Thursday 31 December 2009

Vacation @ Paradise

Yes! When we arrived in Bali we immediately went to paradise island Nusa Lembongan 2hrs (by speedboat) off the coast. A litle paradise indeed with no cars just motorbikes



Mushroom beach looking out on Bali's largest volcano.

There are no docks at the island, so you'll have to get wet feet (and / or luggage) if you want to visit.



Freshly caught dinner!!



Eating while watching the sun set behind the island.

Next we went to the Gili Islands off the coast of Lombok more paradise:



Freddo Tropicano



View from in front of our hotel



Mojito and shells



Sun sets on Lombok

We're spending new years eve here so no worries about us gov warnings!

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Vacation @ Kuala Lumpur

Ok so we made it!

Well one more day stuck at Kuala Lumpur which could have been worse :)



Those stars for hotels appear to have different meanings in different countries...



Buffet dinner is definately different! Jummy!!



Sweet sensation was rocking da house



:)



Accidental foot shot #2



Kuala airport

See u in paradise!

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Friday 25 December 2009

Vacation @ Schiphol day 3: The birthday bash

Ok, now our flight is planned to leave at: 0:01 december 26th.
Let's hope that will be te last change in the schedule.

Here's day 3:



Inter-Noey



Coffee overload



Birthday cake alternative



Rebel Stone



Reflection



Oh yeah, I can make pano's now, it's not a beach :)

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Thursday 24 December 2009

Vacation @ Schiphol part 2: The return of the the son of the evil twin of day 1

So here's the story: "Our" plane hit a luggage cart which was parked in the wrong place which tore up the
casing of one engine. Since it's Christmas there are no:
- Spare parts at Amsterdam
- Spare planes
- Spare crews
- Spare seats with other airliners

So we're resceduled to fly fridaynight @ 22:00 (if repairs go well they're flying in a new casing and a tech-team from Kuala Lumpur)

Anyways... here's day 2 of our vacation @ Schiphol:



Coffee again....



Luckily Hilde was moving to Amsterdam today... Jay!
We had some spare hours to kill :)



When I say Amsterdam I mean Amsterdam Grachtengordel!
Nice view from the roof terrace :)



Relaxing....



:)



More relaxing, they have our favoroutie beer so could have been worse



btw... we were also able to delay our return!




Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Wednesday 23 December 2009

Vacation @ Schiphol

Well, you know that story about that plane we needed to catch today?

It didn't go :(

Technical probs, we still don't know when we will depart.

Luckily they put us in a four star hotel with pool and sauna...

So here's an impression of our vacation @ schiphol:



Vacation @ Schiphol



Stranded Lunch



Voucher says: Mr / Mrs Stranded



Accidental foot picture shot through glass table... no we're not bored :)

Music: Marillion - hotel hobbies

Hotel hobbies padding dawns cobbled corridors

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Tuesday 22 December 2009

Villa Konellibont - Phase 3: The Christmas Edition

Run konelli! Run!
Snow is coming!
Cold is coming!



But run where?
To Villa Konellibont of course!

----

Here are the happy konelli's in their new home...
Snow came before a much needed paintjob, but hey, they seem happy with their new shelter.



Side and front panels can be removed, so can the roof!



Actually, they went crazy in the snow during the day, and loved it!

 

Run, rabbit run
Dig that hole, forget the sun

And when at last the work is done

Don't sit down

It's time to dig another one

Sunday 20 December 2009

Snowfever

Someone suggested (online) to have a snow fight @ keizer karel plein @ six...
The word apparently spread and a large crowd was ready for snow armageddon!

Sunday 13 December 2009

Contagious Affirmation - dub step / electro - thingie

Completely forgot about the last track I made (more than a year ago)...

I tried to add some dub step flavor to the Mr. Botak electro sound judge for yourself how it turned out.

Also tried a different approach to the visuals: Slowly changing, not necessarily visualizing the beat, or changes in the music... (Yes, those are pages from the Voynich manuscript )

Check it out on YouTube:

Friday 11 December 2009

Gucci Dog


Gucci Dog, originally uploaded by Lost Archetype.

Ha came across this photo in my Flickr stream...

At the time I shot and named this picture (gucci dog, because of the necklace),
I had no Idea that this little guy's real name actually is (Señor) Gucci and that he is a famous model and has a job in pet store.

We are friends now... well most of the time :)



(Hyves / Facebook users click "bekijk de originele post" or something like it for better display of pics / videolinks / etc.)

