64 years
I was born on Wednesday, November 1, 1961 at 9:45 in the morning (CET). That
means that today, I will be 64 years according to the calendar and 23376 days
old. But how old am I really? The tropical year, the time that it takes for the seasons to return, is said
to be 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45.19 seconds. Yesterday, around
21:45:12 in the afternoon, it was 64 tropical years since I was born. But the
tropical year is shorter than the sidereal year, the time taken by the Earth to orbit the Sun once with
respect to the fixed stars, namely 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.76
seconds. That means that, today at 19:31:24 it will be 64 sidereal years
after I was born. The average anomalistic year, the time taken for the Earth to
complete one revolution with respect to its apsides, is 365 days, 6 hours, 13 minutes, and 52.6 seconds. That means
that, tomorrow around 0:33:06 it will be 64 average anomalistic years since I was
born.
This morning, as usual, we went to pick up the harvest from Herenboeren Usseler Es. The harvest season is winding down, but there's
still plenty in the fields and/or in storage. What you get depends on your
subscription (number of mouths) and your own choices. I came home today with
a red cabbage weighing 4 kilo. We will probably make sauerkraut with it again,
since it is impossible to eat it all at once. I also picked up: small green
bell pepper, two tomatoes that are still green, two leeks, small celeriac
(without leaves), sweet potatoes, beets, salad, and an apple (from the giveaway
table, from Limburg, probably traded with another Herenboeren there).
Profile picture
This afternoon, Conny took some pictures of me in
our back garden. Below, there is one of them after a bit of trimming.
BlinkyTile dodecahedron
This evening, at TkkrLab, I made an attempt
to create a BlinkyTile
dodecahedron, that I bought on August 11. It
proved harder than I thought. I only managed to solder six of them together.
Maybe I should try to use a different type of tape at home.
18.4° Celsius
The temperature at Twente Airport has gone up to
18.4° Celsius, which breaks the previous record of 17.3°C on this date
in 1963. According to the prediction, the temperature would only reach
15.8°C. When Conny and I went walking, we
left without coat but with sweaters. About halfway, we took of our sweaters
off. I spend some time in the garden, pruning our
magnolia.
Exhibitions
Again, it was a warm day for the time of the year, but not as warm as
yesterday. The temperature reached 16.1° Celsius at Twente Airport. In one
of the exhibitions rooms of University of Twente, I saw the exhibition Dissonance with works by novice and professional photographers, a
photo exhibition in collaboration with COWMAG. I found the following works noteworthy:
It looked like two of the projections were not working. On my way to Tetem art space, I made a little detour to view the Bolhaarsteen, a marke stone
that has recently been placed near the location of the original stone, which
was moved when houses were built to a private location in one of the gardens.
At TETEM art space, I saw the installation Operation Theater by Amos
Peled, which I found somewhat interesting. At Concordia, I saw the
exhibitions Squeez in, out (by Sakamon Triboriruk in cooperation with FÆES-›!T) and
Vrouwen in Enschede (Dutch for Women in Enschede) with works by
various local women.
Official election result
Today, the official election results for the
Dutch
general election were announced by the Electoral Council. The final results with respect to the distribution of
the seats, did not deviate from the distribution given on October 30. I downloaded the official report from
the download page. From page 187 to page 230 of the PDF file it countains
all the complaints that have been reported by people and how the councel dealt
with them. From page 231 to 253 it reports all the recounts that have been
commissioned by the electoral council and the corrections that were made based
on the results. On page 254 it reports that (translated from Dutch): 'The
Electoral Council has received more than 100 requests for a full recount of
the votes, but without any justification or factual basis. The Electoral
Council acknowledges these requests." That high number of baseless request and
the higher number of complains, 23 pages in 2023 against 43 now, resulting in
more recounts, 8 pages in 2023 against 22 now, must because of the many rumours
of fraud going round on social media in particular X including the questions
Geert Wilders raised
quoting some wild rumours when it became clear that his party lost with a small
margin from Democrats
66. Being a member of the House of Representatives since 1998, he should be
well aware about the procedures for counting ballots and how the Electoral
Council operates and how people should complain in case they think they have
observed an irregularity. I am affraid that he is doing this and that it should
be regarded as an attack on the foundation of our democracy.
Flowers
This afternoon, Conny and I went on a bit longer
walk that usual. We walked along the Usselerrietweg and turned to the left into the Oude Boekelerdijk (heading
the South). The photo below shows the flowers in the field along Oude
Boekelerdijk. (Farmers are encouraged to sow flower along the edges of their
fields.)
