Category Archives: EN

Domestic terroristm

When I wrote about terrorists a few weeks ago, I only briefly mentioned the domestic variety of terrorists or terrorism. According to trusty old Wikipedia, domestic terrorism can be simplest described as:

Domestic terrorism or homegrown terrorism is a form of terrorism in which victims “within a country are targeted by a perpetrator with the same citizenship” as the victims.

At the same time, Wikipedia mentions that there is no universally accepted definition of this phenomenon, leaving it to each country to set its own definition. 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 →

tɛɹəɹɪst

Say what…?

That spells terrorist, or tɛɹəɹɪst if you want to know its correct English pronunciation. The word is on the lips of everyone in presidential office, in each government, on police forces and in military all over the globe. It is used by democracies, dictatorships, military juntas, and autocracies the like. Anyone my age may remember that such was not the case for thirty or forty years ago. What happened? 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 →

The Nord Stream blowout

Nordstream:

As was reported yesterday on international news, and perhaps even more in detail out here in Scandinavia, there seems to be some serious trouble with both Nord Stream pipelines since yesterday. Both seem to be showing all the signs of massive leaking. While Nord Stream 2 was not yet deployed, even that has been blowing bubbles since yesterday. Continue reading →

‘Referendum’ in Ukraine

As no one can possibly have missed, russia is in the process of organizing a referendum. The fact that they organized it in another country makes it more unique. The fact that the subject is whether the folks voting in the referendum want to join the russian federation makes it even more unique. Note that my use of the word ‘unique’ is not to be interpreted in a positive manner. Continue reading →

Pricing issues

As much as I like helping others, giving away my books for free makes no sense to me. As it turned out, at bol.com I virtually did just that.

Due to the excessive amount that bol.com takes off my profit, I was giving away each book at €0.60 per copy, which is a steal on their behalf as I see it. As a result of this, I decided to no longer sell my paperbacks via bol.com but only at bravenewbooks.nl. Obviously, sales of ebooks and pocketbooks continue via amazon.com and bravenewbooks.nl (Nuremberg, The Big Day, The Deep, and De Grote Dag).

That said, I am reconsidering the pricing for my ebooks. I’ll keep y’all posted.

Paul
2022-09

Click here for all essays on books and writing this site

Educate russian tourists?

Since the unprovoked invasion of and war from russia* against Ukraine, relations between the EU and russian federation have been at a historic low, at least since the cold war ended about thirty years ago. Many rich russian folks, certainly those aiding and supporting the putin** regime, have found travel restrictions to the EU and US. Continue reading →

Paperback time! (…the sequel)

The great Amazon has since a few years problems delivering print-on-demand paperback books within Europe. Sure I can order a paperback to my summerplace in Spain with no problems and delivered within days. But getting one out to Sweden, where I live, is not possible for the great Amazon. Mid 2022, they still blame it on Covid…

So I struck deals with two publishers, Amazon.com for the North American market and BreaveNewBooks.nl for the European markets. The content of BraveNewBooks is forwarded to other large bookshops such as bol.com. Continue reading →