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60 years
I was born on Wednesday, November 1, 1961 at 9:45 in the morning. That means
that today, I will be 60 years according to the calendar and 21915 days old.
But how old am I really? The tropical year, the time that it takes for the seasons to return, is said
to be 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45.19 seconds. Yesterday, around 22:30
in the evening, it was 60 tropical years since I was born.
But the tropical year is shorter than the sidereal year, the time taken by the Earth to orbit the Sun once with
respect to the fixed stars, namely 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.76
seconds. That means that, today at 18:54 it will be 60 sidereal years after I
was born. The average anomalistic year, the time taken for the Earth to
complete one revolution with respect to its apsides, is 365 days, 6 hours, 13 minutes, and 52.6 seconds. That means
that, today around 23:37 it will be 60 average anomalistic years since I was
born.
My colleagues gave me some presents. I got the book Journal 29 Revelation: Interactive Book Game written by
Dimitris Chassapakis in English
and published by Rain Projects Software Developers Limited in 2018,
ISBN:9780692183052 and a bag of Gyokuro tea.
At 17:50, I bought the book Kröller-Müller: honderd jaar bouwen en
verzamelen written by Rudolf Willem Daan Oxenaar in Dutch and published by
Joh. Enschedé in 1988,
ISBN:9789070024543, from thrift store Het Goed
for € 2.25.
In the evening, Conny and I went to see and
experience Foundscape Orchestra
by Daniel Maalman at the former
printing press hall of De Twentsche Courant Tubantia newspaper in Enschede. The two fuzzy
silhouettes seen in this video are the two of us.
Palindrome date (DD-MM-YY and YY.MM.DD)
Today is a palindrome date when written
according to the DD-MM-YY format: 12-11-21 and the YY.MM.DD formats: 21.11.12.
The previous such date was November 2, 2020 and
the next will be November 22, 2022. It is also a
double date when written according the DD-MM-YY format.
At 10:05, I bought the book Ulysses written by James Joyce in English and published by
Wordsworth Classics in 2010, ISBN:9781840226355, from thrift store Het Goed
for € 2.15.
Wasserprobe | Waterproef
I biked to Tetem, where I saw the exhibition SprintExpo 'If it fools you, it is not fake' with works by Valentina Gal, Diana Gheorghiu,
and Sonia Mangiapane. This is part of the
Fotomanifestatie Enschede '21 for which I already visited the other locations
two weeks ago on October 30. Next, I went to
XPO to see the exhibition Wasserprobe |
Waterproef with works by Judith Schepers
and Regine Wolff. The floor of the
exhibition was filled a layer of water. There were some rubber boots available,
but I decided to take of my socks and shoes to wade through the water. I talked
a little with Judith Schepers and at 15:40, I bought the catalogue of the
exhibition for € 24.00.
Faktum
In October 2012, I bought a FAKTUM kitchen from IKEA, which was installed by my brother and one of my sisters. It came
with a 25 year warranty. However, in 2014, IKEA introduced the METOD kitchen
system, which is incompatible with FAKTUM. In the first years after the
introduction of METOD, FAKTUM reserve part remained available. But that is no
longer the case. There are some companies that have started producing spare
parts however. Because the fridge of Conny was
a bit larger and a lot newer, we decided to remove the build-in fridge from
the FAKTUM kitchen and use the space for storage. This required to install some
new shelves and fix the hinges. I tried to order the right type of shelves from
one of these spare parts websites. It was kind of hard to find the right type
of shelves due to the broken interface of the website. They offered a set of
two shelves for 45 €. I wanted to order two of these sets only to
discover that the transportation costs where another 125 €. I decided
to have a look hardware store and for about 30 € we got all the
materials to create four shelves and fix the back of the cupboard. The doors of
the cupboard used to be attached to the door of the fridge, but now that the
fridge was gone, the doors would no longer close. To fix this the hinges needed
to be replace by soft closing hinges. I tried searching the internet for the
original soft closing hinges for the FAKTUM kitchen, but failed to find any.
Instead we bought two sets of two KOMPLEMENT soft closing hinges (intended for
the METOD kitchen system) and I spend some hours trying to fix them by drilling
some new holes in the sides of the cupboard and makes some holes in the doors
a little larger. Today, I succeeded in fixing the doors and get everything to
work as we wanted. If I ever will get a new kitchen, I wonder whether it will
be an IKEA kitchen again, as it seems that the 25 year warranty has little
meaning if something breaks down or if you want to modify your kitchen.