Stable coalitions
Yesterday evening, there was some mentioning about stable coalitions. In the
Netherlands no party is large enough to form a government, which means parties
have to form coalitions such that they have a majority in the House of
Representatives. It means that they have to have at least 76 seats of the 150
to make that their proposals and motions will pass. Furthermore, parties should
agree with each other on many subjects. Whether parties agree with each other
can be estimated based on how often the agreed on how the voted on motions that
were submitted in the past years (see table, I presented on October 7). In a possible coalition, the difference between the most right
and most left party should not be too large. So, the question one could ask is
whether there is a party in the coalition (probably one of the parties in the
middle of the coalition) such that the lowest number of agreement with the
other parties is the best. I wrote a program to
calculate these numbers. The sorted output of the program is included as a
comment in the source code of the program.
The by many prefered coalition honouring the election results is a coalition with People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) with 22 seats, Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) with 18 seats, Democrats 66 (D66) with 26 seats, and GroenLinks-PvdA with 20 seats. This is a broad coalition with 86 seats and
an average agreement score (taking into accound the number of seats per party)
of 77.29 and when the program of the CDA is taken, a minimum agreement of 65%
with GroenLinks-PvdA. However, the VVD has stated before the elections that
they do not want to be in a coalition together with GroenLinks-PvdA.
Dilan
Yeşilgöz, the leader of VVD, says that the GroenLinks-PvdA is
to far to the left, while in the past the VVD has been in coalitions with the
Labour
Party (PvdA). They prefer a coalition with JA21 instead, which has only a slighter higher average agreement score of
77.35% and when again the program of the CDA is taken, a minimum agreement of
67% with JA21. D66, who won the election, are not favour of a coalition with
JA21, which is a far-right party that in their program have many plans that go
against the constitution and/or international treaties, which are considered
anti-democratic. There is another right-wing coalition where JA21 is replaced
by Farmer-Citizen Moverment (BBB), Reformed Political Party (SGP), and Christian Union (CU). This coalition has an average agreement score of
78.26% and when the program of CDA is taken all parties agree at least for 72%
(with BBB). Although this coalition is more 'stable', I am not sure D66 is very
possitive about it, because the strongly differ on ethical issues (abortion and
euthanasia, for example) with the two small Christian parties SGP and CU. The
most 'stable' coalition is a left-wing coalition with Christian Democratic
Appeal, Christian Union, Democrats 66, GroenLinks-PvdA, Socialist Party (SP), Denk, and Party for the Animals (PvdD), which has an average agreement score of
81.44% and when the program of D66 is taken the minimum agreement of 73% with
CDA. But I wonder whether the CDA want to be in a coalition with the small
(far) left parties, who have never been in a government and whether those small
left parties want to be in the government, being afraid that they will lose
even more votes.
BlinkyTile dodecahedron (Part 2)
This afternoon, I spend some time to put the BlinkyTile dodecahedron together with some masking tape. This evening, at
TkkrLab, I spend about three quarters of an
hour to solder the tiles that I had put together with tape. I used a lot of
solder with putting it together. I did a quick check for short circuits and
then it worked the first time I plugged it in. I have not looked into
reprogramming it.
Duo Expo
I went to artist collective B93 to attend the
opening of the
new exhibitions In Between Silence with painting by Saheed Wahab and Self Defense by Karolina Żyniewicz, in which she continues her long-term project on
poisonous plants, where she makes embroideries depicting of poisiones plants
with thread soaked with a sap of that plant. She was doing that during the
opening while sitting cross-legged against a wall. She also had some note books
with samples of poisonous plants with text describing the effects.
Designing programming languages
Yesterday, I came across the page Language Design, which talks about all the aspects of it, and I realized
that I have been designing languages as long as I learnt my first programming
languages, which were Algol
60 and FORTRAN. List of
language design activities:
Data structure alignment
I encountered a major stumbling block in compiling the Tiny C Compiler (TCC) with C compiler I am
developing as a replacement for the MES-compiler used in Live-bootstrap, In the past weeks, I made steady progress in fixing bugs
and implementing some missing functionality. With respect to data structure alignment my compiler, for simplicity reasons, make use of
a 4-byte alignment for all members of a struct. However, TCC to create an ELF file, uses the function fwrite to write a struct to the file
that makes use of the 'typical' alignment rules. This is not good practice, because the
alignment rules and also the endianness are not defined by the C standard. If I want to implement the
'typical' alignment rules in my C compiler it will complicate the
implementation a lot. Fixing the TCC sources is also not desirable because that
means that the trusted release cannot be used. The hack that I am thinking
about is to recognize calls to fwrite with a structure and generate
code to write all the members of the struct with the number of bytes that
matches the 'typical' alignment rules. I will also have to do that for
fread statements that read data into a C struct.
