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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.

Wednesday, May 20, 2026

Compact shapes of hexagons

I was wondering if there was a more compact shape to arrange 64 hexagons than the one I have been using for place the pieces from The China Labyrinth. I searched The On-line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences® with some keywords hoping to find the sequence for the number of compact (convex) shapes for a given number of hexagons. I did not find a sequence related to this. I wrote the program convexhaxagon.cpp to calculate all the shapes up to 99 hexagons. With the numbers, I did find the sequence A116513: 'Number of distinct hexagons of n points chosen from triangular lattice A_2 with sides parallel to the principal axes of that lattice. Degenerate sides (of length 1) are permitted.' This sounds like it is the same, I was looking for. I also searched the sequence of the most compact shapes, which are the shapes with the shortest perimeter. I found the sequence A216522: 'Integers of the form 2*x + 3*y with nonnegative x and y, with repetitions,' that matches the perimeter when measured around the centers of the hexagon for first 99 numbers. Although it is quite likely that the two sequences are the same (beyond the part they are the same), I have no idea how to prove that they are equal.

Christian Freeling

I read that Christian Freeling was found died yesterday at the age of 79. According to a news report in Dutch he was found dead at the bottom of the stairs by a neighbour, who already suspected something might be wrong because his raccoon dog Snowy was left outside during the night. There are reasons to believe that he already died on Monday. Yesterday, I still visited his website with respect to The China Labyrinth. I met in 1981, when I started studying at the university during the game evenings of Fanaat. He introduced me to some of his abstract board games with complete information. We also had some philosphical discussions and was impressed by his intelligence and his ideas.

Links

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

The China Labyrinth: I Ching

This evening, I did some experimentation with the visualization of compact solutions of the The China Labyrinth to connect it with the I Ching. First I decided to adapt the shape of the pieces suitable for a physical puzzle. I also decided to place the hexagrams on them. The upper three lines reference to the top three sides from left-to-right and the lower to the bottom ones also from left-to-right. The I also decided to have the names in Chinese characters as an alternative to be selected. (Note that the selection will become effective for the next solution to be realized.) I am not really happy with the result.

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Monday, May 18, 2026

Seven Mystic Questions

I was watching a Dune: Part One first reaction video on YouTube, when I realized that the phrase "Who are you?" that is heard when Paul and Jessica enter the room where the reverend mother Gaius Helen Mohiam is sitting is not found in the book and that it might be taken from the Aql (from the Arabic عَقْل) as found in the appendix "Terminology of the Imperium" where it is defined as: "the test of reason. Originally, the 'Seven Mystic Questions' beginning: 'Who is it that thinks?'" I have always wondered what the other six question could be. I used Google and its AI gave the following list:
  1. Who is it that thinks?
  2. Who is it that loves?
  3. What is the beginning of the end?
  4. Where is the path to truth?
  5. How is the soul weighed?
  6. When does the drop become the ocean?
  7. Why does the universe dream?
It also explained that the first question serves as a gateway into the consciousness and inner-awareness traditions of the Zensunni Wanderers and the Bene Gesserit. It explained that it invites the thinker to look past their day-to-day ego, memories, and personality to identify the true, core source of their consciousness. It mirrors real-world mystical practices, like the Atma Vichara (self-inquiry) found in Advaita Vedanta. I found the sixth question quite interesting when you realize that the story of Dune plays on a dessert planet that has not seen an ocean for a very long time. I asked Google's AI for the origin of the questions and it gave an answer with another set of questions.
  1. Who is it that thinks? (The canon prompt: identifying the observer)
  2. From where do these thoughts arise? (Traces the origin of consciousness).
  3. What is the shape of the mind? (Realizing that thought has no physical form).
  4. Who experiences the senses? (Separating biological input from the soul).
  5. What remains when the thought is gone? (Finding the stillness of pure awareness)
  6. Is the observer separate from the observed? (Dissolving the barrier between self and universe).
  7. Who am I? (The ultimate dissolution of ego).
Although this list is more of the line of self-inquiry, I judge it as less mystic compared to the first list.

