Previous Up Next
Dutch / Nederlands

Diary, April 2009



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


Friday, April 3, 2009

First day of Spring

If there is one day that could be given the title "First day of Spring" it should be this day, at least for our part of the country. During the day, the temperature rose to 23 degrees Celsius. But not everywhere it was this hot, as can be seen in the temperature profile of 16:50. At that time it was 22.9 degrees near us, but only 7.2 degrees in the far South-West of the country.


Saturday, April 4, 2009

Into the city

This afternoon, I went into the city on my own. I had put on my walking boots. After I bought I currant bun, I walked to Gallery "Beeld & Aambeeld". I had a quick look at some painting by Billy Foley, which I had seen before. Next I walked to Picture gallery Objektief where I watched some pictures by Robin Noorda under the title Transit Mongolia. Quite impressive, I have to say. Next, I walked to bookshop Kruimeltje and only made a short visit. Next was bookshop De Slegte. In the bookcase with recently acquired second hand books, I found two books that I read as a young teenager: De strijd om het Goudschip by Willy van der Heide and De Discus komt terug by R. Feenstra. When I searched a right section, I found some more books from these two authors. Next I went to bookshop Broekhuis. After looking around, I went to the second floor and watched some of the drawings and prints by Pieter Appel. This evening, I discovered that just after I left, a poetry collection was going to be presented. I missed that. When I arrived on the "Oude Markt" square, there was a men standing in a pillory and eggs where being thrown at him (picture). There is some wierd custom around where I live, that couples who want to marry are subjected to a kind of test by their friends, who otherwise simply refuse to give any present. Bystanders could buy eggs for one Euro each. Of course, I did not join. Just before I went home, I bought some gherkins and curly kail.


Sunday, April 5, 2009

De Slegte: Three books

This afternoon, Li-Xia went into the city. She returned around a quarter to four and encouraged me to go to the city as well. Of course, I went to bookshop De Slegte. There I bought the two books that I had seen there yesterday both for € 2.00 and the book Verborgen stemmen (The Good Women of China) by Xinran for € 2.50.


Monday, April 6, 2009

First flowers of Magnolia opened

This afternoon, I noticed that a few flowers of our Magnolia had opened. I expect that many more will follow in the coming days. I usually does around this time of the year.


Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Natural well

Everytime when I bike to my office, I come past three, or maybe it is just one, natural well. It hasn't rained from some time, but these three spots are always wet. The first spot (picture) seems to be the wettest. Actually it only appeared after they reconstructed the road crossing on the left and installed some traffic lights. At first it seemed it the had forgotten to close some drainage pipe, because the spot would be flooded everytime after it had rained, but lately I noticed that it was wet even when there was no rain at all. The second spot (picture) used to be the wettest. Even in the middle of the summer, you can hear the sound of water dripping into the sink. The third spot (picture) is a little further. In the picture I have marked the position of the first and second spot with a yellow arrow and a number along. I think that the three wells are linked, that the water is coming from the same source. The geology of the area is that there are porous and nonporous layers which were pushed by glaciers from the last ice age. (KML-file with the locations.)

(Follow-up: Drainage installed in January 2012)



Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Playing Go

This evening, I went to the university to play Go. When I arrive, Taco and Rudi were already encaged in a game, and Huub was watching them. After having watched the game some time, Huub and I decided to play. I was given a two stone handicap. In the end I won with 10 points. We tried to replay the game, but we did not come far. (Game record.) Tonight, we had several people watch us play. Even one of the waitresses (a student) game to look and wanted to know the goal of the game. Rudi gave a short explaination of the goal without explaining the rules.


Thursday, April 9, 2009

Jan Cremer

This evening, I went to bookshop De Slegte as usual. I looked around, and in the end I bought the book Jan Cremer Documentaire by Hans Dütting about the life and works of Jan Cremer. I bought the book at 19:36:01 for € 4.99. Last Monday, I started reading the letters of Jan Cremer that he wrote from 1956 to 1996. I think it would be interesting to read both books sides by side.Before I already read the autobiographical book Wolf (Wolve) about the youth of Jan Cremer.

