History
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Exploring Pisa: Lunch and Landmarks on the Way to Corsica
On our second day driving to Corsica we had a short leg of a little over 300km between Milan and Livorno. The reason for this was that we had an early ferry on Sunday morning so we wanted to avoid getting to Livorno very late and having to get up early in the morning to…
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Hollywood Boulevard. Een Eeuw Filmsterren, Steven de Foer (ISBN 9789463101516, Uitgeverij Polis)
This book came out in 2016 and I bought it after reading a review in the paper De Standaard. The author is a journalist that worked and wrote for De Standaard covering among other things American politics for quite a while. He is also a film enthusiast and he wrote numerous movie reviews for De…
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Exploring Leiden: The Rembrandt Days Experience
Our recent visit to Leiden happened to coincide with the Leidse Rembrandt Dagen to honour the famous painter Rembrandt van Rijn. During this event part of the city centre becomes the stage for actors evoking the 17th century. There are also many art exhibitions to visit. The actors, in 17th century costumes, perform activities typical…
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Experience the Impressive Naturalis Museum in Leiden
Naturalis in Leiden is the Dutch national research institute for biodiversity. Their national history museum has a very large collection of more than 40 million objects. During our previous visit a few years ago most of the museum was closed for renovation and we could only see their T-Rex skeleton Trix. This was excavated in…
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Exploring the Boerhaave Museum: A Dive into Dutch Scientific History
During our recent trip to Leiden we decided to visit the Boerhaave museum again. This is a very famous Dutch history of science museum covering 5 centuries of scientific discoveries in The Netherlands. You can view famous scientific equipment like early telescopes and microscopes used by for example Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. Quite a lot of…
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Thinking Small. The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle, Andrea Hiott (ISBN 9780345521422, Ballantine Books)
I read about this book in the newspaper when it originally came out in Dutch in 2012. When I was young an uncle had a Beetle and I liked driving around in the car. The boxer motor really generates a unique sound. As a result this book caught my interest and I bought it. But…
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HTML For the World Wide Web, Elizabeth Castro (Peachpit Press)
I read this book in 2003 when the web was still young. I used it to teach myself html (and a little css) so that I could create my own first personal web page. I like to read so it had short summaries of books I had read, plus pictures to share with the family…
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The Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler (ISBN 978-0-141-39453-4, Penguin Classics)
I read about this book in another one about the effort to send people to Mars. I wrote a short post about that book earlier. This book is a mix of history a of science and an analysis of the scientific method. From the latter perspective it presents an alternative to the well known Structure…
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Oppenheimer. Portrait of an Enigma, Jeremy Bernstein (ISBN 978-1-56663-569-1, Ivan R. Dee)
The third Oppenheimer biography I have read. Compared to the other 2 this is a very brief one. Jeremy Bernstein is a physicist turned science writer who wrote many biographies for The New Yorker. In the introduction of the book he writes he never got around to writing a biography of Oppenheimer for The New…
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Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes (ISBN 978-0-375-71394-1, Vintage Books)
The third book in the series on atomic weapons after ‘The making of the atomic bomb’ and ‘Dark Sun’. Chronologically it also covers the period after these 2 books and covers the nuclear arms race and the negotiations between Gorbatchev and Reagan that finally lead to several treaties that finally lead to a reduction in…
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