Data structure size
This is a continuation of 'Data structure alignment' that I wrote last Monday. I have implemented the idea that when fwrite (or
fread) is called on a struct, it is rewritten in separete calls for
all its members. It now generates object files of the correct size. But when I
compared the file with what the program compiled with GCC generates, it still
contained difference. I quickly noticed one cause, the use of the sizeof operator. The value returned by this function depends on
the type of alignment that is used. This requires some more, Tiny C Compiler
specific hacking, because when it is used to allocate or copy memory inside the
program the size should be used that matches the alignment used by my compiler,
which gives a minimum of four bytes to all members, but when it is used to
establish the size when GCC is used, it should return the size when a smaller
alignment is used. I have to perform some analyses on all uses of
sizeof and figure out a method to differciate between the two kind of
uses.
Wrong solution for alignment problem
It looks like I have chosen the wrong solution for the data structure
alignment problem that I mentioned last Monday and talked
about last Thursday for the C compiler I am developing as a replacement for the MES-compiler used in Live-bootstrap. I found that the Sym struct is fed into a hash
calculating algorithm that assumes that the fields are packed. So, it seems I
cannot get around implementing 'packed' structures. There are some design
decisions to take. Am I going to extend the intermediate language with commands
for retrieval and storage of two byte values? Am I going to do the implement
the packing for all structures? What about the alignment of pointers, this
because the Stack_C intepreter assumes that pointers are aligned on four bytes.
I could also decided to do the packing for structs that do not contain
pointers, because there is a problem with structs used inside structs for that
matter.
Some wet snow
This afternoon, there was some wet snow. When we
noticed the wet snow, I looked outside and saw some snow 'flakes' on the
ground, so it is possible that the snow started with some large flakes that
stayed a bit on the ground.
Beach
In the afternoon, Conny and I travelled to Oud Poelgeest, a small castle in Oegstgeest, a small town near Leiden. We are going to stay in the hotel behind the former coach house of
the castle. From November 19-23, 1979, I
stayed here during a highschool camp. At that time, there was no hotel yet. I
vaguely remember there were wooden barracks. The Dutch author Jan Wolkers often visited the estate around the castle during his youth
and his first published collection of stories starts with an autobiographic
story about someone stealing two sphinx statues from the castle. One of the
statues was returned in 2013, the other, according to the story was hidden
somewhere at the estate, has been lost till now. After we checked in, we
travelled to Katwijk
aan de Zee to visit the beach on the North, Were we walked along the sea
hoping to see the sunset. We did not see the sunset due to clouds at the
horizon, but did take some pictures. We also collected some shells. The
restaurant we had planned to have dinner at was closed. We travelled to the
city and parked under the dunes at the sea side and had dinner at the beach
pavilion Het
Centrum.
Leiden
Conny and I took the bus to the bus station in
Leiden were she studied.
In the morning, we visited Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden. There we first saw the exhibition Masterful Mystery - On Rembrandt's Enigmatic Contemporary. This
enigmatic contemporary is known as Master I.S. because only his initials are
known. He signed his paintings with his (or her) initials written as a large I
with an S written over it. I found the following works noteworthy:
- Self-Portrait of the Painter in his Studio, Gerrit Dou, circa 1632.
- Saint Jerome as Hermit, Jan Lievens, circa 1631.
- Old Man Besiges a Table with Books, Master I.S., circa 1640-1649.
- Young Scholar, Master I.S., 1633.
- Saint Jerome in his Study, Master I.S., 1653-1655.
- Young Scholoar Half-Nakes, Master I.S., 1638.
- An Old Woman Singing, Master I.S., circa 1638.
- Old Woman Reading, Master I.S., circa 1624-1625.
- Old Woman Reading, Gerrit Dou, circa 1631-1632.
- Old Man, Jan Lievens, circa 1625-1626.
- Old Man with a Fur Hat, Master I.S., 1633-1658.
- Head of an Old Woman, Master I.S., circa 1645-1648.
- Head of an Old Man, Jan Lievens, circa 1630.
- Portrait of an Old Woman, Master I.S., 1651.
- Young Main with a Fur Hat, David Bailly, circa 1635.
- Old Man with Fur Hat, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1630.
- Portrait of a Woman, Facing Left, Master I.S., circa 1650.
- Old Woman Reading a Letter, Master I.S., 1658.
- Two Scholars in a High Room, Master I.S., 1640.
- Old Woman in Three-Quarter Profile, Master I.S., 1640-1645.
- Baptims of the Enuch, Master I.S., 1644.
- Five prints by Rembrandt van Rijn and five by Jan Lievens.
- Old Woman, Master I.S., circa 1645.
- Man with a Growth on his Nose, Master I.S., 1645.
- Man with a Blind Eye, Master I.S., 1635-1655.
