indian restaurant. I has: Dal Soup, Shabji Kabab (as a starter), Bhuma Curry special, Dall Tarka Mushroom Massala, Pillaw rice, Mixed Salad, with Nan bread (as the main dish), and some icecream (as dessert). The others had similar dishes. The food was nice, but we had to wait a long time for the main dish.

Friday, February 3, 2023

Link

Monday, January 30, 2023

Link

Sunday, January 29, 2023

Dune 2021 film

In the past weeks, I spend some time working on my page about Dune 2021 film where I compare the transcript with the book, a script and the screenplay. For this I watched most of the film and attempted to count the number of shots in every scene. It was interesting to watch it in such a detailed way, because it made me aware of the sometimes subtle symbolism of certain shots. The most obvious being the various shots of the ox. Another example is the shot of Paul closing his fist with the ducal ring inside followed by a shot of the open hand of Leto hanging down.

Friday, January 27, 2023

Link

Thursday, January 26, 2023

Museum No Hero

Conny and I went to Museum No Hero where we saw two exhibitions. First we saw the exibition Oog in Oog met de Wereld (Eye to Eye with the World). The works that I found noteworthy (all of them, if I am not mistaken): From the exhibition Verzamelen is kleur bekenen. De wilde collectie van Geert Steinmeijer (Collecting is showing your true colours. The wild collection of Geert Steinmeijer), I found the following works noteworthy.

Afterwards, we walked towards Twickel Castle and around the area. The castle now belongs to a foundation that owns large areas of land around the city Delden.

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Fairy ring

I found a fairy ring in the back garden of our house. It is actually inside an old doormat.

Links

Sunday, January 22, 2023

愉快的春节

Today is the first day of the year 4720, the year of the rabbit according to the Chinese calendar. The spring festival has begun.

Speck of snow

When we went walking this afternoon, there were some speck of snow falling from the sky, non of which stayed on the ground. On Friday, there was some substantial snow in the Southern parts of the country but nothing in our part of the country.

Small area substitution patterns

In the past weeks, I continued working on the program for find substitution patterns for irregular grids of squares and equilateral triangles. Below it shows 53 of the 15407 patterns with a boundary length of 27 that the program found, starting with the pattern with the smallest area. As can be seen, many of these patterns can be split in more than one smaller pattern. I have wondered whether I should exclude these combinations in the counts, but it should be noted that there are restriction on how substiturion patterns can touch each other. The program does check if the outside of the boundary can be filled with squares and triangles. It does this by checking if the coves can be filled. The count of substitution patterns per length of the boundary, starting with a length of 12, is: 1, 0, 1, 1, 4, 3, 12, 15, 44, 75, 200, 411, 1070, 2420, 6304, 15407, 40569. I have not found this sequence in The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences®.

This text is displayed if your browser does not support HTML5 Canvas.

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Underneath the wings of a butterfly

This afternoon, I visited the exhibition Underneath the wings of a butterfly at TETEM art space. I only saw the augmented reality part of the exhibition where you had to walk around the room with a tablet to which headphone were attached. You had to follow a butterfly. Interesting concept. There were a lot of flat photographs in the scenery. I did not wait for the virtual reality part of the exhibition.

Friday, January 20, 2023

Introduction

Diaries
March 2023
February 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022
October 2022
2023
2022
2021
-- contact --

Family

Frans
Conny
Annabel
Andy
Li-Xia†
Others
Pictures

Collecting

Books
Maps
Bookshelves
Art works
Computers
Cameras
Trips
Flights
Weddings
Funerals
Reading
Movies
Useless lists

Hacking

My life as a hacker
Signature programs
Software enginering
The Art of Programming
HTML to LaTeX
JavaScript
eXtreme Programming
Programs
Pluim

Puzzles

Hamilton cycles
cutting sticks
Califlower fractal
more...

SARS-CoV-2

Tracking
Trends
Prediction
nextstrain.org/ncov


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