Category Archives: Eef

Graham’s number

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis

One of the most important mathematical objects is the set with its many useful properties. We can look at the size of the set by wondering how many members it embraces. The answer obviously can be found by counting them.
Then we can take another set and compare its size with the first one, again by counting the members. We call this size the cardinality of the set. Continue reading →

Energievoorziening in Nederland

In ons land wordt de energiebehoefte door een aantal bronnen ingevuld.
– aardgas    |
– aardolie    | fossiele brandstoffen
– steenkool |

– kernenergie    |
– windturbines   | CO2-vrije energieopwekking
– zonnepanelen |

– biomassa | “CO2 vrij” —> The great accounting trick Continue reading →

Aardgas

De Europese Commissie zet het licht op groen voor extra investeringen in onder meer aardgas. Dit als vervanging voor steen- en bruinkool dat in veel energiecentrales nog als brandstof wordt gebruikt. Continue reading →

Teloorgang

Met toenemende somberheid beschouw ik de ontwikkelingen van de Nederlandse samenleving welke niet anders dan kunnen worden beoordeeld langs een afglijdende schaal.
En dit afglijden lijkt een zekere route naar totale anarchie.

Bijna wekelijks zien wij uitbarstingen die alleen in een stuurloze samenleving kunnen ontstaan. In iedere poging tot handhaving wordt wel aanleiding gevonden om uiterst gewelddadig te gaan relschoppen: vuurwerkverbod, vaccinatieplicht, QR-pas, lockdown voorstellen, avondklok. Continue reading →

De mythe van de ware tijd

In 2021 zouden de procedures worden gestart om het systeem van zomertijd/wintertijd af te schaffen voor de EU lidstaten. Dit was in 2018 voorgesteld door de Europese Commissie op voorspraak van de toenmalige voorzitter Junckers maar de Europese Raad (regeringsleiders) moet zich hierover nog uitspreken, De kwestie staat echter niet hoog op de prioriteitenlijst dus voorlopig zullen we de klok nog wel tweemaal per jaar moeten bijstellen. Continue reading →