HanniBall

HanniBall is a strategic game which Christian Freeling invented in the past week. He published the rules on the Arimaa forum in a discussion about inventing games. Christian has been inventing games for a long time, and in the discussion he claimed that he could get an impression of the quality of a game by just looking at the rules, thus without having to play the game. Christian did not invent this game to proof this point, but when it happened to him (by his own surprise) he decided not to play the game before fixing the rules. Today, he did play the game against his son and he did not find neither inconsistency nor incompleteness in the rules. This game is unlike any of the games he invented before. It looks quite interesting.


Friday, April 10, 2009

Magnolia

Today, it was warm day again. The highest temperature was 23.8 degrees Celsius. When I came home, I enjoyed the many flowers on our Magnolia that are now fully open. I also took a number of pictures, one of which is shown on the right.


Monday, April 13, 2009

Easter Fires

Yesterday evening, when we drove home from Almere, we saw three Easter Fires while driving on the highway. In this part of the country there has been a strong tradition of making bonfires of wood left from pruning. Today, I tried to located the position of these fires. I succeeded with respect to the first and the last. From the second, I only have a guess. The fires where in the villages Dortherhoek, Loo, and Beuseberg. See also this detailed map in Google Maps for all the Easter Fires in Overijssel. This morning, the smell of the fires was still hanging in the air. Yesterday morning, there was also a smell of fires, but this was from fires lit in Germany where they have the tradition to ignite them on the evening of Holy Saturday.


Tuesday, April 14, 2009

CPHPC

According to Alzheimer's disease: A new small molecule approach to treatment from UCL, a new small molecule drug, called CPHPC, may have a positive effect on Alzheimer's Disease because it aids in the removal of Serum amyloid P component (SAP) from the blood and also from the brain. Removal of SAP may stop the accumulation of plaques in the brain, and thus stop the progression of the disease. This was announced by Professor Mark Pepys from The Centre for Amyloidosis and Acute Phase Proteins. CPHPC is shorthand for R-1-[6-[R-2-carboxy-pyrrolidin-1-yl]-6-oxo-hexanoyl] pyrrolidine-2-carboxylie acid. This drug has been known since early 2002: Amyloid buster? New drug hinders Alzheimer's protein.


Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Large numbers

Yesterday, during a dinner, I had to think back about the problem of generating large numbers with BF programs. Today, I got the idea for this program:
>n_1..>n_k<[>[-<[->>a<<]>>[-<<b>>]<]<<]>[-<+>]<
where n_1..n_k,a,b stand for one or more + characters. This program calculates the number n_1.(ab)^(..^(n_(k-1).(ab)^(n_k))..) with a program length of 35+n_1+...+n_k+k+a+b.

This program does calculate numbers that are larger I do not know if it beats the program that I described on January 24, 1999, but it looks like it could, as the core of the program is shorter. This program makes use of a construction that I have not used before in programs to generate large numbers, but which is being used rather frequently in compact BF programs. The construction is a "sliding" loop, a loop in which the memory pointers moves. The idea of the program is to fill the location 1 to k (where the starting location is location 0) with some numbers and next raising powers while walking back.


Thursday, April 16, 2009

Large numbers

Today, I modified the slcc program, which I wrote a long time ago for calculating large numbers. The program found that the BF program ">+>+>+>+<[>[-<[->>++<<]>>[-<<++>>]<]<<]>[-<+>]<" (with a lenght of 47 instructions) leaves the following number in the first memory location:

13407807929942597099574024998205846127479365820592393377723561443721764030073546976801874298166903427690031858186486050853753882811946569946433649006084096

A similar program with just one extra "+" produces a number with more than 6000 digits. By just prefixing the above mentioned program with ">+" it calculates the number 4 to the power of the number mentioned above, which is a number that has about 0.602 times this number digits. For a table of number that can be calculated with programs shorter than 47 instructions see here.