Sunday, May 17, 2026

Negative space

This afternoon, I visited the exhibition Negative space at Het Robson (Stichting Vierkant), the first solo exhibition of Kashyap Krishna. Although, I was not able to attend the artist talk he gave later this afternoon, as announced, and hear his story behind the works on display, I was quite impressed by the exhibition also through the titles given to the works. The works are given on negative space page on the website of the artist. I saw the works as they were numbered at the exhibition:
  1. Don't Carry the World Upon your Shoulders
  2. Broken
  3. Dissection of the Objectified Female Human
  4. N01 is trapped
  5. Genocide
  6. Life is loneliness
  7. can he dance?
  8. The Exhibitionist & The Voyeur
  9. Stranded (36×)
  10. what's right (in me) what's left (of me)
  11. U R N01
  12. suicide
  13. ಸಮಾಧಿ | Samādhi (a state of meditative consciousness)
  14. ಅಂತ್ಯಕ್ರಿಯೆ | Antyakriye (funeral)
  15. ಸಂಸಾರ | Saṃsāra (ongoing cycle of life, death, and rebirth)
  16. Markers
  17. Alone
  18. ನಮಸ್ಕಾರ | Namaskāra (a customary Hindu manner of respectfully greeting)
I do not know if the artist attached some particular meaning to this order, but it would not surprise me.

Saturday, May 16, 2026

Link

Friday, May 15, 2026

ಪುರಂದರ ದಾಸ

I found this text (of the title) in the announcement for an artist talk by Kashyap Krishna at the last day of the exhibition Negative space, his first solo exhibition. I wondered what the text meant and discovered it is the name Purandara Dasa, probably refering to Purandara Dasa (c.1470 – c.1564), who was a composer, singer and a Haridasa philosopher from present-day Karnataka, India. The script that is being used is the Kannada script, which is an abugida of the Brahmic family, used to write Kannada, one of the Dravidian languages of South India especially in the state of Karnataka. I have never hear of the Kannada language before, but I understand that is quite an old language.

Asymmetric TSP

I have been thinking about my program to solve the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem that I have been using to find the shortest biking route along MUPIs with posters of AKI students. I have been thinking about the method that I am using to estimate the minimum distance that still needs to be travelled for a partial solution. Now I am adding the shortest route going to and from each node (and divide it by two) for the estimate. But that estimate is not very good, because there are three nodes that are close to eachother, it is very likely that the shortest route going to and from these nodes are all going to eachother, which is not very realistic. I am now thinking about a method that looks at all shortest outgoing routes from each node. (Of course, you could also do this with all ingoing routes.) Summing up all the distances for all those routes, leads to a minimal distance that still needs to be traveled. I guess it will be close to the method I have used so far. Now if there is a node that has two or more of shortest outgoing nodes into it, it is not possible to that the final solution will contain all of these. Only one can be included, meaning that the others have to point to some other node with a longer route. It is possible to calculate which is the minimal value that needs to be added to the already minimal distance. Also when there a cycle of a number of nodes, at least one of the node should have a route going to a node outside of the cycle to break the cycle. Again it is possible to calculate what is the minimal additional cost to break the cycle. It looks like these two do not interfere with eachother. Maybe there are easy ways to improve this even further.

Link

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

Flemish Primitives

I went to see the exhibition Flemish Primitives with photographs (and some items) by Fleur Debruyne at B93. I liked the titles with the works as much as the works themselves and for that reason an essential part of them. The titles of the works in the order I saw them: (I hope I have not made any mistakes in the above titles.)

Tuesday, May 12, 2026

live-bootstrap, Issue 470

I just read Issue 470: 'tcc-mes gets stuck building meslibc in amd64 bootstrap' of the live-bootstrap project. This morning, I pulled the last version of the live-bootstrap repository and started to build it for the x86_64 (also know as amd64) target, I got the same error as mentioned in one of the comments (the latest at this point of writing), which occurs when when unified-libc.c is compiled with tcc-mes. I thought I was doing something wrong myself, but it seems that this is a know limitation. The reason I wanted to build it for the x86_64 target is that I am stuck with respect trying to compile the Tiny C Compiler (the version used in live-bootstrap) with the compiler I am developing to replacing the GNU Mes compiler. I am gettings as far as to compile tcc-boot0, but when I execute tcc-boot0, it immediately crashes with a segmentation fault. I am getting exactly the same binaries when I replace calls with my compiler with the GNU C compiler (gcc). I asked for some advice on the #bootstrappable IRC channel at Libera.Chat and Ben Siraphob send a patch to fix the problem with the incorrect relocations in the executable preventing the immediate crash. But now it seems to crash in another location when I call it to compile some code. I will have to look into this further. Maybe I should have a look at a recent version of the Tiny C Compiler, such as the one at repo.or.cz / tinycc.git.

