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The Abacus
The abacus has been around since ancient times and apparently is still used in some places. The abacus was once widely used and is known as soroban in Japan, suan pan in China, schoty in Russia, coulba in Turkey and choreb in Armenia for example. Maybe it would be fun to introduce them again into the classroom and use it to teach a bit of history and to organise speed calculation competitions between teams using an abacus and ones using pen and paper. As you surely know the abacus uses sliding stones to count but you may not know like…
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The Birth of Zero
‘In the history of culture the discovery of zero will always stand out as one of the greatest single achievements of the human race.’― Tobias Danzig, Number: The Language of Science
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Life without Zero
‘The point about zero is that we don’t need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.’― Alfred North Whitehead
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Life Is Simple, JohnJoe McFadden (ISBN 978-1-529-36495-8, Basic Books)
I started reading this book at the end of August and only just finished it yesterday. My wife bought it at Dominicanen in Maastricht during our visit there in July and read it on vacation. She asked me to read it as well so we could exchange thoughts about it. The book is a history of science but one looking at how Occam’s razor influenced the evolution of scientific thought and theories through time. This approach makes it quite different from more traditional approaches. The main focus is on how the demand for simplicity lead to new theories in various…
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Einstein’s Razor
‘Nature is the realisation of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.’― Albert Einstein
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All Weather Rocket
End of last week my Stromer ST3 Pinion Edition arrived. I had hoped to get the fancy red launch edition but had to settle for a black one in the end. From far away it looks a little common in black. Common is not exactly the word I was looking for but one way or another it seems not special enough for this bike. If you inspect the bike up close and look at the craftsmanship that went into making the frame it is stunningly special, even in black. My son said that if Batman would ride a bike it…
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Cannondale Contro-E Speed Retirement
After roughly 8000 commuting kilometers I have ‘retired’ my Contro-E Speed today. You can read a short review in Dutch here. When I bought it back in 2016 it was a ‘trade in’ for my motorbike. I got rid of my unsafe motorbike and got an equally unsafe speed pedelec instead. Of course, going fast on a motorcycle in heavy traffic on the highway is more dangerous because of the speed but on my commute through villages I really believe the speed pedelec can be more dangerous. Riding 45 km/h on it you are going about as fast on a…
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Lego Technic BMW M 1000 RR
This year there were not so many summer vacation camps going on so I figured it would be a good period to build a new Lego BMW motor. A few years ago I bought a R 1200 GS model but this time it was the M 1000 RR. Built on scale of 1:5 and containing almost 2000 stones this is a massive piece. We started working on it at the beginning of the summer school holidays but then the remaining camps and our family vacation came in between and the model wasn’t finished until end of August. The model is…
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Keerbergen D1 – Embourg
After losing the opening match of the season agains Old Club there was a bit of pressure on the team for the second game. Last season D1 also played against Embourg in Nationale 3 and while they won the away game at Embourg, the game agains them near the end of the season at home ended in a draw which in all fairness should have been won by Embourg. But the fun thing about sports is that it is often unpredictable. And so it went here. What we expected to be a tough game ended up being relatively easy with…
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Begonvil
With both of our kids away on summer camp activities we decided to go for dinner at Begonvil just the 2 of us. I had stumbled across it a little while ago looking for a place to eat on google maps. This mediterranean/Turkish restaurant is located in the centre of Keerbergen and serves a number of dishes that you may also find in Turkish and Greek restaurants. The interior is a little strange but that is probably due to the fact it used to be a bakery before at the same location and a traiteur before that. You can still…
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