In 2015 we organized the worlds first computational Diplomacy contest in Leiden: won by Dave de Jonge's AI m-cacm.acm.org/news/189870-s… These AIs were super dim (sorry Dave). But now, computers beat human opponents in Diplomacy 85% of the time: science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… What a world!

New 'Pizza' installed today at our beautiful kid's playground 'Burcht ter Cleeff'. The Pizza is an ever lasting joy for all ages.

From Tchaikovsky's unsurpassed Children of Time (p.341): ... astronomy, a science particularly prone to breeding heretics.

lucky find of Bode's Anleitung (the 1806 edition) at an auction, and found the Titius-Bode law on page 37 (I think, because it's hard to read).

This red beech, planted in the year 1800, regretfully fell this winter in a storm. The city council left the tree laying in the canal because of a nest of coots. They now left, and the fallen tree will be removed. A sad farewell. I wonder what it could tell us, what has it seen?

made a reservation via Airbnb for an apartment in Zaliznyi Port (near Cherson, Ukraine) for 5 people for this week. I hope that they use the money wisely. And, I hope to be able to make real trip some later time.

made gnocchi today. Well... I tried. it became a gou (gob, glob, blob, smurry, hutt). Taste was okay. ingredients: 1kg potatoes, 0.2kg flour, 1egg. All looked great, until served. Then.. collapse. Result: hungy kids, unhappy partner. What went wrong? What is your gnocchi secret?

1983, together with my best friend, we, just 18, drove an old VW camper: Amsterdam-Marseille at 80km/h. Paradise by the Dashboard Light; on tape, all the way, uninterrupted. Well I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday. It was long ago and it was far away.

For those brilliant minds with an interest in machine learning and astrophysics, Leiden Observatory and the Leiden Institute for Computer Science offer an 3-year fixed-term advanced research position, see jobregister.aas.org/ad/8161a… Help us understand the complexity of the Universe!

reading 2001: A space odyssey (1968). Clarke turns out an even greater visionary than I thought. He 'predicts' the irregular moons (found in 1974), Aurora on Jupiter (1979), and adopts gravitational assist and AI. And he speculates on the existence of a huge 'crater' on Iapetus!

Supernova for dinner?  Anthony Mezzacappa talked at @SterrewachtNL on supernova simulations and how they compare to pasta: gnocchi for the pre-collapse neutrons, lasgana for the compressed layers and spaghetti for the neutron star's superfluid.  All to form the central hot potato

For those who consider moving to Mars: @ProfAbelMendez presented this amazing figure in today's colloquium on modeling planet habitability, showing how Mars (red dots) is 1000 time less habitable than Earth (light green dots [rain forest] and yellow[desert]).

Cristal clear talk by Steven Balbus at Leiden Observatory on general relativistic diffusion in circum black hole disks from tidal disruption events. The picture shows a stable orbit of a photon near the innermost stable circular orbit around a black hole.

my neighbor's son, Twan (12 years: I was mostly picking my nose at that age) makes 3d projection photo's with his dad's 3d printer. A light behind the print reveals the foto! And he sells them via a self made website: xixije.nl here is an example of foto and print:

Arend Moerman got highest score for master's thesis on Post Newtonian effects and arbitrary precision in N-body simulations. or.. eh.. Chaos in black hole triples. Movie of 3 black holes is on(Newton:green, pairwise-gr:blue, including the cross terms:red): youtu.be/KRa7Wl-2y_s

HM queen Maxima and court lady at the inauguration of the new Snellius Supercomputer. They both look happy. Dutch scientists are happy! Congratulations SURF.

Doing the dishes in my son's soccer club. At least these cups are used twice. Regretfully, I only have bar chore once per semester.

First colloquium of the academic year at Leiden Observatory by Jason Hessels about the enormous diversity in models, here depicted in a collage (including my favorite Gruffalo). It reminds me of the GRB debacle 20 years ago until Jan van Paradijs and students found a counterpart.

Today's colloquium at Leiden Observatory by Sara Ellison on the gas content and its relation to star formation in the nearby galaxies. The image shows a beautiful mosaic of galaxies from the ALMaQUEST survey (arc.phys.uvic.ca/~almaquest)

Today, Mirjana Póvic's colloquium at Leiden Observatory on stimulating Ethiopia developments through astronomy, showed this beautiful image of the Danakil Depression, a hot salty lake. an excellent site to study extremophilic Venusian habitability?