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Diary, February 2023


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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.

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Book

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

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?

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 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.

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:

This months interesting links

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