Link

Monday, May 11, 2026

Links

Sunday, May 10, 2026

Links

Saturday, May 9, 2026

Maker Festival Twente

I went to Maker Festival Twente. I first saw the exhibition at Tetem Art Space with the installation Synthetic Halo by Kurina Sohn, which generates sounds and graphics based on the brainwaves detected by an EEG sensor. I also subjected myself to the installation. I heard various kinds of sounds. Only afterwards, I looked at the explaination of the various sounds. I am not sure if I identified all the sounds on the explaination. Next, I joined the free embroidery workshop using TurtleStitch. I decided to program it without reading the manual after someone showed me some elementary steps. It took me some time out that drag and drop is the primary method of creating the Scratch based programs. In my first program that was executed on an embroidery machine I had added some movement, not realizing that it introduced a line as well. I was told that the machine automatically centers the output generated by the program. The second second program, saved in the file SimpleFractal.xml, in which I also increased the size a bit, resulted in a nice result. Both were executed with pink wire on a purple sample of felt. I looked around the area at all the stands and also wanted to have a look inside the Luminarium by Architects of Air, but when I was told I had to buy a ticket for 5.00 €, I declined. At the end, I talked with two people (students) from the AKI, I was given a copy of AKI ArtEZ FINALS 2025, the last one they had with them. It is sealed in plastic and I might decided not to open it.

Friday, May 8, 2026

Taken

I came across the page Taken, which shows information that a webpage receives from the client. When I looked in the source code of the page, I discovered that the page was not generated by the server, but that the information was retrieved with JavaScript. Of course, this allows the code to make some kind of request to a server using this information and thus being used to track someone. As far as I can see, this page does not do it. So, although it seems that the page knows a lot about you, the information shown never reaches the website but stays local. In the text box below, some information is shown that is can easily be retrieved with JavaScript embedded in this page. Again, this is purely local. This is a static website and no information is send to a server and the website does not use cookies.

Thursday, May 7, 2026

De Vrijhof

This morning, I saw two exhibitions at De Vrijhof, a building at the University of Twente, which is the cultural centre and houses the central library. First I saw the exhibition with thirteen gouaches by Klaas Versteegen. The second was the exhibition See What We Make. I found the sculpture by Sophia de Vries and Jet van de Werf noteworthy and also the paintings by Tessa van Belois, Carlijn Tempelaars, Joanita Leferink, Mirka Tako Morocho and Emile Hollander.

Links

Sunday, May 3, 2026

Links

Friday, May 1, 2026

Book

It was only yesterday evening late that I discovered that the Book fair Glanerbrug already had started day before yesterday. In the past years, I usually went on the first day of the book fair. I went this afternoon. I did not find many interesting books and I also noticed that the prices have come closer to the prices in thrift stores. At 13:59, I bought the book Information is Beautiful written by David McCandless in English and published by Collins in 2009, ISBN:9780007294664, for € 2.00. There is a website related to the book.

Dry weather

I downloaded some data about the precipitation deficit in the Netherlands from the Dutch page Data neerslagtekort of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute to calculate on ever day since April 1, in what percentage of the driest years we are. The numbers for the past weeks are: 
    date   value    max      %
-------------------------------
20260424:   52.3   67.2    2.8%
20260425:   55.6   69.8    2.7%
20260426:   59.1   73.1    2.6%
20260427:   61.8   76.6    2.1%
20260428:   65.6   77.3    1.5%
20260429:   69.7   80.3    1.2%
20260430:   73.8   84.3    0.7%
The value in the second colomn is the current precipitation deficit in mm. The value in the third column is the highest value on record. The value in the third column is an estimation of the driest year we are in based on the distribution of measuremenst from 1906 to and including last year, a total of 120 years. Some rain has been predicted for the coming days, so hopefully it might drop a bit in the coming days. I used the following code to process the int_nl.dat file: 
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    char buffer[200];
    while (fgets(buffer, 199, stdin))
        if (buffer[0] == '1' || buffer[0] == '2')
        {
            buffer[8] = '\0';
            double val;
            sscanf(buffer + 9, "%lf", &val);
            printf("%s %05.1lf\n", buffer + 4, val);
        }
    return 0;
}
And the following code to process the sorted output of the above using the contents of the file rdev_tijdreeks.txt with the latest numbers: 
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    FILE *f = fopen("rdev_tijdreeks.txt", "r");
    char buffer[100];
    fgets(buffer, 99, f);
    char buffer2[100];
    fgets(buffer2, 99, stdin);
    while (fgets(buffer, 99, f))
    {
        double val;
        sscanf(buffer + 9, "%lf", &val);
        double prec = -1;
        double prev = 0;
        int years = 0;
        for (;; years++)
        {
            if (strncmp(buffer + 4, buffer2, 4) != 0)
                break;
            double val2;
            sscanf(buffer2 + 5, "%lf", &val2);
            if (val2 >= val && prec < 0.0)
            {
                double diff = val2 - prev;
                prec = (double)years + (diff > 0 ? (val-prev)/(val2-prev) : 0);
            }
            prev = val2;
            fgets(buffer2, 99, stdin);
            if (feof(stdin))
                buffer2[0] = '\0';
        }
        if (prec < 0.0)
            prec = years;
        buffer[8] = '\0';
        printf("%s: %6.1lf %6.1lf %6.1lf%%\n",
               buffer, val, prev, 100 - 100*prec/years);
    }
    return 0;
}