Formnext 2021
Yesterday afternoon and today, I visited the Formnext, the leading trade fair
for additive
manufacturing and the next generation of intelligent manufacturing
solutions, which is held on the Messe Frankfurt. I looked around halls 12.1 and 11.
struct or class
I have been using the programming language C# for two years, after having worked with C++ for many more years. Recently, I was tricked again with some quirck of
C#, which is related to a fundamental difference between struct and
class. In C++, struct and class are semantically
equivalent in their behaviour, except with respect to a small detail, which
partly might explain why I was being tricked again. Take for example, we want
to sum value based on some key and also count the number of values, which for
example could be used to calculate the average afterwards. (I am aware that
this probably could also be done with some clever
LINQ
expression.) For this we define a type Values with a Sum and
Nr member and implement the following method:
public void AddValue(Dictionary<int, Values> dict, int key, int value)
{
if (dict.TryGet(key, out Values values))
{
values.Sum += value;
values.Nr++;
}
else
{
dict.Add(key, new Values() { Sum = value, Nr = 1 };
}
}
The idea of this method is to check if the key is present with the
TryGet method and then either modify the value or add a new entry in
the dictionary. However, this code does not work when Values is
defined as a struct instead of a value, because when it is
defined as a struct the method TryGet returns a copy of the
value in the dictionary and modifying that value does not change the value in
the dictionary, where as when Values is defined as a class it
returns a reference to the value in the dictionary. C# is one of the
programming languages that have decided to hide the difference between a value
and a reference to a value. In languages, like C this difference is made more explicit, which requires more
syntatical sugar.
This a common problem when deciding to make things explicit or implicit.
B.1.1.529
The new B.1.1.529 variant is going to be the test if we learned anything about
dealing with COVID-19. Besides Botswana and
South Africa, it already has been detected in Hong Kong and Israel. Some
countries are closing their borders, but I wonder whether we will be able to
confine it. There are indications that it more infectious than the now dominant
Delta variant and due to the high number of mutations in the spike protein,
there is a reasonable chance that current vaccins will be less effective
against this variant. Actually, it shows that we have failed to deal with
COVID-19, because scientists have warned for the chance of variants that evade
current vaccins and that it was just a matter of waiting before it would
appear.
Book
At 10:01, I bought the book Het gezicht van de AKI edited by Maarten
Binnendijk, Saskia Huisman, and Regina Kroeders, written in Dutch and published
by Hardyuitgeverij in 1997,
ISBN:9789075522075, from thrift store Het Goed
for € 1.60. Yesterday, I already saw this book, but did not buy it
because I was afraid that I already had a copy of it. I went back this
morning, after I concluded that I did not have it yet.
Yesterday, two planes from South-Africa arrived in the Netherlands with 600
passangers in total. Before they boarded the plane all of them had to show a
negative test result (with a rapid nasal test, for example) not older than 24
hours. On arrival, 61 of them tested positive with COVID-19. Those who tested negative were free to leave but where requested
to stay in isolation for five days. Those who tested positive and had a place
where they could stay isolated either by themselves or with the group they
traveled with, where also allowed to leave. They were requested to stay in
isolation for five days if they showed no symptoms and for seven days if they
did show symptoms. People who arrived from South-Africa in the past days are
urged to have themselves tested. Today, the samples from those who tested
positive will be checked for the Omicron variant. There is a big chance that
someone in the Omicron variant is already spreading in the Netherlands and I
suspect that it will not take long before it is spreading uncontolled as well.
I went to the Overkill Festival. I wore
the necklace Conny made from the contents of the .Festival Box we got
Last year. I looked around. I liked the following
art works:
The theme of this tenth Overkill Festival is Collective Masquerade. Because of
this there were several 'makeup' stations around the venue. At one of them, I
put a dot of nail polish on the nail of my left thumb and than pushed the nails
of my thumbs together, which transfered part of the nail polish to the nail of
my right thumb. (Before I left the venue, I removed most of the polish as not
to scare other people.)
I sat around and talked with some of the people of the modular meet-up. I left
before the modular synthersizer music event started in the evening.
After having visited the festival, I walked through the city. At
Fotogalerie Objektief, I
watched the exhibition Klei with
pictures by Ben Vulkers. I walked
into the Beeld & Aambeeld
gallery, where there were two works by Billy
Foley on display. At the coffee and thea shop Simon Lévelt,
I bought a tea water thermometer. Finally, I visited bookshop Broekhuis, where at 16:49:16, I bought the book Nietzsche
written by Paul van Tongeren in Dutch and published by Amsterdam University
Press in 2016, ISBN:9789048529414, for € 5.95.
A little bit of snow
This morning, when I went outside, I noticed a little snow on some parts of the grass in the garden.
It was reported that the Omicron variant was found in 13 positive tests so far. These are of
the 61 that tested positive last Friday from the 624
passengers that arrived in two planes from the Netherlands. A similar amount
of passangers arrived in the past days, but they were not tested like those
on the Friday, maybe because the way that was done was critized. In the past
days those who continued elsewhere were not tested and those who left the
airport were offered a free test. About half of the people did not take the
test. There is currently no law that allows the government to force people to
take a test. So, the operation of last Friday, which drew some critizism with
respect how it was executed, seems to have been an exceptional event. But it
does give some interesting information. From this one could make some estimates
how many people could already have been infected with the Omicron variant in
the Netherlands.
Omicron variant spreading
Today, it was reported that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 was
detected in test samples taken on November 19 and 23. The cases are not
related. One of the two persons has been in one of the countries in the
south of Africa. The other has not and a connection with someone coming from
there has not been established yet. This suggest that the variant has already
been spreading over the world undetected and probably cannot be confined
anymore.
This months interesting links
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