Today is a palindrome date when written
according to the D(D)-M(M)-YY format: 2-2-22 and the YY.(M)M.(D)D formats:
22.2.2. The previous such date was January 22.
I finished reading the book Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern
Relationships, which I started reading on January 28, two days after I
bought the book. The TED talk by Christopher Ryan
Are we designed to be sexual omnivores? give a good summary of the book.
I found the first chapter of the books rather rethoric. The book makes some
good arguments, but I think the truth is a bit more complicated and there are
other solutions to the problems that the authors address. I think that the main
reason is that we have a larger brain than the apes we are closely related to.
Anyhow, it was an interesting read.
I finished reading the book Room to Dream by
David Lynch and
Kristine McKenna,
which I started reading on October 21 last year after I bought it exactly a month earlier. The interesting fact about this book that it is
both a biography and an autobiograph. There are alternating chapters where
McKenna writes a biographic chapter (based on her research) followed by an
autobiographic chapter where Lynch writes about his recollections after reading
the chapter. Sometimes there are things he cannot remember, at other points he
adds some of his own unique points of view to it. It is really a refreshing
concept, the 'objective' story mirrored with the 'subjective' story. I found
the latter part of the book getting a bit long-winded and a bit too much
focussing on the works of Lynch and less on his personal life. But yes, it is
clear that his life is very much about his work and that several of his
marriages have died out due to him being engrossed in his work project. I have
not been a great fan of Lynch and not seen many of his films and series, but is
has raised my interest in watching them.
At 17:35:41, I bought two sets of books related to Documenta the book from bookshop
Broekhuis. The first set, written in German and English, and published by
Taschen in 2007, I bought for € 15.00. It consists of:
Documenta Magazine: No. 1, 2007, Modernity? written by Fouad Asfour,
ISBN:9783822815328.
Documenta Magazine N°2, 2007 Life? written by Klaus Ronneberger
and Nidhi Eoseewong,
ISBN:9783836500586.
Documenta Magazine N°3, 2007 Education written by Christian
Höller, Felicity D. Scott, and Gregory Whitehead,
ISBN:9783836500593.
The second set, published by Cantz in 1997, I bought for € 24.50. It
consists of:
Materialien zur Documenta X: ein Reader für Unterricht und
Studium edited by Werner Stehr and Johannes Kirschenmann, written in
German, ISBN:9783893229123.
documenta X documents 1 edited by Françoise Joly written in
German and English,
ISBN:3893228268.
documenta X documents 2 edited by Françoise Joly, written in
German and English,
ISBN:3893228594.
documenta X documents 3 edited by Cornelia Barth and
Françoise Joly, written in German and English,
ISBN:3893228748.
Politics - poetics: das Buch zur Documenta X edited by
Françoise Joly, written in German,
ISBN:9783893229093.
Yesterday, I saw this tweet with the text sequential circuits with an interesting
image attached to it. I immediately thought about how many there are for
any given size. While we were walking, I figured out that the number must be
n!(n-1)!/2 (The OEIS sequence A010796.) In the evening, I searched for the tweet, but could not find it.
I did write a small JavaScript program to generate
them. But they looked rather different from what I remembered. Today, I found
the tweet again and it confirmed my impression that they look different. I have
been thinking about how to generate more similar looking sequential circuists,
but I have not come up with a good idea. The results of the program I wrote
yesterday are displayed below. (I added some code to generate a new one every
two seconds.)
At 17:41, I bought a slipcase the book Qua Art Qua Science 2004-2008
(publised in 2008) and Qua Art Qua Science 2009-2013 (published in
2014) edited by Martha J. Haveman, written in Dutch and English, and published
by Foundation Qua Art-Qua Science from charity
shop Het Goed for € 5.95.
It is now becoming clear (through requests based on the Dutch Freedom of
Information Act) that some people in the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM)
already in February 2020 considered that COVID-19 could have a large impact. On February 9, one of the researchers
of the a newly established "response team", which is trying to estimate the
consequences of the corona virus for the Netherlands, wrote in an email to his
bosses: "The impact of an nCoV epidemic is classified as a serious to
catastrophic threat to national security." For the risc analyses they made
use of Leidraad risicobeoordeling; Geïntegreerde risicoanalyse Nationale
Veiligheid (Guidance risk assessment; Integrated risk analysis National
Security, in which 'catastrophic' stands for more than 10,000 casualties.
Again, on February 13, there is an internal email stating: "Worst case
scenario: 6x worse than seasonal influenza in terms of deaths." However, a
week later on February 20, Jaap van Dissel does not say anything about this during
a technical briefing at the Dutch House of Representatives. In another
email from February 6 states that there is proof of transmission before the
first day of illness and there are indications that more than half of the
infections occur before that day. For a long time, the government denied that
this could happen and at the end of February, the conservative-liberal party denounced unnecessary parliamentary
questions and assumptions about this. The RIVM now states that these were
scenarios not predictions.
Yesterday, Lorinda
Cherry was found death in her home. She was a computer scientist and
programmer who worked at Bell Labs. Together with Brian Kernighan she developed
eqn, a preprocessor
that formats equations for printing. Itis similar to the mathematical component
of TeX developed by
D.E. Knuth, which appeared several years later. The paper A System for Typesetting Mathematics starts with the example:
sum from i=0 to infinity x sub i = pi over 2
The following describe the same mathematical expression in TeX:
\sum_{i=0}^{\infty} x_i = {\pi \over 2}
I somehow feel it is a pitty that Knuth went on to design his own method for
describing mathematical expressions, as his seems to less semantic and more
based on representation. Note how in his notation the two '_' have a total
different semantic meaning, while in eqn different syntax is used. His method
is a more consize, but even not that much, but her method is much closer to how
the resulting expression is read. I did have a look at the paper mentioned and
noted that terms like 'sub' and 'sup' are also related to
position. An even more semantic approach probably would use 'x power
2' instead of 'x sup 2'. I wondered whether it would be possible
to write a preprocessor to replace a more eqn like syntax to the TeX syntax.
When I searched for a grammar for TeX, I across:
Is there a BNF grammar of the TeX language?, which explains that parsing
TeX is Turing
complete due to the fact that TeX itself is Turing complete and use this to
adapt the input processing depending on this. It is not strange that TeX is
Turing complete, because it is basically a programming language. But it is not
a very well defined programming language because its syntax is rather complex
and it is possible to redefine symbols while processing the input.
This afternoon, I saw two exhibitions when I was
in town. The first was at Concordia: Inkspot 2021 with a selection of the best political
cartoons that appeared in Dutch newspapers. Many of these are without words and
about world events. This year winner was Luc Zeebroek, better known as Kamagurka. The second was the exhibtion
Madonnas by Hanna Jansen at
Fotogalerie Objektief.
Quite intriguing, because the pictures are about adult couples.
In the evening, I read (skimmed) through the Dune 2021 script dated September 24, 2018 with the idea in mind to
compare it with the Dune screenplay (dated June 19, 2020). The final screenplay seems to be
very close to the transcript of the movie. I made some notes about the
scenes but did not make a details analyses. I also wanted to compare it to
the list of
deleted scenes. My first impression that the greatest differences between
this script and the screenplay are that the start and the end of the movie.
I had expected to find the deleted scenes in this script, but they were not all
there. I also noted that also in this script, the whole sub-plot of a traitor
is missing.
In the afternoon, I went to see the exhibitionEyebright by Hannelot van
Elst at TETEM art space. I found the
pictures impresive, also because of the combination with stylistic pictures of
dead flowers. In June 2018, I saw work from
her at the exhibition Under Sweet Surveillance.
This months interesting links
