History
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Tumbas : Frits Zernike
Famous Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate Frits Zernike lies buried in graveyard Zorgvlied in Amstelveen near Amsterdam. He is buried together with his sister Elisabeth who was a writer and a poet. In the nineties the tombstone was removed and a new one was ‘inaugurated’ recently. If you understand Dutch you can watch a short…
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London Science Museum
Whenever I visit a city I have a look if there are any interesting science museums. In London we planned to go to the Natural History museum but during on trip in the underground we saw an advertisement for the Science Museum and the temporary exhibition of ZimingZhong, mainly British clockworks given to the Chinese…
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J. Robert Oppenheimer. A Life, Abraham Pais (ISBN 9780195327120, Oxford University Press)
With the Oppenheimer movie coming out I decided to read a biography first. I didn’t have the one from Kai Bird on which the movie is based (has been rectified in the mean time) but I did have 3 other books on Oppenheimer patiently lying in the library waiting to be read. After googling a…
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Interview with Richard Rhodes about The Making of the Atomic Bomb
I was surfing the web for some information about the Oppenheimer movie and came across this interview with author Richard Rhodes on YouTube in May 2023. Really interesting to hear Rhodes talk about the many people he talked to in the course of writing this book and others. Well addition to reading the actual book.
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Killers of the Flower Moon
Last week we had an unexpected opportunity to go to the cinema and watch Killers of the Flower Moon as both kids were not at home. Even though the movie was only released mid October we had to look for a theatre that was still playing it. We were in luck that it was still…
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Mosaic
Even though Netscape was the first really widespread browser it really started with Mosaic. Marc Andreessen was involved in both products. There is s a short Computing Conversations interview about the origins of Mosaic.
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Netscape
If you are old enough you may remember Netscape and their browser that made the World Wide Web accessible for everyone. There is a nice documentary about these early beginnings of the www, Netscape and the ‘war’ between Microsoft to bring out the most popular web browser.
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Italië
‘De begeerte om dit land te zien was overrijp; pas nu ze bevredigd is, krijg ik mijn vrienden en vaderland weer innig lief en wordt mijn terugkeer wenselijk, en wel temeer omdat ik het stellige gevoel heb dat ik zovele schatten niet tot eigen bezit en eigen gebruik meeneem, maar dat ze mij en anderen…
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Napoleon. Deel 1: van strateeg tot Keizer, Johan op de Beeck (ISBN , 9789022329115, WPG Uitgevers)
Read this biography a second time while on vacation in Austria. I had read the book a few years ago when it first came out in 2019. As the title says it is the first part of a 2 book biography, spanning a little over 1000 pages in total. Johan Op De Beeck worked many…
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10 women who changed science and the world, Catherine Whitlock & Rhodri Evans (ISBN 9781472137432, Robinson)
Another book I picked up in bookstore Dominicanen in July 2022. It is a cheap paperback edition and I have to say I have read better written books of this type of collection of short biographies. Somehow I found the biographies were too much a collection of facts without a soul that inspires. But there…



