Unexpected turns of events – Short stories

Eef, our resident columnist and contributor of mainly scientific content to this blog, decided it was time to write and publish some short stories collected from his memory under the sub-title ‘Unexpected turns of events‘. It is my pleasure to publish them on this site and bring them to your attention. Eef wrote three stories to date, I have no doubt that more will follow shortly. Continue reading →

Audiobook – Follow-up

A short message this time. This is a follow-up to my previous post on creating an audiobook with an AI voice. You can read that post here.

While all the techy bits were sorted when I posted that article, there was still quite some administration and distribution going on after I posted. Today it was pointed out to me that my audiobook ‘The Big Day‘ is now available for listening on several websites specializing in Audiobooks. Here are a few of the webshops: Continue reading →

The Art of Translation

My all time favorite SF-writer is Jack Vance who died at May 13th 2013 at the age of 96. He wasn’t a follower of the hard science fiction category, there are far more qualified writers for this genre like Larry Niven with his fabulous novel Ringworld, full of hard core science.
In fact Niven had to write a sequel to Ringworld because he wanted to correct a rather stupid technical error in the original story. One which was pointed him out by MIT students. Continue reading →

Translation, human or AI?

As the idea came up to translate one of my books from the English language it was written in, to what is supposed to be my native tongue: Dutch, I decided to have a go at this challenge. To be fair, it wasn’t really a formal challenge, more like a curiosity of mine if I could do it or not. After all, with all the AI presence online, why would one be as mad as to undertake such a laborious task manually Have I gone mad? Continue reading →

AI? For an audiobook? Are you mad?

Well, that remains to be seen. The question is if I can publish an audiobook using AI?

Good question, I’ve written a few books, and published them both in paperback and ebook format, but never given the idea of publishing them as audiobooks much thought. While I’ve always been an avid reader of printed books and more recently also of ebooks, audiobooks never really became my thing. I tried one of them once a long time ago but never managed to finish it. Mind you, that was in the age when CD’s had just become fashionable. Continue reading →

Police brutality – Unique to the USA?

It has been impossible to ignore the cases of severe police brutality from departments all over the USA. Any reasonable person would wonder, after reading about this for the second, third, or even fourth time in the same year, why US police departments do not learn from previous examples. After all, how hard can it be? Continue reading →

PrisonLAW

In de recente pers werd melding gemaakt van een gerechtelijke dwaling in de zaak Jaitsen Singh, de Nederlander die al tientallen jaren vastzit in de USA. En, zoals het er al lang naar uitziet, voor iets dat hij niet gedaan heeft. Een grove gerechtelijke dwaling derhalve!

Helaas is zijn geval niet uniek, hij is niet de enige nederlander die onschuldig vastzit of vast gezeten heeft. Bovendien geldt hetzelfde voor gevangenen in andere landen dan de USA, en met andere nationaliteiten dan de Nederlandse. Continue reading →

ChatGPT…

After a recent contribution by fellow columnist Eef, suddenly a lot of articles in the Dutch and Swedish press about this AI were published – did they read Eef’s column? As usual with the presentation of any new AI, the articles vary from handy tools for the curious, via a new don’t-have-to-do-any-more-homework trick for students, to the latest threat for AI to take over our jobs and ultimately the world.

Finally, I got curious and decided I had to try the thang for myself. Continue reading →

Domestic terroristm

When I wrote about terrorists a few weeks ago, I only briefly mentioned the domestic variety of terrorists or terrorism. According to trusty old Wikipedia, domestic terrorism can be simplest described as:

Domestic terrorism or homegrown terrorism is a form of terrorism in which victims “within a country are targeted by a perpetrator with the same citizenship” as the victims.

At the same time, Wikipedia mentions that there is no universally accepted definition of this phenomenon, leaving it to each country to set its own definition. Continue reading →

Mathematical issues

Some remarkable mathematical issues

Although the Dutch newspapers Volkskrant and NRC can be blamed for being too political (D66) biased to be independent as journals ought to be, it must be said that both have excellent science sections.
On an irregular base even topics of mathematical nature have been published.

Of course for a layman’s audience, mathematics lacks the ability of other science disciplines of being easily visualized.
So the topics in these sections were about trivial stuff like the latest calculated decimals of π or some large regions on the number line without any prime number called prime deserts, a newly found Mersenne number, etc.
But that hardly scratches the surface. Continue reading →