(scroll down for my two talks if you are in a hurry) As I write this I’m suffering from severe post-camp blues. Every four years the Dutch hacker community organizes a stupendously large multi-day campsite event, with ample international help. To a large extent, “everyone” is there. And this time, like every time,...

Eerder dit jaar spraken Kustaw Bessems en ik elkaar in een aflevering van de Volkskrant podcast ‘Stuurloos’ (reservelink). In een uitzending van meer dan een uur behandelden we waarom het zo moeilijk is voor de overheid en grote bedrijven om mensen te werven die ergens echt veel vanaf weten, en die mensen vervolgens...

As presented on the 24th of May 2022 at the European Energy Law Seminar 2022 organized by the Dutch Energy Law Association (NeVER), in cooperation with the University of Groningen’s Centre of Energy Law and Sustainability and the University of Oslo’s Scandinavian Institute of Maritime Law So before we delve into the...

Hi everyone, A brief note, I’ve written a book, and the content is nearly done. You can read all about it here. The first 90% of the project went well, but I need (well paid) help with the remaining 90% to turn it into a decent book. This is a ‘for profit’ book, but it will be given away for free to schools,...

In an earlier post I presented a naive model for estimating Dutch electrical solar power generation numbers. It turns out that the Dutch electrical power generation numbers are an even bigger mess than I appreciated. It appears that “everyone knows” that the numbers are confusing, incomplete and perhaps even wrong....

As part of my coping mechanisms, I like to make graphs of important things I worry about. Recently with the Russia-inflicted horrors in Ukraine, I’ve been looking at the torrent of Russian gas being bought by Europe. This turned into a live plot that shows just how much money we are sending to Russia. In that post,...

The horrors of the Russian war on Ukraine continue unabated. Every eurocent we send to Russia is an intolerable assault on the senses. The world buys lots of things from Russia. For some of these, if Europe does not buy them, someone else will. But there is one major exception: natural gas. Over the past few weeks...

So I love academia, and I also built two businesses. When I dropped out of studying physics to focus on my company, I assumed I knew everything, since I had studied physics! Turned out that if you enter the world of commerce, it is very bad if you are visibly confused about the difference between business...

And we’re back! As noted in part 1 and part 2 I thought it might be possible that I had discovered something interesting in biology. Lacking an academic peer group, I had decided to use a series of blog posts to gather feedback and to keep myself honest. I’m very pleased to report that this process worked! I just...

If you programmed something and it turns out to be too slow, often you’d like to farm out the work to multiple threads. At this point you typically have a few choices: use some kind of producer/consumer pipe half-ass it by dividing the work into n chunks and launch n threads and hope for the best rely on one of the...

Na mijn vorige deprimerende stukje over ons stompzinnige Coronabeleid gooi ik het nu over een wat positievere boeg. Want het lijkt er soms wel op alsof er geen enkele vooruitgang geboekt is, en we hier nooit meer uit gaan komen, maar dat is echt niet zo. Foto van Ivan Diaz op Unsplash Om met het begin te beginnen,...

Echt, ik trek het niet meer. Regeren is vooruitzien. Ik denk dat we dus niet regeren in Nederland. Corona is, ook na twee jaar, nog steeds een ontwikkelend ding. Het virus, de vaccins, de reacties van mensen, ze blijven ons verbazen. Maar een ding is inmiddels wel constant: geïnformeerde mensen in de buitenwereld...