Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30
|
Vitamin D
There is more and more evidence that vitamin D has a positive effect on how someone responds to a COVID-19 infection. A recent double-blind experiment showed that
vitamin D is even a good treatment option for people who have been
administered to a hospital: Effect of Calcifediol Treatment and best Available Therapy versus best
Available Therapy on Intensive Care Unit Admission and Mortality Among Patients
Hospitalized for COVID-19: A Pilot Randomized Clinical study.
In the past weeks the number of registered infections has been increasing in
the Netherlands, but so far this has not led to a strong increase of people
administered to a hospital and the number of casualties. Only about 3% of the
people who are being tested, test positive on COVID-19. Among the people who
test negative, there also some people who have no symptoms, but have themselves
tested because they came from a high-risk area or have come into close contact
with someone who was infected. I have heard of several people who were ill,
even with a few days of high fever. There seems to be some kind of other virus
going round. You would expect that there are less infection now that people
practice social distancing (albeit to a lower degree than at the start of the
outbreak). One reason why there are not many people in hospital, is because it
seems that mostly younger people test positive. Maybe that older people
excersize more social distancing. Another reason could be that many people
have higher vitamin D levels so shortly after the summer. So far, I have not
heard any statements in the media about administering vitamin D supplements
for people who are at risk to develop severe complications due to COVID-19.
Dune 2020 trailer
Yesterday evening, shortly after six, I watched the trailer for the Dune (2020) film. When I saw it I was not sure whether this would be a
good film adaptation. Even one of the first words in the trailer doesn't match
the book, because Chani calls Paul Usul in his dream. And I also can't
remember that the book speaks of a crusade (Paul in the trailer says: "There is
a crusade coming"), but of a jihad, a holy war. This morning, I watched
the Dune featurette.
Now that I've seen this, I think it might be a good movie. I doubt whether all
layers in the book will be addressed. Maybe some will only be recognized by
those who have read the book. It is only after I reread the book last year, that I understood that it is (also) about a profound tragedy of
someone who without realizing himself degenerates into someone he never wanted
to become. Let's hope the film will be a great success, because it only covers
the first half (more two thirds) of the book, and it would be nice if the
second half and the following books are also made into films with the same
cast.
GOGBOT
At noon, I went to the GOGBOT exhibition, which this year is only held at a few locations. Due to
COVID, the exhibition inside requires you to buy a ticket for a certain time
slot. When I entered the exhibition some installations were not running yet.
I found the following installations interesting:
- level 1, number 14: CovidTeller by Dave Borghuis.
- level 1, number 9: I Enjoyed The Parts in Your Mind by Coralie Vogelaar.
- level 1, number 10: Offshore banking for the
little guy by Herbert Luciole.
- level 1, number 8: Research findings by Rosa Menkman.
- level 1, number 7: Installation by Heidi Hörstuz.
- level 1, number 16: 3 level reboot fossile spacestation WARP SPUTNIK
by Vladimir Grafov.
- level 1, number 6: SEISMIC by Gijs van Ouwerkerk.
- level 1, number 5: Installation by Telemagic.
- level 1, number 3: panOptical by Roel Weerdenburg
- level 2, number 2: Inner Landscape by Martina Dal Brollo
- stationsplein, number 4: Halbzeit by Wermke / Leinkauf.
Around 14:00, I went to TETEM art space to
see the exhibition Reflecties
(Dutch for reflections). If I am not mistaken, this is the first time that they
open again for an exhibition. There were a lot of students entering before me
and I had to wait some time to see the exhibition. At the start of the
exhibition, I was offered a tablet, but I refused it, only to discover that it
was required for each part of the exhibition. I was a little dissapointed as it
felt a little like a physical website, more about a philosophical discussion
than about art.
Border poles near Coevorden
Conny recently bought the book Op zoek naar
grenspalen (which translates as Searching for border poles) by
Herman Posthumus, which give walking routes along border poles along the
border with German and the provinces of Drenth and Groningen. Today, we
decided to give the first route a try. We parked the car near the pumping
station called De Mars south of Coevorden and close to the border between the
provinces of Overijssel and Drenth and started walking along the canal. We
first walked on the north side of the canal before I consulted the book and
realized we should be walking on the south side of the canal. We had a hard
time finding many of the poles that were mentioned in the book because there
was a lot over overgrown. The poles we found are:
- At 11:29, pole 133, which is at tbe border of the provinces of
Overijssel and Drenth as well.
