Sjors

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

Ik vond het leuk om vorige week in de NRC-Next een artikel van Bjorn Lomborg tegen te komen, dat een vertaling is van zijn artikel in The Guardian. Hoewel enigszins overdreven – ik heb sowieso niet zoveel met kinderen – komt zijn betoog erop neer dat de klimaathysterie in wereld schadelijk is voor de moraal van kinderen.

Het is onderdeel van zijn algemene punt dat klimaatverandering teveel geld en aandacht krijgt ten opzichte van andere problemen in de wereld. Dat wil zeggen, als je puur kijkt naar de effectiviteit van geboden oplossingen, zowel qua tijd als geld. Een uur vergaderen over klimaatverandering levert duizenden keren minder geredde levens op dan een uur vergaderen over gezondheidszorg in ontwikkelingslanden. Een miljoen euro in Kyoto is ongeveer net zo effectief als een euro in malariabestrijding* (plus of min een paar ordes van grootte). Ik ben het hier volledig met hem eens, zoals ik al eerder en veel uitgebreider beschreven heb.

Vandaag reageerde Greenpeace op zijn artikel, op een bijzonder voorspelbare manier. Laat ik het even kort analyseren.

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Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

I just read an interesting and funny blog post that compares two well known – among certain people – productivity systems: Getting Things Done by David Allen and The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. I left a comment there that – in all my modesty – I’d like to share with you.

About four years ago I read GTD (Getting Things Done) for the first time. I was very busy – in fact slightly overworked – at the time. The methodology helped me to create an inventory of my “projects” and I used that inventory to start removing stuff.

It’s a fairly complicated system, but so is public transport; once you figure it out it pays. It’s no secret that I really like this book.

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Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

I’m going to TED India! My application has been accepted (you have to apply in order to attend) and I’ve booked my flight. Only one minor detail remains: paying for the conference ticket.

I “should” be able to “afford” this conference, since I’m a software engineer in a fairly rich country. So it’s really a cash flow issue; if I could, I would have borrowed the money from my bank and worked for the ticket later.

This is where you come in…

Your donations** will help me go to TED India. In exchange, I offer one hour of my “brain power” to anyone donating $50*. Please send me an email if you wish to use that offer.

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Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

I decided to keep track of my weight for a month, as a 30 day trial. I weighed myself first thing every morning on a cheap digital scale.

The result is the blue line in the chart below.

I knew there’d be some variation, but I wanted to figure out what is causing that. My attention was drawn to the sharp peak (73.0) at June 19th and so I looked back into my calendar to see what I was doing around that day.

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Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

Nu ik opzoek ben naar een baan, is het begrip scheefwonen – in een huis wonen dat te goedkoop is voor je inkomen – ineens weer relevant geworden.Als ik straks een baan heb, ben ik dan een scheefwoner? En is dat erg? Sommige van mijn beste vrienden zijn tenslotte scheefwoners.

Vandaag werd er weer klakkeloos negatief over scheefwoners gesproken in de Zaterdag NRC (23 mei, pagina 4, opiniestuk van Maarten Huygen over krakers). Ook vermoed ik dat mijn ouders sceptisch staan tegenover scheefwonen.

Tijd voor een tegenoffensief dus, want scheefwonen is goed!

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Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

Back in February I watched Travis Metcalfe’s talk about the Pale Blue Dot project, where you can adopt a star for $10 and sponsor scientific research. And not just any star; the recently launched Kepler satellite is looking for planets around these stars. Now that’s a cheap price to pay for so much fame and glory

Of course, I wanted to adopt the brightest star available, but this was difficult using the interface available at that time. So I decided to download the list of stars and build my own Ruby on Rails application around it to make this search easier.

It’s located at pale-blue-dot.sprovoost.nl and here’s a preview:

My adopted star

You can search for stars in order of increasing or decreasing brightness and you can choose not to list stars that are already adopted. Each of the stars can viewed in Google Sky Maps, so you can see if you like the looks. You can also search by adopter name.

I just realized that every star now has a URL. Not sure why that is significant, but it’s kind of cool.

One of the features that I’d like to build soon is the possibility of finding available stars near a particular star, so you can adopt a star close to your friends star. To make the sky even more social, I’d like to build a Facebook App around it.

Of course, I don’t have an infinite amount of time to work on this, so any help is greatly appreciated.

You can find the source code here and the issue tracker here.

Also, is there anyone with enough math and programming skills and patience to build a mobile app? Such an app would use the phone’s clock, GPS, accelometer and (optionally) compas to assist in locating the adopted star in the sky.

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

One of the questions in the student evaluation of the Google Summer of Code reads:

If there was one thing you wish you had known before getting started in Summer of Code, what would it be?

It is a very typical evaluation question and we all sortof know what it means and how to answer it. However, if you insist on thinking about it – and this is very acceptable behavior in some circles – it is actually a very difficult question.

I tend to read this question as follows: if you could meet yourself in the past, what would you tell your past self?

Well, I would probably give myself the final git repository, plus an external hard disk with as much of the interesting new information on the present day Internet as possible.

What would my past self do with that information? He would probably decide to use the outcome of a couple of footy matches to make a decent living. But apart from that, he would pick another project. Not because my project is uninteresting, but I really enjoyed that part of the project that I worked on. Continuing to work on this particular code base is really interesting, but not as interesting as it was to build it in the first place.

So my conclusion is: the more advice that I give to my past self, the less intersting his project would become. This is not a real problem however, because the information would provide him with many new opportunities.

I have the same view on Sudoko puzzles. A friend of mine wrote a computer program, while he was drinking beer in the pub, that could solve a lot of these puzzles. Many fanatical puzzlers would never consider using such a program; it would take away the fun.

I completely disagree with them. Now that my friend has releaved the world of The Sudoko Problem, mankind can move on to solving new problems.

I do not understand why people take such pleasure in creating artificial problems and then solving them over and over again, when there is an astonishing abundance of problems already out there waiting to be solved.

Just to make an even bolder statement: anyone who spends even a minute a day solving problems that have already been solved, should feel really guilty about climate change, poverty, diseases, slow public transport and millions and millions of other problems. Well at least, I tend to look at my own behavior from that perspective. All that without losing the ability to enjoy live; that is the real tricky part.