Thursday 10 December 2009

They Fuck You Up, Your Mum and Dad (or: Bennett on Writing)

Yeah, it's way too late but:

I'm watching Being Alan Bennett
(you know the playwright-guy from the Talking Heads monologues? ... No? Well he also did an adaptation of Wind in the Willows and wrote the play The madness of King George III... No? Well he also did the narration for Winnie the Pooh... aahh! )



which is amazing... 

He just made an observation about writing using Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse":


"They fuck you up your mum and dad, and if you are writing that is probably a good thing. But if you are planning on writing and they haven't fucked you up, well, you've got nothing to go on, so then they fucked you up good and proper."


He then proceeds to sing This Be The Verse to to the theme tune to Last of the Summer Wine

Why all that is funny???
mmm... I've had years of training listening to (mostly British) symphonic rock: Let's just say Bennett, like a good sympho-band is able to translate a minor problem like getting through another rainy sunday into a multi-part 20+ minute epic rock-anthem using mostly keen observations, folk psychological reasoning and an amazing mastery of the English language.

Tuesday 1 December 2009

Where were you this morning at 5 AM?

Well officer....

I was writing a pre-proposal for research funding, because the deadline was today and planning is on one of those pages in my dictionary which was accidentally removed by brute force.

Anyway.
Since chances are slim I will be invited to send in a full proposal (because my #@XX%&@ is not finished yet) there will probably be about three people who will ever read it. So, for the effort, I'll post it here as well :)

Here's a part of my alibi (including spelling errors and general awkwardness :) ):



On the origins of the discrete contents of the mind


How and why do we translate our continuous external environment into an internal environment, which consists of matters predominantly discrete, bounded and categorical? Even our actions in the external world can be described as discrete movements or movement patterns. These discrete contents of our internal world are often the objects of study in Psychology. Examples are speech-sound categories extracted from a continuous acoustic signal, the individual words they are compiled into and the categorical semantic information the word conveys. Colour labels attributed to specific ranges of a continuous distribution of electromagnetic radiation are another example. Attitudes towards a minority population and gender stereotypes may be viewed as the outcomes of a categorization process as well. Many streams of information from different sources need to be combined and evaluated to designate a category label like “us” or “them” or “Masculine” or “Feminine”. It is evident that the process of transforming the continuous flow of information from different sources into distinct categories requires a mechanism operating across different spatial and temporal scales. It is also evident that an answer to the question might benefit from an interdisciplinary approach.



Stored and static or emergent and dynamic?

The dominant theory used for the scientific description of the discrete cognitive world is one in which cognitive processes may be understood as algorithmic operations on abstract symbol-like mental representations of stored information. The mental representation of a speech sound would consist of information about the range of frequencies that would trigger the activation of the representation if they were to be detected.

Many objections can and have been made against this machine-metaphor of cognition. One objection is that it is not clear how these discrete representations are created from the continuous stream of perceptual information. It often appears psychologists assume the external world to be as discrete and sequential as the representations and the algorithms. Moreover, many categorical boundaries and algorithms are assumed present at birth and thus coded in our genes. More important is the fact that abstract mental representations of categories are static. Their boundaries should be at certain critical values of a feature variable. Several studies have shown however that perception of category boundaries on a continuum of an acoustic parameter is subject to well-known nonlinear phenomena as hysteresis. This means that the boundary between the categories is not perceived at one critical value, but changes to other values dependant on the direction the continuum is sequentially traversed. [1,2]. These results were successfully modelled by a potential model describing the categorisation performance: The speech sound categories were conceived of as the discrete attractor states whose relative strength was influenced by the value of the continuous acoustic parameter, but also by previously perceived trials.

If we generalize this dynamic account of categorical speech perception to the broader question of the apparent discreteness of the contents of mind, we may arrive at the following conjectures:


1. The apparent discrete nature of the contents of the mind can be understood as the emergence of discrete attractor states at the macro-level of cognition from the continuous interactions between system components at the micro-levels.

2. The emergence of a discrete attractor state occurs as a consequence of the strength and the nature of the coupling between system components at the micro-levels

3. As the system self-organises its way through an ever changing landscape of attractor states this may appear as a sequential succession of discrete cognitive content. The changes are however driven by the continuous interactions of processes at the micro-levels.

4. The coupling of two previously independent systems will create discrete attractor states in a shared phase space depending on the strength and nature of the coupling



It is the main goal of this project to investigate whether these conjectures are universally applicable to all phenomena characterised by discretization of a continuous variable. A sub goal is to evaluate whether it can serve as a plausible alternative ontology to the machine-metaphor. Plausible in this case would mean not only by scientific standards like empirical support and evidence from simulation studies but also relating to the strong intuitive validity of the machine metaphor.