- At 11:32, pole 133-I.
- At 12:00, pole 134-I.
- At 12:23, pole 135.
At 12:49, pole 137, which we unearthed after having it located with the
help of some pocket knifes after having estimated it location using a
picture from the book. This pole has sunk into the ground completely. We
even did not completely unearth the top, but only the area around the
number tag attached to the top.
- At 12:52, pole 137-I.
- At 13:10, on the way back, pole 134-II.
Next we drove a little further along the border and parked the car on the
Europark Allee. The border makes bluges in both directions, following a ditch,
in a kind of S-shape. There was a farmer who had land on both sides of the
border along the ditch. Now there is some dispute about on which side of the
ditch the border lies. Because governments on both sides of the border, wanted
to create an in industrial area, now called Europark, he was expropriated.
(The ditch is no longer visible and the main offices of Intergas have been build in the area.) He claims that
he still owns the area of the ditch, because it was not bought by government
parties on both sides of the border. And because there is also a dispute about
the exact location on the border, he now has declared it an independ country
called: "Vrijstaat Beukeveld". More information, in Dutch, can be found on
the site www.eurostaete.eu.
The poles we found there are:
- At 13:47, the former pole 143. We searched for the official pole 143,
which according to the book should have been 20 meters futher away, but we
did not locate it, fearing that it is now in the middle of the pond near
the Intergas offices.
- At 13:58, pole 142, one of two poles where the border is in the middle of
the poles.
- At 14:03, pole 141.
- At 14:17, pole 140.
- At 14:28, pole 142, the other of the pair.
- At 14:31, pole 144 and metal circle on the bike path with the text: "grenz
punkt" (German for border point).
- At 14:46, pole 145-II.
- At 14:49, pole 145-III.
- At 14:50, pole 146.
- At 14:51, pole 147, which no longer stands at the original point, which
lies on the road.
Some links (in Dutch) with information about poles along the route that we
took:
After this, we also walked around the city center of Coevorden, which used to be a fortified town.
32.1° Celcius
The temperature at Twenthe Airport went up to
32.1° Celsius, which breaks the previous record of 29.3° for the
temperature on this date in 2016.
PARR specification
In the past weeks, I have been thinking about the steps with which a formal
specification of the PARR patterns could be
transformed into the PARR generator, which I
wrote last month. In a way it is also similar to proving the correctness of the
program. I have come up with some kind of specification of the collection of
all PARR patterns using a made up specification languages where types are
defined as sets. There are three types of 'complex' values: list
(denoted with square brackets), sets (denoted with curly brackets) and maps
(denoted with curly brackets and a colon separating key and value).
Sets stands for all enumeratable sets and Nat stands for a
natural numbers (including zero).
Graphs = { { "V" : V, "E" : E }
| V in Sets and
E subset { { v1, v2 }
| v1 in V and v2 in V and v1 != v2 } }
subgraph(G1 in Graphs, G2 in Graphs)
= G1."V" subset G2."V" and G1."E" subset G2."E"
FullPARRgraph = { "V" : V, "E" : E }
where { "V" : V, "E" : E } in Graphs
and V = { [x, y]
| x in Nat and y in Nat and
0 <= x and x < 4 and 0 <= y and y < 5 }
and E = { { [x1,y1], [x2,y2] }
| x1+1 = x2 and y1 = y2 or
x1 = x2 and y1+1 = y2 or
x1+1 = x2 and y1+1 = y2 or
x1 = x2+1 and y1+1 = y2 }
PARR(nrp in Nat, nrl in Nat)
= { graph
| subgraph(graph, FullPARRgraph) and
size(graph."V") = nrp and size(graph."E") = nrl }
This is not really an executable specification, yet it contains everything to
calculate the PARR function.