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

Fixed bug in C compiler

I finally fixed the bug in tcc_cc.c, the C compiler in my replacement stage0 of live-bootstrap that I have been struggling with in the past weeks. It turned out that the bug was in the preprocessor that did not handle the following code correctly: 
#define VAR_A 1
#define VAR_X VAR_A
#if VAR_A == VAR_X
#endif
It is important to realize, that the following, should return the same result: 
#define VAR_X VAR_A
#define VAR_A 1
#if VAR_A == VAR_X
#endif
This shows that macro definitions are only expanded when they are used. This is the same for the expressions for the #if directive as it everywhere else. In the iterator solution I implemented, I decided to have the expansion iterator only work after the condition iterator (that evaluates the various #if directives), because otherwise it would also expand all branches that are not needed and it would have something to not expand the macro definitions. (Maybe there is an elagent way to implement it, but I have not looked into it yet.) This meant I would have to implement something for the macro symbols in the expression and assuming that the full expansion rules would not be needed. I simply added some code repeatedly expand macro definitions in the expressions with two lines of code. This again shows that the implementation of the C preprocessor is far from trivial. I am sure that my implementation in tcc_cc.c is not compliant with the standard. There is still some other bug to be solved as I am no getting error messages about 'Invalid relocation entry.'

Monday, April 28, 2026

Sci-Bot: hamiltonian cycles

Yesterday, I tried out Sci-Bot with the question: 'hamiltonian cycles.' I found the result quite interesting and decided to keep the results in a local copy. Because the saved file contained UTF-8 characters, I wrote the program UTF8toHTML.cpp to convert these characters to HTML escape sequences. It looks like the AI bot is no longer workable without creating an account.

Links

Monday, April 27, 2026

Link

Sunday, April 26, 2026

Link

Saturday, April 25, 2026

Link

Friday, April 24, 2026

Link

Thursday, April 23, 2026

Still the same error message

I am still getting the same error message with the 64 bits version of my replacement stage0 of live-bootstrap when I am using the interpreter that I wrote for Stack-C, the intermediate language that the compiler uses. In the past weeks, I worked on getting the interpreter working for the 64 bits version of Stack-C and I also implemented a debugging mode allowing to set breakpoints and step through the execution. Getting it to work took more time than I had expected. Now that they show the same behaviour, it is safe to conclude that the bug is likely not in the programs used to generate an executable from the Stack-C file but in the compiler itself or how the compiler is called (with respect to environment variables). The message both versions return is: 
lib/linux/x86_64-mes-gcc/crt1.c:55: error: non-zero addend on REL architecture

Wednesday, April 22, 2026

Link

Monday, April 20, 2026

Links

Sunday, April 19, 2026

Infinite mazes

I have been thinking some more about generating infinite mazes since I wrote about it on the second of this month. If you always generate the chunks in the same order, it is sufficient to remember which walls are connected on the perimeter in order to avoid areas that cannot be connected and that there are no cycles. However, generating the chunks in the same order is not very efficient. Whenever two or more walls on the outside are connected, one has to decided which one will be going to infinity or in other words for each wall we need to indicate in which direction we have to walk, while touching the wall, to arrive at the other side of the wall. In the other direction this will never be the case. I think this will work, but I get the impression it will result in some bias. Because walls going outside of the border can never return into it. A way to counter this, is also to determine how walls outside the border have to be connected. In interesting question is how many of these should be connected to avoid another bias? I fear that some serious mathematics is required to establish this. Maybe is also depends on the shape of the perimeter.

