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groen moet!
One week to go before the regional and European elections and tension is rising. For me there are two crucial questions : will a racist party get more than 20% of the votes? and will the green party get over the electoral threshold of 5%? If you are not Flemish both probably require some explanation. […]
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capita selecta
Rather than going to the NOG III Workshop I think it is more fun to give a talk for the Capita Selecta-course for 2nd year students on “Monstrous Moonshine”. If I manage to explain to them at least something, I think I am in good shape for next year\’s Baby Geometry (first year) course. Besides,…
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25 years monstrous moonshine
Writing a survey paper is a highly underestimated task. I once tried it out with \’Centers of generic division algebras : the rationality problem 1965-1990\’ and it took me a lot of time and that was on a topic with only 10 to 15 key papers to consider… The task of writing a survey paper…
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artistic and other frustrations
Yesterday, PD1 exhibited some of her paintings in the Antwerp Museum for Photography. Over breakfast this morning she was in a rare angry mood. No, she was satisfied with the responses she got on her work, the room was not ideal (lighting etc.) but that was not what mattered… Me : So? She : There…
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the cpu 2 generation
Never ever tell an ICT-aware person that you want to try to set up a home-network before you understand all 65536 port-numbers and their corresponding protocols. Here is what happened to me this week. Jan Adriaenssens returned from an extended vacation in New Zealand and I told him about my problems with trying to set…
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one week blogging
So far I found it rather easy to post one or more messages a day as I was installing a lot of software or trying to get things working and was merely logging my progress for future reference. These notes are useful to me but probably not to the rest of the world. Another thing…
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internet’s backbones
Did you ever wonder what hardware keeps the web running ? Fibre-optic cables, cross-continent cables and the like seem to be a dull subject but in the hands of Neal Stephenson. When he was doing research for his excellent book Cryptonomicon he travelled the continents following the biggest backbone cable to be laid and wrote…
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a blogging 2004
As it is probably better to run years behind than to stand eternally still, I’ll try out how much of a _blogger_ I am in 2004. If you want to read more about blogging, Rebecca’s pocket is a good place to start. She has written an essay on the early days of the weblog, an…