Today, at this small hour of the night, a window opened through the shell.

As I told you, I wish the world was different, I truly do.

In a parallel universe, I would know how to express my feelings with both words and actions. I would know how to tell …

I just came across a blog post by Coraline Ada Ehmke on the potential drawbacks of seeking meritocracy in open source projects. Besides the main argument, a rhetorical question drew my attention:

why is it that we can proudly refuse to use software created by corporations whose often aggressive business …

Beste E.,

ik liep langs de via Regina Margherita in Turijn op woensdag toen plotseling kwam een gedachte naar voren die ik onmiddellijk met jou wou delen.

Het beeld van Ezio (Assassin’s Creed III) vanavond doet er me weer aan denken. Er gaat over een afwijking die ik observeer …

Video games are awesome, but not enough people know how to make them.

I believe society should invest in teaching how to make video games. The experience of playing video games and watching others play them is an intensive source of diversified cognitive and social experience. This experience advantageously replaces …

Dear M.,

I hope this message finds you well. I am sorry I have not written for so long; sorry too we have not seen each other for nearly a year now. Yet I continue to think fondly of you, and the memory of our times together still warms up …

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A recent XKCD post makes fun of frequentist statisticians and hails Bayesian statisticians for their superior skill at predicting trivial outcomes. This comic makes it look like only Bayesian approaches are sane and reality-compatible when predicting outcomes. This annoys me. There is no need to invoke Bayes’ theorem and Bayesian …

September 5th, that was last week. Photos and videos were made. But I was not really there.

(It was reminded that I write a lot. It is thus fitting that I would deliver an epilogue in writing as well.)

“the clothes were really nice. the event was impressive.”

I am …

Recently I have published a book. This could not have happened without the help of a few special people, whom I thus profusely thank at the beginning. Yet this simple expression of gratitude has raised unexpected questions, some from people close by, that make me wonder what picture of me …

It was an ideal moment.

We saw the bus leaving as we crossed the street. Twenty minutes to kill, at least ten with nobody around.

Content after a productive day. Content from a clement weather, the kind where it is pleasurable to be outside. Carefree, confident in success to come …

Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has recently argued his perceived increase of anti-intellectualism among geeks. By denouncing anti-intellectualism, he turns into an anti-anti-intellectualist. However I don’t like his picture of “intellectualism”, here’s why.

By “anti-intellectualism” Sanger means: 1) disrespect towards the role of experts 2) disinterest in books …

Je bent er niet voor opgevoed. Je plannen omvatten kinderen, een huis, een hond. Je kijkt naar mij, en ik zie in je ogen dat je niet ziet hoe ik erbij zou kunnen passen.

Je hebt misschien vooroordelen over de “levensstijl” dat het impliceert. Ik heb je een keer een …

You, there. You have exposed some rusty cogs in my thoughts processes, and I friendly despise you for that. The rest of the engine has awakened again by the way, after so many years of dusty oblivion; I guess I should thank you for that. But today there was something …

When you expressed last Friday your interest in my opinion about you trying to decide how to shape your future, I felt honored. Many thanks for trusting me; although I don’t believe you should trust me too much on this.

My musings from the past few days were an …

Two days ago, we considered together the difficulty to move forward, and we mulled over the question of “why.” Yesterday, I presented you the four-base model I had used so far to recognize the drive in other people.

You see, one aspect of my crisis is that I am not …

Yesterday, we saw that answering your “why” may be an important step to decide what you are going to do next. If you are anything like me, chances are it’s difficult for you too. Did you know different people have quite different answers to it?

Together, we recalled our …

What now? That was the question that kept a friend and myself busy over the telephone for about an hour yesterday.

We found that there are two main criteria to consider: who you interact with, and why you do what you do. We found also that “what”, “where” and “how …

Dear you, self-appointed stranger from outer space,

it took me Dream On, after Turning Tables, Light Up the World and Don’t Stop Believin’ before I got started tonight. Spotify is good at hinting inspiring tunes. More truly, both my psychologist and my recent muse have advised I elaborate on …

There is a quality to the urban sidewalk at night after a rainy day nowhere to be found otherwise, except maybe on a very quiet night with bright moonlight on a lake border.

This quality is the reflection of city life in puddle pools.

The eyes of the casual observer …