Riksdagsval – En jämförelse

För några dagar sedan var det val i Nederländerna. Jag tänker dock inte ta upp resultatet av valet. Däremot är det ett bra tillfälle att jämföra den Nederländska valprocessen med den Svenska.

Den Svenska valprocessen har jag skrivit om vid två tidigare tillfällen; en gång innan ett tidigare val här, och sedan några dagar efter samma val här. Slutsatsen var då att jag inte är särskild imponerad av valmetoden som tillämpas i det Svenska valet. Continue reading →

Writing and hobbies

One of the many perks of writing is that you get to incorporate things you fancy in your stories. After all, as a writer, you own the story! I regularly make use of that perk. Readers who know me will recognize these details, while others take them for regular book content.

One of the things that always has had my interest, apart from reading, are cars, motorcycles, and sailing. So I eagerly jump to every opportunity to put in my favorite cars or incorporate cars or sailing in my stories.

Nuremberg:
When I was working on my first book Nuremberg in 2021, I could not resist using a 2CV as a means of transport in the center of Amsterdam in the 80ies. Even if the make and model are never mentioned in my book, when reading the attached text snippets you’ll probably agree the car cannot be anything other than a 2CV. Continue reading →

P vs NP – A promise fulfilled

P versus NP – An early encounter

My first programming experience was in the early 80’s. I had bought myself a Texas instruments 58-c programmable calculator, and I was curious what could be done with such a device. That turned out to be very modest.
The calculator was capable of 480 program steps but held then zero memories for data storage. Each memory used for data consumed 8 program steps, so with the storage of e.g. 10 integers, the programming space was diminished with 80 steps.
The 58-c’s memory was retained even after switching off the calculator, but before creating another program, memory first had to be erased. Continue reading →

Cultural dilemma – Country vs Religion

One would think it would be easy to describe or define a country. But its definition in Wikipedia leaves room for interpretation that attempts to describe it as ‘…a distinct part of the world, such as a state, nation, or other political entity…’. Notably, the definition of a country does not include ‘a group of people with a certain religion‘ or even ‘a group of people‘. On the other hand, the Wikipedia article does mention religion in any way but for the use of religious symbols, eg. in flags. Continue reading →

Ocean floor infrastructure vulnerability

Just about one year ago (although it seems longer than that), the Nordstream pipelines were sabotaged. Within a short period of time, all four pipelines appeared to have blown up, likely by explosive charges. As a result of this, central Europe had to find alternative sources to replace the gas delivered by the Nordstream1 pipeline, Nordstream 2 was not yet ready, albeit very close. Continue reading →

Paperback weekend!

This weekend I’ll be publishing all my four books on amazon in paperback format. Until now, I had my ebooks on amazon (Kindle) and my paperbacks on bravenewbooks.nl. This last webshop turned out to be quite expensive for readers outside of the Netherlands, myself included, that had to face excessive shipping costs up to €25. With amazon, I hope y’all at least get better shipping costs as the books can be printed on demand more locally. Continue reading →

TweetrX

Once upon a time, you had Twitter to distribute new, opinions and other stuff you wanted to share. I joined quite late, in 2016, and used the app mostly to share technical conferences I joined. Once I started writing books, I used the platform to announce my books. Later, after The Deep was published and the actual sabotage took place, I published links to the news articles combined with a comment and a link to my book.

Then Elon came along… Continue reading →

New site!

Indeed, you may have noticed we’re now at allegedfacts.eu rather than the trusty old plusservices.se. or my former company site pvdconsultancy.se.  Perhaps you were automatically redirected here when trying to get to the old site.

Whatever the case, welcome to our new home!

Why, you may ask? Fair question! There are actually several reasons for this change:

  • The .se did not match the international character of the site anymore
  • The plusservices URL  was actually an old company account (that was never used for my company)
  • The name of the site had no real relation to its content
  • The website of my old company PvD Consultancy AB was finally mothballed

Anyway, from wherever you came: welcome here! I hope you’ll like it as much here as you did the old site – or perhaps even better!

Continue reading →

Sweden, NATO and democracy

Let’s start with democracy:

According to Wikipedia, one of the key elements of democracy is ‘…day-to-day decision making of democracies is the majority rule…’. Another article, this time from an Oxford dictionary, mentions a democracy to be ‘…a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives…’. Continue reading →

Graham’s number

In the 2nd or 3rd grade of my catholic primary school our teacher spoke of stuff like ‘God’
and ‘Heaven’.
“People live in Heaven after their death,” she told us. “All eternity.”
Nobody knew what eternity was, so she had to explain.
“Eternity,” she said, “never ends. “The years go on forever.”
Apparently she saw her pupils struggling with this concept and that made her tell us a
story. Continue reading →

The economy of cheap versus special needs

‘What is that?’ you might say. Fair question as I do not believe any courses under this title are given at any university. The reason for this is that I invented the term years ago to describe what seems to dictate our economy nowadays.

The phenomenon of the economy of cheap started long ago and seems to have developed in phases. First phase: the supermarket. Continue reading →

Unexpected turns of events – Short stories

Eef, our resident columnist and contributor of mainly scientific content to this blog, decided it was time to write and publish some short stories collected from his memory under the sub-title ‘Unexpected turns of events‘. It is my pleasure to publish them on this site and bring them to your attention. Eef wrote three stories to date, I have no doubt that more will follow shortly. Continue reading →