Link

Thursday, April 16, 2026

Rijksmuseum Twenthe

Today, Conny and I visited Rijksmuseum Twenthe. We first saw the exhibition Pekka Halonen. An Ode to Finland with paintings by Pekka Halonen. I found the following works noteworthy: Really a lot of very impressive paintings. After this we saw the exhibition: Edwina van Heek: Silent force behind Rijksmuseum Twenthe, which honours that a hunderd years ago Edwina van Heek-Burr Ewing signed the deed of donation by which she donated a new museum building and an accompanying art collection to the Dutch State. Some of the works on display:

Next we saw the exhibition Many Loving Arms with works by Bas Kosters. I did not have high expectations of this exhibition, but I was quite impressed by it. I found the following works noteworthy (if I have not mixed up the wall labels):

We saw the exhibition Calculating Empires again. Conny took the picture below of me paging through the book Calculating Empires. On the wall I found the words Incompleteness and Undecidable but I could not quickly find it in the book. I wondered whether it is possible to buy the book, but (at home) I could not find it.

Tuesday, April 14, 2026

Link

Sunday, April 12, 2026

Links

Tuesday, April 8, 2026

Exhibitions

This afternoon, I visited the exhibition Over Water with photographs by Joop Overkleeft. It has a series about soldiers placing a Bailey bridge and some from his digital graphics.

Next, I went to Concordia and watched the Idem et Idem exhibition again. One of the artists was present and I talked a little about her project. I also saw the video with the work of Kore Danaë Plunkett that that I cannot remember seeing the last time (probably because it was not projected). It was kind of a recording of a performance by her. The translation of the description of her work is: "My life is defined by duality and contradictions, as a result of my limitations. Chain armor and two-dimensional work are the spaces in which I explore these characteristic aspects of my identity."

In the evening, I went to the exhibition RE:-)CONNECT at B93 with works by second and third year students of the AKI. There were individual works by the following students on display:

They also had some collective works in coorporation with Tessa de Roo. There were two screen print collective works and two collages of works on the wall. I found those quite interesting. I talked with one of the students about this because you do not often see that artists worked together on an art work. I understood that it had come quite natural when they started working with screen printing.

Link

Tuesday, April 7, 2026

All flowers open

It looks like all flowers on our magnolia have opened. The first flowers opened on March 18. The leaves of most of those first flowers turned brown due to frost and have partly fell down already. The latest of the flowers that opened are on the side of the house, which receive far less sunshine than the side where the first flowers opened. We did get flowers for quite a long period this year. The flowers spread a lovely fragrance.

Link

Monday, April 6, 2026

Unexpected error messages

Since I finished replacing stage0 of live-bootstrap for x86 (32 bits) two months ago, I have been working on the x86 64 bits version. I heve now come as far as being able to compile the Tiny C Compiler sources, but the resulting compiler when compiling some sources gives some unexpected error messages, which seem to be correct (see commit 96ad3732). This will require some clever debugging. Maybe, should first test this compiler on some other sources.

Friday, April 3, 2026

Links

Thursday, April 2, 2026

Infinite mazes

I have been thinking about the construction of infinite mazes. When I say maze, I mean a maze on a infinite square grid (in all directions) where there is some way to calculate if there is a wall on each line segement of the grid and that the mazes is 'prefect' in the sense that the mazes has no cycles and that each square can be traveled to from every other square. The page Maze Classification give some algorithms for creating finite mazes on a rectangle (or square) of a square grid. There are only two algoritms: Wilson's algorithm and Aldous-Broder algorithm. For animations of these algorithms see the page Maze Algorithms. There is a simple method for generating infinite mazes from finite mazes of some fixed size n. The idea is to place grids of size n side to side on the grid. Asuming that the walls on the outside are all closed, it does not meet the requirement of a perfect maze. The idea is to create a maze of size n×n with 'rooms' of size n and have the openings determine where to add an opening between the mazes of size n. This should be repeated for every power of n. Asuming that the generation starts at the origin, one only has to generate this for a limited number of powers, depending on how far one moves from the origin. This technique is also explained on the page Making an Infinite Maze. This method does not really result in random mazes, because these kind of mazes will contain very long walls that are getting longer and longer the further one gets from the origin, which is rather rare in truely random mazes. How can be improve on this assuming that we start generating the maze from the center and do want to store as less as possible information, potentially being able to regenerate parts of the maze on demand? In some game, for example, the user would only see a limited part of the maze from above, or till a wall (or a certain distance) when from the inside. One idea is to generate the maze in chunks of n by n squares. In such a chunk it should not always be the case that there should be a path between all the squares. The idea is to start with an infinite grid that has no walls and start randomly adding walls inside a certain chunk as long as each sqaure still has a path to the 'outside'. If an additional chunk needs to be added, it will also be allowed to put walls on the 'sides' where the chunks touches chunks that already have been filled. Although this seems a good approach, it seems that it will reduce a different maze depending on the order in which the chunks are added. Even if everytime the same random sequence is used for each chunk, there is still a problem for the walls that needed to be placed on where the chunks meet. A solution could be to always generate the chunks in a 'fixed' order. If the order is truely fixed, for example in s spiral order around the center, one would have to generate more and more chunks if one is moving away from the center. A solution to this to introduce a dependend relation to the grid of chunks, were a chunk can only be generated when all the chunks it depended on are already generated. Maybe there is a way to define the dependend relation (with all other than the origin chunk depending on the origin chunk directly or indirectly) such that only a limited number of chunks need to be generated, possibly linear to the 'distance' to the origin.