Friday, April 17, 2009

Turkish Airline victims go to court

Three victims of the Turkish Airline crash have decided to go to court with the Lawyers Manuel von Ribbeck and Mide Eidson from Ribbeck Law. There action is based on the assumption that the initial report by accident investigators said that a faulty altitude meter probably caused the crash. I am not a lawyer, but I think they do not have a case, because the pilots made the decision to land the plane with just one auto-pilot active, which is a configuration that is not certified. It would have been perfectly possible to land the plane without the auto-pilots active. If I understand it correctly, than the data from the black-box shows that the problem with the radar altitude meter occured at least twice before and that in both cases the pilots landed the plane without any problems.


Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Ernest Louwes

Today, Ernest Louwes, was released from prison after having served for eight years. He was convicted for twelve years on the murder of Mrs. Jaqueline Wittenberg on September 25, 1999, which becamse known as the Deventer murder trial. His conviction has been highly disputed, and labled as a Miscarriage of justice. In the Netherlands, people are usually released from prison at 2/3 of there conviction period on good behaviour. Ernest Louwes already was outside of prison for some time, but placed under certain liberty restrictions. He also was not allowed to speak with the press, which is quite unique for the Netherlands. This restriction was tried in court and although the court lifted the restriction to a certain degree, but it was done in such a manner that it was still enforced. Today, Louwes is allowed to speak as a free person, and he did so during several television programs. Tomorrow he is going to present a book about his story of the murder trial.


Sunday, April 26, 2009

Curcumin

Today, I came across some announcement that Regina Appiah-Opong is going to receive her PhD on dscovery that curcumin seems to reduce the activity of Cytochrome P450 3A4 and Cytochrome P450 2C9. Already in June 2007, the article Inhibition of human recombinant cytochrome P450s by curcumin and curcumin decomposition products was published about this.


Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Prelimenary report about Flight 1951

Today, the Prelimenary report about the crash of Turkish Airlines flight 1951 on Wednesday, March 4 near Schiphol, Amsterdam was released. This report seems to confirm the information earlier give on flightglobal.com with respect to the following facts about the last ten seconds of the flight: In the Prelimenary report is says: The description is slightly confusing, as the second paragraph details the facts mentioned in the first part. The report does not mention the time between the different events, but we can estimate them from the facts. An airspeed op 110 knots is equal to 203.72 Km/h, which is equal to about 56.6 m/s or 185 feet/s (fps). The normal glideslope is such that rate of descent is about 5% of the airspeed, which leads to 9.25 fps for the given airspeed. But in this case, it might have been higher. So lets assume that they where already 20 fps. Then you get the following timeline: This timeline seems to match the description given at flightglobal.com.


Thursday, April 30, 2009

Swine flu: level 5

The WHO has raised the Swine Flu threat level to 5. But is that a good decision. Are we really at the brink of a world wide disaster. As it seems no, there are only eight confirmed death cases in the world and most cases outside Mexico has been very mild. It is unknown how many people have been infected in Mexico, but it might much more than the suspected cases in Mexico. Which means that the death rate might not be much more than of a normal flu. (New Scientist article.) If this virus is like the Spanish flue, it might come in several waves, of which the second wave might be the worse. In that case, it might be better to catch it during the first wave, because at the moment it seems rather mild. So, maybe it is better to let it go loose. The economical damage done by all the restrictions might be much more than the actual damage done by the flu virus itself. Anyway, the virus has already spread over the world, and then I do not think about the cases that have been detected in the developed world, but all the undetected cases in the developing world. I can hardly imagine that the virus has not already spread to many countries in South America. It is the hidden cases (often mild) that are responsable for most of the spread of the flu virus.


This months interesting links


Movements

KMZ file of movements (incomplete).


Home | March 2009 | May 2009 | Random memories