We also walked to most of the rest of the museum. I found the following
works noteworthy:
- Triptych with the Last Judgement, Lucas van Leyden, circa 1526-1727.
- Preparation, Roy Villevoye, 2009. (Depicting a barefoor Asmat man.)
- Regents of the Laridanshof in Leiden, Jacob Fransz. van de Merck, 1658.
- The Presentation, Ceasar van Everdingen, 1655.
- Merry Couple, Jan Steen, circa 1660.
- The Robbed Violin Player, Jan Steen, 1670-1672.
- Strips (unnumbered, 13, 30, and 33), Marlene Dumas, 1987.
- The Astronomer, Gerrit Dou, circa 1650.
- Girl with a Lamp, Gerrit Dou, circa 1660-1670.
- Rest in the Flight into Egypt, Adriaan van Gaesbeeck, 1647.
- History Painting with Self-Portrait of the Painter, Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 1626.
- Travelers Resting, Circle of Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, circa 1929.
- Musical Company, Rembrandt Hermansz. van Rijn, 1626.
- Spectacles Seller, Rembrandt Hermansz. van Rijn, circa 1624.
- Self-Portrait, Willem van Mieris, circa 1705.
- Languorous Linering, Larissa Esvelt, 2023.
- Family Self-Portrait, Jaasir Linger, 2019/2025.
- Winti tafra, Jaasir Linger, 2023/2025.
- Ingo opo a liba, Jaasir Linger, 2025.
- Ahead, Atelier Van Lieshout, 2014.
- New Leiden Blanket, Vera van de Seyp.
- Stained-glass window from the Algemeen Handelsblad building in Amsterdam, Harm Kamerlingh Onnes, 1927-1928.
- Portrait of Akkie, Tinus van Doorn, 1929.
- Plucked Roasters, Floris Verster, 1888.
- Flowers and Leaves, Floris Verster, 1940.
- Blue-Green Chinese Bowl and Red Apples, Floris Verster, 1926.
- Flowers in a Conservatory, Floris Verster, 1891.
- La fille du héros, Alexander Hugo Bakker Korff, 1875.
- View of Noordwijk, Harm Kamerlingh Onnes, 1918.
- Still Life with Bottle, Dish and Onion, Hendricus Petrus Bremmer, 1946.
- Preliminary study for stained-glass Composition VIII, Theo van Doesburg, 1917-1918.
- Preliminary study for stained-glass Composition VIII, Theo van Doesburg, 1918-1919.
- Staircase holyday-resort "De Vonk", J.J.P. Oud, 1917.
- Contra-Composition VII, Theo van Doesburg, 1924.
- The Breakfast, Hendrik Valk, 1921.
- Self-Portrait, Hendrik Valk, 1926.
- Composition III, Theo van Doesburg, 1917.
- Clearing in the Woods, Jan Vijlbrief, 1895.
- The Passion of Christ, Henri van Daalhoff, circa 1895.
- Self-Portrait, Theo van Doesburg, 1907-1908.
- Abstract Self-Portrait, Theo van Doesburg, 1915.
In the afternoon, we went to Japan Museum SieboldHuis. We watched the short introduction about the
travels of Philipp Franz von Siebold and how he afterwards settled in the house that
no occupies the musuem. He learned also that he, unknown to the Japanese, was
able to smuggle out germinative seeds of tea plants to the botanical garden
Buitenzorg in Batavia, which were used to start growing tea in
Indonesia. Next we watched the exhibition of the collection on the ground
floor. Upstairs we saw the exhibition Anaïs López - the Turtle and the Monk. An interesting exhibition. I found the
following works (all by Anaïs López except if indicated
differently) noteworthy:
- Pregnant in Kyoto.
- Mountains at Dusk.
- Carp in the Kamo River.
- Crow in a Tree the Kamo River.
- Two Herons by the Kamo River.
- Tabula scalata, Kyoto:
- The Empty Stone.
- My First Encounter with the Turtle.
- Mountains surrounding the City.
- Kami.
- Reiko.
- My Encounter with Kami the Turtle.
- The Saxophonist, Niva Yuta, 2024.
- Woods in the Mountains.
- The Ancient Wood III.
- Deer in the Night.
- Kami Apparition in the Mountains.
We had dinner at the Indonesian Restaurant Sumatra House.
Computer problems
Andy came to visit us as he does every two weeks
on Saturdays. The Lenovo Thinkcentre
Edge72 desktop computer that he uses to watch YouTube did not want to start
anymore as if it did not get power anymore. I unplugged it several times and
pressing the power button did not have any effect. The LEDs on the network card
did light up. We found some old laptop for him to browse YouTube. I installed
Linux Mint on another
old laptop, an Aspire 8935G, for him to use the next time.
This months interesting links
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