How to Lie Honestly
Really enjoying the chapter on Statistics in our bed-time read, Math with bad Drawings by Ben Orlin, who approaches the subject in the most profound and at the same time … Continue reading How to Lie Honestly
Category: Thoughts about the world
Simon contemplating various voting systems
Last night, using simple logic, Simon proved to me why a two-candidate plurality voting system is better than many others. There’s a theorem called Arrow’s Theorem which says that any … Continue reading Simon contemplating various voting systems
How many weeks old are you?
I always have my birthdays on a Saturday, a little girl told us at a playground. We laughed at first. But then we asked ourselves, why are we celebrating how … Continue reading How many weeks old are you?
World Cleanup Day 2020
10 times the volume of an olympic swimming pool of plastic waste ends up in the world ocean every hour. E v e r y h o u r. Today … Continue reading World Cleanup Day 2020
Math at the beach
We also visited another old favorite, the beach in Noordwijk. By the way, that’s where ESA is located, toon (they’ve got an awesome space museum we used to frequent when … Continue reading Math at the beach
Singing bottles, negative kelvins and resolving Zeno’s paradox
Picking up hiking keeps leading to beautiful conversations and thought experiments on the way. Yesterday, on our longest hike so far (over 8 km, partially in the sand), as we … Continue reading Singing bottles, negative kelvins and resolving Zeno’s paradox
Tick-Tock
On June 22, at the sea coast in the south of The Netherlands, Simon got bitten by a tick. Climate change sucks. 54% of Dutch land is infested with Lyme-carrying … Continue reading Tick-Tock
How Can Math Help Resolve Racial Segregation?
This is Simon’s contribution to #blacklivesmatter How Can Math Help Resolve Racial Segregation? This video and coding project is based on Segregation Solitaire by Thomas Schelling, an American mathematician and … Continue reading How Can Math Help Resolve Racial Segregation?
Simon’s remix of one of Nicky Case’s playable essays
If you’re interested in why #covid-19 tracing apps are important and the most privacy-friendly way to implement them, please read this interactive essay by Nicky Case and play with the colorful … Continue reading Simon’s remix of one of Nicky Case’s playable essays
New Friends. New Horizons.
Thanks to the lock-down, Simon’s got new friends. For a little over a month now, he has been part of exciting daily discussions, challenging coding sessions and just playing together … Continue reading New Friends. New Horizons.
What do we know: COVID-19 and Protein Folding
On April 9, Simon finished his World Science Scholars course “From Chemistry to Living materials” and had his final live session with MIT’s Professor Markus Buehler who works on COVID-19. … Continue reading What do we know: COVID-19 and Protein Folding
Doughnut Education
Pondering over the future, I told the kids the universal basic income and Doughnut Economics should be the next step. Simon game me an improvised lecture on doughnut topology. Well, … Continue reading Doughnut Education
Geeks out of the box 