Second wave
It looks like the second wave of COVID-19
infections has arrived in the Netherlands (as well). The number of infection
has steady risen in the past weeks. It is only last week that also the number
of hospitalizations has gone up. In the past week they have doubled. It is
likely that this will continue in the coming weeks. Last Friday some addition
regional measures have been announced. This evening, I watched
last Sundays episode
of Zondag met
Lubach. It explained how the problems with the number of test being
available in the Netherlands is related to the choice of the government to have
the tests being done by the fifty regional labs, which are tied to hospitals,
and not using commercial testing capacity until recently. Hugo de Jonge, the current minister of Health, Welfare and Sport has stated that this was also to
sustain the regional labs until after the COVID-19 crisis. The program also
mentioned that one of the member of the Outbreak Management Team is the
chairman of the Dutch Association for Medical Microbiology, which represents
the microbiologist working at the regional labs.
Border poles near Coevorden (part 2)
Conny and I continued our search for border
poles near Coevorden. We looked at three different locations. Some poles where
hard to find due to a lot of over grown. The poles we found are:
- At 11:36, two poles 132-I.
- At 12:06, pole 138-I.
- At 12:17, pole 138.
- At 12:50, two poles 147-II.
- At 13:09, only one of two poles 148.
- At 13:23, pole 148-I.
- At 13:34, two poles 149.
- At 13:40, pole 150-I.
- At 13:54, pole 151.
- At 13:56, pole 151-I.
- At 13:57, pole 151-II.
- At 14:10, pole 151-III.
Chestnut
At 9:58, I picked up a chestnut from the
Helmerstraat (road) during our walk of this morning.
Book
At 17:34:46, I bought the book Elsbeth Cochius: Begegnungen /
Ontmoetingen written by Elsbeth Cochius and Gert Gerrits in German and
Dutch, published by Stichting Programmaraad Beeldende Kunst in 2008,
ISBN:9783981069327, from thrift store Het Goed
for € 3.50.
A simple Git workflow
Git is a distributed
version-control system for tracking changes in source code during software
development. It is probably the most popular system at the moment. But it is
also a very complex system, which can be used in many different ways. I also
have noted that there is often some confusion about the internals of Git
among people starting to work with it. Many introduction to Git, like
Learn Git Branching, fail to
explain the different workflows of working with it. Below, I present a simple
workflow, which works good for a small team.
Although Git is a distributed version-control system, it is often used in a
centralized manner, where there is a central repository and where everyone
syncronizes work through this central repository. There are free Git repository
services, such as GitHub
and GitLab, which also
provide additional features, such as issue tracking. It is also possible to set
up a central repository on a file server using the "git init --bare
targetdir" command. The common way of creating a local copy of a
central repository is to use the "git clone path", where the
path is either a link to a repository on a service or a file path to a
respository on a shared file server. Before you start working, you should
issue the following commands:
- git config --global pull.rebase true
- git config --global rebase.autoStash true
After a local clone of the central repository has been made, you just can
start working. By default you are now in the master branch. If you
have been working on some issue for some time or you have heard about someone
else having pushed a commit to the central repository, you issue the command:
If there are indeed new commits on the central repository, this will stash
your changes, pull these commits, and apply the set of stashed differences to
the up-to-date state of your local repository. This could lead to merge
conflict, which need to be resolved. (There are various tools to resolve
conflicts, but I find simply editing the files often the easiest way.) You can
repeat this as often as you want.
Now that you are ready to commit your work, your issue:
- git add files to specify the files you want to include in
your commit. This command can be repeated. It is also possible to specify
a directory.
- git commit to create the commit
- git pull to see if there are some new commits in the central
repository that you need to deal with. If this command does not reply that
your local repository is already up-to-date, it means that your last commit
has been applied to the last commits from the central repository. Then you
need:
- Resolve any merge conflicts
- Build and test your work. Fix any problems.
- git add to add resolved merge conflicts and fixes.
- git commit
And repeat this step, until there are no new commit pulled from the
central repository.
- git push to push your commit to the central repository.
There is still a chance that between since the last git pull command
someone has pushed a new commit. In that case a merge will occur in your
history. This merge could have broken the build and/or some tests. It is good
to verify if this the case and fix any problems.
Editted text on October 7, 2020
This months interesting links
Home
| August 2020
| October 2020
At 12:49, pole 137, which we unearthed after having it located with the
help of some pocket knifes after having estimated it location using a
picture from the book. This pole has sunk into the ground completely. We
even did not completely unearth the top, but only the area around the
number tag attached to the top.