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Dutch / Nederlands

Diary, March 2023


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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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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:

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.

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Re-Generations

This evening, I went to the exhibition Re-Generations at the artist collective B93, which was cooperation between Anya Palamartschuk and Edwin Dertien. The exhibition consisted of three video projections, two on semi-transparent cloths and one on a table. On the table there was also a small 3D printed object, which was printed with clay. On the walls there were a number of panoramic pictures, which seems to be constructed from a single photograph being 'stretched'. There were also some object made with a laser cutter and an embroidery machine. An interesting exhibition. I spend some time talking with Edwin Dertien.

Monday, March 27, 2023

Winter showers

Today, we had a lot of winter showers alternated with sunshine. Around 13:00 hour, there was some wet snow with some real snow flakes that would immediately melt as soon as they touched the ground. Later there also was some hail. At 15:53, there briefly was a rainbow visible, only the top of a, not very bright, single rainbow. After work, through some light hail, I bike to thrift store Het Goed, where at 17:42, I bought the book Na de Jacht: Tien jaar verzamelen in 100 kunstwerken written by Josien Beltman in Dutch and published by Rijksmuseum Twenthe in 2021 from just € 1.00. I was not sure that I already had the book, but decided to buy it anyway. At home, I discovered that I had already bought it. So, now, I have two copies. At the shop, I searched for a kind of wierd book that I had looked at several times, but everytime decided not buy because it was a bit too expensive for my liking. But now that I cannot find it anymore, I kind of regret that I did not buy it. This is definitely not the first time this happened to me and I know it is not going to be the last.

Wednesday, March 29, 2023

Flowers on the magnolia

Some flowers, mostly on the top, of our magnolia have started to open a bit. Non of the flowers has fully opened yet, but it seems they will do soon. We are a little worried with possible cold nights in the coming week that might cause the leaves of the flowers to turn brown.

Checking EML file for Enschede

In the past weeks, I have written a program to check the Election Markup Language files with all the information about the elections on March 15 for Enschede. The program makes use of some files from IParse. With the program I did not find any errors in the files. The file also lists all the irregularies found. It countains the following summary: It seems that not all the difference between the number of admitted voters and the number of ballots are explained. At each polling station there is someone taking in the various types of voting passes, there is someone helping with checking if they are valid, and there is someone handing out the empty ballots. After filling in the ballots, they need to be dropped in a sealed container. It is possible that a number of voting took ballots home. It is also possible that some people took their voting pass instead of handing it in. It is also possible that more ballots were handed out by mistake. If you look at the differences at individual polling stations the numbers are low. I think it is good that these irregularities are carefully documented.

Thursday, March 30, 2023

Half of the flowers

During the day, about half of the flowers on our magnolia opened. There was quite some wind today and not much sun. In the coming days the temperature may drop to 0°C.

Random pairing up with group restrictions

I was asked to implement some algorithm to generate a random pairing of elements belonging to groups with the restriction that only pairings between elements from different groups are allowed. If you start randomly pairing elements you can end up with the situation that you are left with two elements from the same group and maybe have to do some back-tracking. However, I came up with this idea to always randomly select an element from (one of) the largest group(s) and pair that element with a random elements outside the group. In that way you can never end with two elements from the same group and no back-tracking is needed.

This months interesting links

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