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Lone signpost in Mongolia

In episode 128 of season 8 of Itchy Boots titled 'Loneliness hits different in Mongolia 🇲🇳', Noraly Schoenmaker comes along a signpost in the middle of nowhere as can be seen starting at 13:53. This is along the grevel road A1701, which at many place is not a single road, but many parallel roads often spread out quite widely. So, it is rather interesting that there is a sign somewhere in the middle when most local just take one of the many tracks. I found a photo on Alamy.com that was taken by Daan Kloeg on Augustus 7, 2019. I contacted him and he promptly gave the location from which the photo was taken, allowing me to find the signpost on Google Earth. According to the satelite image on Google Earth the location of the signpost is 48°55'59.88"N 92° 2'19.38"E, a little west of the road on google maps and open street map, which might explain why I had not yet found it when I followed the road. (I am not sure whether I followed the complete road from the start to the end.) A little bit further (at 48°57'44.50"N 92° 2'34.98"E), she comes along another 'sign' with the words (if I have transcribed them correctly): 'өлгий' 'тавтай морил', and 'сум', which I understand means 'Welcome to Ölgii district. A little further she travels through a village called Ölgii.

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

Link

Sunday, March 29, 2026

Rotterdam Art Week (Day 4)

I traveled to Rotterdam to visited some locations of the Rotterdam Art Week. Below the works and/or artists I found noteworthy at the various locations. At Brutus Art Space, I saw the exhibition Autonomous curated by Ine Gevers. I found the following works noteworthy: I also saw the Sanitas Futurum exhibition by Atelier Van Lieshout.

At the Kunst & Complex building, I visited the studios of the artist. I found the following noteworthy:

At the Katoenhuis, I saw the exhibition Observatory: Cosmic Cabinet. I found the following works noteworthy:

At the exhibition Haute Photographie, I liked the following photographs:

At the Keilewerf, there were many people outside sitting and eating. I looked around inside and spend some time at Studio i Focus of Iris Veentjer and watch the machine to spinning machine for long fibers for the RietGoed project. Quite interesting.

At TEMT, I liked:

At the Museumplein, I saw the exhibition Learn to Love the Bomb organized by TECART. I found the followings works noteworthy:

At Kunsthal, I first saw the exhibition What the Hell Was I Thinking by David Shrigley. I found the following noteworthy:

I walked quickly through the exhibition Flowers Forever (because I was becoming a bit saturated with impressions) and only stopped looking at: I walked through the exhibition Mr. Goodman: The Kiteman. From the exhibition They have always been here by Kudzanai-Violet Hwami (Instagram), I liked:

At the S/ASH GALLERY, I saw the exhibition Interface. I found the following installation noteworthy:

Saturday, March 28, 2026

Link

Friday, March 27, 2026

Rotterdam Art Week (Day 2)

There was a broken layer of snow on the ground. At 9:15, I left by train to Rotterdam to visit a number of locations that take part of Rotterdam Art Week. Below the works and or artist that I found noteworthy at the various locations or exhibitions.

