Today is Amnesty‘s "Freedom of speech day": A movement to illuminate the lack of freedom of speech around the world. They encourage everybody to do something related to freedom of speech on this day, and this is my contribution. Freedom of speech is one of the most important liberties in our lives. If we did not have the right to express our opinions, our lives would be radically different from what we are used to today. I doubt we would even have the ability to go to space if it wasn’t for freedom of speech. That does sound a bit too far fetched, but let’s think about it for a minute. In the middle ages the church was the de facto governing administration. They followed […] Read more

I found this site, where you can make your own hero, through this blog. The hero I made for myself didn’t exactly turn out to be a big surprise to me (or the people who know me). It’s a good idea, though, and I hope someone will pick up this comic book idea and call me in as a consultant.

I’ve started taking lessons to learn a new subsection of my music skills. I’ve started playing the cello! After some 20 years of playing the euphonium it was about time to pick up some new skills. I’ve always admired string instruments, and during the last year or two I’ve admired the cello more and more, up to the point of wanting to learn how to play it myself. During the last months I’ve come to the conclusion that a cello is really the string equivalent to a euphonium. After all, whenever we play classical pieces in my orchestra, the cello parts are always given to the euphonium. That’s when I figured out I wanted to learn how to play the cello.I started taking lessons a […] Read more

Last night at around 11pm I went to a dark place. Not the dark place in my mind, but the dark place where I took the Aurora photos a few years back. This was another space hunt. Not for Aurora this time, but for comet C/2007 N3 Lulin.The comet was just barely visible to the naked eye. I could see it a few times, but it was very very hard. When I looked at it through my binoculars it popped right out, so even if you can’t see it with your naked eye don’t let that discourage you from a similar excursion.My only failure on this excursion is that I don’t have a telescope… or a motorized and tracking tripod. The photos would have been […] Read more