Category: observation

To recreate social systems, I have to model individuals and the institutions formed by their networks. Individuals are part of multiple networks and can thus keep multiple institutions alive. Individuals are connected to clubs, to administrations, to markets and to infromation resources – all with each other, side by side, and through each other. (In…

In order to build and run toy social systems, I have to make decisions about how I can imitate the behavior of people. Imitate people who think they are autonomous, with the help of algorithms that serve me. Paul Rée published Die Illusion der Willensfreiheit in 1885 in Berlin. Its first two chapters of are…

After getting to know Le Bon, I realize that there are more who wrote epiphany pieces in the 19th century and which have now (2021 )retained their scientific significance for me. It concerns Nietzsche’s piece on truth and lies in a non-moral sense from 1873, the piece by Rée on the illusion of free will…

A year ago I started the blog in the hope of gaining a better understanding of COVID. For myself. To determine my attitude. That’s difficult. Experts are popping up everywhere, fighting for a place in the media and telling us how to act and what the others are doing wrong while a child can see…

As a responsible citizen I look for arguments to determine my attitude towards the measures taken by the government. I can of course rely on what the institutions (RIVM,…), the government and the pundits (in their talk shows) have to say. But that input is too diverse to begin with, and too colored by political…

The material given below deserves further study. I now have data on 72 different countries in the form of time series. (The Jupyter Notebook is here). The time-series plots look diverse. Both individually and structurally. They form the basis for a new phase in my project: from observation to simulation. I think it makes sense…

Almost simultaneously with the news that Biden had been elevated to president elect, the news reached me that my grandson Marius was infected with the virus. He lives in Vienna and is serious about football, in a football school where they are regularly tested. He and two others were found to be positive. No serious…

This is the first of what will be a long series of stories about the questions COVID-19 poses and the answers the data provides, and the questions they raise again during the first 41 weeks of the pandemic. They are interim reports. They follow the data analysis and precede the experiments with toy worlds to…

It is October 13, 2020. Yesterday the British government announced a new national approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. Four different levels in daily new infections are defined and linked to measures such as maximum size for meetings and limited opening hours / general closure of pubs and restaurants. Just like in the Netherlands, the numbers…

Yesterday was the first Trump-Biden debate. I waited till 03.00 am to watch. Could not believe what was presented and turned the thing off. Remembering that Kunbei didn’t have access (in China) to the televised event I WeChatted my feelings: You will have heard about the debate. A disgrace. I could not bear to keep…