Prospects

Xaver Könneker. Samboleap Tol with Starlight. Pippilotta Yerna with Please, piece your bones into mine. Sophie Schreurs. Alice West. Marina Sulima with Of Climbing Vines and Copper Crystals. Natalia Jordanova with Latency Treshold, Latency Echo, Latency Transmission, Latency Amplification, and Latency Resonance. Suzanne Plomp with Framed in Veins (Substanctia), 2026. Isamo Thissen with De Melkfabriek,2025 and De Jacht, 2026. Obbe van der Weide with OS, Enforming, I, II, and III. Sander Coers with Intensive Care (Pietā), 2026. Clémence Lollia Hilaire with CRAA. Maja Simišić with a poster. Luca Tichelman with All the Wonders and the Ahhhh. Yara Veloso. Lea Novi with The Golden Garden. Ceola Tunstall-Behrens. Yara Jimmink. Aaryan Sinha. Christy Groen with Polyshift Horizon, Polyshift Full Frame, and Polyshift Portrait. Nelly Dansen with Project XXX. Steffi Reimers. mo Futures with Bizarre Beauty. Jonathan Tang. Aion Arribas with Dear Rubsters and Scisoring, Rubbing, Dildoing. Juni Mun. Saja Amro with Firearms Prohibited. Bonnie Ogilvie with Pin Me Down, Madeleine Elisabeth Peccoux with Moonbump, 2022-now. Sophie Allerding. Doris Kolpa. Marlot Meyer with Pneuma, 2025-2026. Jonathan Hielkema. Jildau Nijboer with Undercurrent I, 2026. Maaike Meindertsma with Shortcut. Ben Yau. Anto López Espinosa. Geo Barcan. Gus Drake with Landscapes in Motion. Jamal Ageli with Call Her the Morning Star, 2026. Ariane Toussaint with A Textile Room. Radvlad with Reduced Artifacts 4×. Pelle Schilling with a melting metal wire. Lena Longefay with La Chanson à Boire de la Douleur de la Terre. Loran van de Wier with Veganistische kaas sculpturen in vitrine. Katayoon Valamanesh with I Am Not The Girl, I am the Horse, 2025. Sixin Zeng with The 2.5D Nomad. Joppe Venema. Sarjon Azouz. Frances Rompas with The Exotic Fruit Section.

Art Rotterdam

Cordico

Rotterdam Photo

The New Current

The Usual

Kunstinstituut Melly

Garage Rotterdam

From the exhibition At the End(s) of the World: The Ground Is Shifting.

Thursday, March 26, 2026

Hail and wet snow

Just before noon, the sky turned dark after the sun was shinning, and shortly after, hail fell from the sky some of which stayed on the ground. Then the hail slowly changed into snow with at end even some real flakes. Soon after a blue sky appeared. Around this time the temperature at Twente Airport dropped about 5° Celsius.Around two, there was another similar, but not so strong, hailstorm, which was not followed by snow. At the end of the afternoon, there was again some wet snow during another shower. We are a bit worried about the flowers on our magnolia turning brown, also because the temperature the night is going to drop below zero.

Planning for Rotterdam Art Week

In the past days, I have been doing some planning for visitings Rotterdam Art Week. I am planning to go there tomorrow and Sunday. I have bought a pass-partout ticket allowing to visit me all locations that are require admission. My plan for tomorrow is to visit the following locations:

My plan for Sunday sofar is:

Sunday, March 22, 2026

Idem et Idem

In the afternoon, I saw the exhibition Idem et Idem (Latin for 'same and same') at Concordia with works by five AKI students. Works by the following students were on display.

Half of the flower

This afternoon, about half of the flowers on our magnolia opened as can be seen in the picture below:

Link

Thursday, March 19, 2026

Counting ballots

Yesterday, the 2026 Dutch municipal elections were held and I helped with counting the ballots again. We only had 740 ballots at the polling station where I helped. We finished counting around 11 in the evening. I stayed together with the chair until the ballots and the official report were collected by separate people. We only made one small mistake during the counting of the ballots, which was corrected by a recount. This afternoon, I went to the central location where the official reports are checked and decided if a recount of the ballots is required. Up to now, I had always thought that everything was recounted. That would indeed require a lot of people. Shortly after we arrived, we were told to have some patience. Some group of people started to do some recounts. After about an hour waiting, the project leader came over and told that there was less recount work than they had counted for and that we were send home. I felt a bit dissapointed because I came to help with the recounting, but I did understand that it would be a bit useless if half of the people had come were waiting for a new recount while the others were busy. We did collect the chairs and fold the tables before we left. I decided to go into the city and I saw the exhibition AI Eyes for a third time. Then I saw the exhibition Pantaleon Hajenius & Haveman-Betman at Beeld & Aambeeld. Pantaleon Hajenius is making art works with objects that he find outside.

Wednesday, March 18, 2026

Some flowers opened

Yesterday at the end of the afternoon, I saw that some flowers on our magnolia had opened. Below a picture, I took of one of the flowers.

I also checked the seeds we harvested last September. One of the two growing boxes had some white mold, probably saprophytic fungi, which are considered harmless. I did not see any evelopment, but I assume that it still too early. I will keep an eye on them and add water if needed.

