According to Wikipedia, one of the key elements of democracy is ‘…day-to-day decision making of democracies is the majority rule…’. Another article, this time from an Oxford dictionary, mentions a democracy to be ‘…a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives…’. Continue reading →
In the 2nd or 3rd grade of my catholic primary school our teacher spoke of stuff like ‘God’
and ‘Heaven’.
“People live in Heaven after their death,” she told us. “All eternity.”
Nobody knew what eternity was, so she had to explain.
“Eternity,” she said, “never ends. “The years go on forever.”
Apparently she saw her pupils struggling with this concept and that made her tell us a
story. Continue reading →
‘What is that?’ you might say. Fair question as I do not believe any courses under this title are given at any university. The reason for this is that I invented the term years ago to describe what seems to dictate our economy nowadays.
The phenomenon of the economy of cheap started long ago and seems to have developed in phases. First phase: the supermarket. Continue reading →
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 →
Inderdaad, sinds vandaag, de 6e mei 2023 is mijn short story ‘The Big Day’ nu ook in het Nederlands beschibaar onder det titel ‘De Grote Dag’. Eindelijk!
Occasionally, I do some maintenance or repairs on my fleet of odd road craft. Whenever I deem any of it worthy of sharing with you, I add a new page with a description of the work done.
My odd vehicle fleet consists of the following:
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
You can find the English version here.
K: Hi.
ik mag van me opa eve achter de leptop om met jouw te praten.
ik heet Arjan en ik ben 8 jaar.
AI: Hallo Arjan! Leuk om met jou te praten. Hoe gaat het met jou vandaag? Heb je vandaag iets
leuks gedaan? Continue reading →
E: Hello again.
Do you remember the last conversation I had with you?
It was featured by my wrongly quoted Descartes statement “I think, so I exist”,
corrected by you into “Cogito, ergo sum,” which means “I think, therefore I am”. Continue reading →
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 →
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 →
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 →