-
Wisdom
In 2002 the American biologist Chandler Robbins discovered a ringed Albatross on the Midway islands. The ring had number Z333 and it turned out to be a bird he had ringed himself half a century before in 1956. At the time of ringing the Albatross was at least 5 years old, making the bird older than 50 years in 2002. Until then biologists thought the maximum age of an Albatross was about 40 years. The bird was christened Wisdom as it had managed to survive for so many years. Wisdom has since generated many new insights. It is the oldest…
-
-
-
Absurd donker
‘Het was zo donker dat zelfs de mol onder de grond tegen de muren van zijn hol botste en somber begon te mopperen.’― Toon Tellegen
-
Krankzinnigheid
‘Krankzinnigheid in individuen is uitzonderlijk – maar in groepen, partijen, volkeren en tijdperken is het de regel.’― Nietzsche
-
Working with dates and times in python
Having finished all the most urgent tasks at work and having started the year end vacation I decided to pick up my python learning on Datacamp again. I followed the course on working with dates and types in python which is part of their python programmer track. It was a nice introduction to the datetime library and how to use datetime objects in pandas. The nice thing about python is that for almost every task you can think of there is probably a library out there to do the heavy lifting for you. This is also the case for dates…
-
Understanding the Universe. An introduction to physics and astrophysics, James B. Seaborn (ISBN 978-146126868-0, Springer)
James Seaborn has been teaching an introductory course for many years and this book is the translation into book form of that course. The book is intended for non science majors and teaches physics with an emphasis on topics and applications in astrophysics. I was curious to learn how that approach would work. The result is a physics course at the level of 6th grade high school but applying and illustrating the concepts from the first chapters to astronomy. The first chapters deal with Newton’s laws, uniform circular motion, energy conservation and the universal law of gravitation. This takes up…
-
Command And Control, Eric Schlosser (ISBN 9780141037912, Penguin)
Command and Control is written by Eric Schlosser. I read his bestseller fastfood nation long ago and liked it a lot so when this book came out in 2014 I bought it and read it. It was a scary read at the time and this year while we were on holiday this summer I decided to read it again in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Having grown up during the Cold War and the nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the US I remember the relief when the Berlin Wall fell and the threat of nuclear…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