Spiritual Enlightenment - The Damnedest Thing

I finished reading the book Spiritual Enlightenment - The Damnedest Thing by Jed McKenna, which I started reading four days ago. Jed Mckenna is a pseudonym of an unknown author. This is the first of nine books he wrote in total, but I get the impression that the following eight books do not add much to what he wants to tell. This book seems to describe a period of at most two weeks where he writes about the conversations he has with various people in around the house he is staying. It would not surprise me if it totally fictional but might still be based on actual conversations. He claims to be enlightened and that he became enlightened through a process that he calls Spiritual Autolysis, which comes down to evaluation everything you consider to be true. A long time ago, I already wrote something about what I think is true and also about being a sceptic, but the book did made me think about those things again. Although the author goes to great length to explain that many traditional sources are not the leading to enlightment, but to mystism at most, he still primarily quotes from those sources. He does not mention any recent scientific source about research into the brain and consciousness. Enjoyable read.

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

Dune: Part Three | Official Teaser Trailer

I watched the Official Teaser Trailer for Dune: Part Three, which is going to be released in nine months and one day. Although I did not like Dune: Part Two, I think I am still going to watch Part Three. This visuals, as expected, look good. Maybe know that Denis Villeneuve does not have the pressure anymore to deliver a block-buster, like I felt he had for Part Two, that it is going to be less of an action movie, although I understand that it will still have a lot of action. In teaser trailer has Paul asking advice with respect to the wars he is fighting, where Jessica answers: 'Your father did not start a war,' suggesting that Paul started the Jihad. That is indeed how it is brought in Part Two, but slightly more different from how it is written in Dune. Paul was not the active source of the Jihad, he was merely the fuse that caused it. The Fremen were oppressed for centuries and had become, also under the influence of the Missionaria Protectivia, religious fanatics where the sharing of the transformed Water of Life in the Sietch or Spice orgy awakening a very strong tribal consciousness. Chani explains: "When the tribe shares the Water we're together - all os us." (I fear that the Bene Gesserit where not aware of the explosive situation they had created with their interference.) Once a messiah appeared to save them, the transition from oppressed to oppressors was to be expected as we also have seen in our own world history up to today. Paul tried to avoid the Jihad to happen. It was in the tent with his mother that he first sensed it as something that could not be avoided. Yet, he made the decision to revenge the death of this father. In the first chapter of the second book of Dune, he wishpers "Now Harkonnen shall kill Harkonnen." He let all opportunities to avoid the Jihad pass. The last, I think, was when the visited the water basin where the water from Jamis was left. Paul is aware of the coming Jihad, but does nothing. When the leave the case he feels that "a vital moment had passed him." He thought he could take revenge and avoid the Jihad, but in the end he could not and after being unable to avoid it, embraced it. This often how things happen in life when people are overcome by evil. Instead of chosing to show the danger of messianic faiths, Villeneuve chose to make Paul the villian causing the Jihad.

Link

Monday, March 16, 2026

Steam

This morning, when I was waiting for the water in the teapot to get to the advised temperature for the type of green tea I had selected, I noticed some steam droplets, typically 3 to 10 μm in diameter, dancing above the teapot. Below one of the two pictures that I took. These droplets are not jumping from the boiling water, but are forming just above it due to the colder air around the teapot causing the water vapour to condense in small droplets. I guess that the shape of the teapot makes encourages colder air drawn from the sides due to the upwards flow of heated air with the water vapour.

Saturday, March 14, 2026

AI Eyes

I went to see the exhibition FAI (Fine Art intelligence): 'AI Eyes' again, which I briefly visisted on Friday, February 28. It has works by a number of female photographers who used AI to modify some part of their work. Work from the following photografers was on display: Quite interesting.

Link

Friday, March 13, 2026

Link

Thursday, March 12, 2026

The China Labyrinth

In the past days, I worked on a JavaScript implementation of an Exact Cover problem solver, which can be found in the file ExactCover.js. I decided to test it with finding 'compact' solutions for The China Labyrinth as I did before on March 16, 2019. It generates a new random solution every four seconds.

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

Curly kail with celery root

Today, we made some curly kail and used both potatoes and about half of celery root. All these ingredients we received from the harvest of Herenboeren Usseler Es. This was the last curly kail, the heads of the plants, that we received for this year. This is the first time that we used celery root. We also added pork and spice mixture, and at it with gherkins and Rookworst, a type of Dutch sausage that is traditional served with several types of hotchpotch dishes.

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Everyday Bridges

In the evening, I went to the opening of the exhibition Everyday Bridges with photographs by Maryam Rostampour at B93. The exhibition is about her project that she did in the past months where she looked at Enschede through the everyday lives of migrants. I read all the text with the photographs and I enjoyed talking with several people at the opening.

Links

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

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