Kelley van Evert

Some time ago now, Wouter (an old friend of mine), Tom (another friend of mine) and I were having a drink when Wouter came up with this seemingly little math problem. A circle, as you know, is the collection of all points with a certain distance to a focus point A. An ellipse has the same definition, but then with two focus points. What would the name and shape be of the object that’s defined the same way as circles and ellipses, but with three focus points?

We couldn’t really think of what the shape would look like, except the symmetric aspect, and that it kinda nears to a circle as you make it bigger. But it must be very simple, I thought, and it must be very easy to come by some nice pictures and descriptions of such objects on the internet. But astonishingly, I couldn’t find anything at all!

So we set out to draw this apparently stubborn shape ourselves. As the distance of (x,y) to the three focus points A, B and C it is defined as:

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I read an article some time ago, in the NRC, by Joris Luyendijk, stating that objective journalism is not possible. His explanation was that with your choice of words, your point of view, even you’re choice of even writing about the particular subject you are already associating your text with certain instances(, authorities, people, etc), and thereby advocating their opinions. Hence, it is impossible to be objective, even not writing at all isn’t objective.

Of course, his reasoning has truth. It is a quite philosophical point he’s making though, and thus it’s applicability to the rest of the reasoning in his article a bit far-fetched. (You can read his article here.) Let me quote one of his conclusions:

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I joined a debating group some time ago at my school. It’s solely run by students. Very now and then, usually once every two weeks, we come together and debate about things; anything, everything. Which usually comes down to a lot of very humorous, but not very serious, debating.

However much I like the idea of this group even existing (with the youth nowadays being as unconcerned about politics and stuff as they are), it disturbs me how shortsightedly everyone just blurts out their arguments at our meetings. I often have to remind myself of the fact that we’re not coming together to work anything out, or to find any truth. We’re merely practicing and developing our rhetoric. (I wouldn’t speak to heavily of it though..)

I’m just not very sure if everyone is fully aware of this contrast. Therefore I’d like to stress the fact that debating often is not the ideal solution for most situations.

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Oh boy oh boy this is interesting stuff

After reflecting on the methods we used with our tutor problem once more, my dad came up with this very neat and simple method for this type of problem: linear programming. I looked it up immediately and found a wonderful GNU library for it (installed quite simply with cygwin running on vista), and a great tutorial on the subject (also check parts 2 an 3!). It’s really quite simple to learn, and I think it’ll provide good solutions for our problem

Linear programming is an optimization process. It’s based on a mathematical method, which I haven’t really looked into yet, but defines itself something like: finding points in an n-dimensional space where possible points are contained by polyhedrons, which are defined by the given constraints. A linear programming problem consists of four parts, for as far as I can make up, here is a little roundup:

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What is power?

Certain aspects of power are simple, for example the ability to have others do as you will. Or having material advantages over others. These are not the ones I’m going to investigate though. I will be looking into one a bit more complex than the foregoing examples, the illusionary aspect of power in the minds of the individuals related to it.

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So I was talking to a friend some time ago and there was this little, unimportant, disagreement we had.

It was nothing really significant in the line of conversation we were having, but when I thought about it some more, later, I found it did actually say a lot. About the different paths we took in discovering, or developing our philosophy or views of our world. (I’ll get back to this ‘paths’ thing later.)

My opinion was that the extent to which people tell their thoughts and/or truth to anyone else, in any relationship so to speak, hits rock bottom at a certain point, at which she disagreed. She had friends to which she told everything on her mind, she said.

At the moment, I equalized her ‘everything’ and my ‘very deep but still shallow’ to get on with my story, but later I did spend some thought to it.

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I just got a new project!
It’s a business website for a freelance supplying English language services.

But the best thing might even be the base color: teal! How often do you see that?
Here’s a preview:

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http://www.thedoghousediaries.com/?p=923

This one took me quite some time to come up with (Deletes uncategorized products.)

Code block

DELETE `a`
FROM `mdv_products` AS `a`
INNER JOIN
(
	SELECT `mdv_products`.`id`
	FROM `mdv_products`
	LEFT OUTER JOIN `mdv_categories`
	ON `mdv_products`.`category_id` = `mdv_categories`.`id`
	WHERE `mdv_categories`.`id` IS NULL
) AS `b`
WHERE `a`.`id` = `b`.`id`

A little writing experiment:

A Boy

Obsessions were the thing that always kept him busy. Not full-blown obsessions, but little ones, hobby’s if you may, but then the kind that never really reached maturity but stayed in their planning stages. Momentary distractions of routine and the painstakingly boring, never understanding world around him. Nurturing his delusional thoughts of superiority to it. It was a quite tragic situation, if you look upon it in this fashion, this ongoing cycle of obsessions which kept promising things never reached, and afterward discarded of by a feeling of discouragement, exchanged for new ones.

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