So, yes­ter­day was quite a sur­re­al day over here in the Nether­lands. It was the first, sun­ny day of ‘the ‘Covid19’ lock­down, the Dutch way’. Instead of a total lock­down like Chi­na, Italy and now Spain and France, the Nether­lands are opt­ing for a con­trolled spread­ing of the Coro­na virus through­out the pop­u­la­tion.
By tak­ing less strin­gent mea­sures, soci­ety will be less dis­rupt­ed, but a lot of healthy, less vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple (pos­si­bly up to 60% of the pop­u­la­tion) will get sick with mild symp­toms of Coro­na over the next com­ing months.
— Lees op arnoldhoogerwerf.micro.blog

L’Ar­rivée d’un train à La Cio­tat (Louis Lumière, 1896). In AI upscaled 4K, 60fps ?

After a week of sev­er­al Mid Year Assess­ments at HKU, I’m tired but very sat­is­fied with all the great projects our stu­dents pre­sent­ed.

Just learned about word vec­tors and some cool tricks you can do with them for cre­ative appli­ca­tions. For exam­ple: you can pro­gram­mat­i­cal­ly ‘aver­age’ words like hot and cold to end up with warm! Time to get more into NLP, and a good enough moti­va­tion to improve my Python skills…

4000 axe-monies returned to Mex­i­co

Intrigu­ing mix­ture of folk art, eco­nom­ics and tech­nol­o­gy from 800 years ago.

They are archae­o­log­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant (…) because they attest to an exchange of monies and met­al­lur­gic tech­nol­o­gy between the ancient Mex­i­can and Andean peo­ples.

Days since last Face­book scan­dal

Just anoth­er nudge for those hes­i­tat­ing to quit their big social media depen­den­cy. (There is a bet­ter way.)

What is mono­cul­ture?

”Is there less mono­cul­ture today, or is cul­ture more mass than ever? Are we siloed with­in our own pref­er­ences or are we unable to escape the homog­e­nized net-aver­age, con­sum­ing all the same things?”

“A present for the Euro­pean Union”

Talk­ing about edu­cat­ing the peo­ple. Fin­land is one of the few coun­tries in the world that real­ly trans­lates words into deeds.

Fin­land is mak­ing its online AI crash course free to the world

Very proud of all the par­tic­i­pat­ing stu­dents of the video and audio work­shop at the Acad­e­my of The­atre and Dance in Ams­ter­dam, who had their pub­lic pre­sen­ta­tion today. They all got way out of their com­fort zone and made very per­son­al, vul­ner­a­ble works of art.