Left or right

In the UK, peo­ple are wait­ing anx­ious­ly for the birth of a new prince or princess. It was sup­posed to hap­pen in late April, but it is a bit delayed. Anoth­er thing peo­ple are look­ing for­ward to are the nation­al elec­tions. At least we know on what date those are going to hap­pen: The 7th …

Information overload

The weeks are fly­ing by. Last one was a week with­out rain, so every night I was out with my water­ing can to take care of the tulips and wannabe veg­etable gar­den. Today moth­er Nature watered the plants for me, which is much eas­i­er. I also got involved in the fight against the dan­de­lions in …

Darwin at Tahiti

Because today is the birth­day of Charles Dar­win, I have browsed the essays of Stephen J. Gould to find some­thing to write about. Gould was an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist, with a great inter­est in the his­to­ry of sci­ence. He is one of my favorite authors. We have one book of him, a yel­lowed Pen­guin edi­tion of …

Thinking about eating

At high school we had a course called ‘Car­ing’ (Ver­zorg­ing). One of the few things that I still remem­ber from that, is a movie with a woman who was jump­ing rope and singing: “Know what you eat, kno-o-ow what you ea-eat!” (This was in Dutch, where the words ‘know’ and ‘eat’ actu­al­ly rhyme) After this …

Run for your life

There is noth­ing like a half hour run to start the day full of ener­gy. The sun peeks through the low hang­ing clouds and the sky looks dif­fer­ent every morn­ing. At moments like that I am total­ly in touch with my pri­mal feel­ings: run­ning across the savan­nah instead of star­ing at a com­put­er screen. My …