Author: Victor
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The dumbphone manifesto
I spent January-June of 2026 with a dumb phone. I was so inspired that I wrote a manifesto. Please see it here.
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David Hume: Describing induction through sense and feeling
I gave this talk as part of a course requirement in Philosophy of Science at Utrecht University. I hope you like it! Much ink has been spilled on justifying induction. I am more interested in how Hume describes inductive reasoning. Slides (PDF) Transcript Today I want to present Hume’s account of inductive reasoning, contrast it…
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Installing GrapheneOS, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Google
I recently read Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism, which gave me the extra impetus to download and install GrapheneOS in an attempt to escape Google’s panopticon. I used these instructions and a second-hand Google Pixel 7. The whole process took me about 30 minutes, though your mileage may vary. The irony is that, in order to have…
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Oh Rascal Children of Gaza (Khaled Juma)
Oh rascal children of Gaza.You who constantly disturbed mewith your screams under my window.You who filled every morningwith rush and chaos.You who broke my vaseand stole the lonely flower on my balcony.Come back,and scream as you wantand break all the vases.Steal all the flowers.Come back.Just come back… – Khaled Juma Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_Juma
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The untranslatable, well-rested Stanislaus Katczinsky
One of my favourite characters in a novel I read recently is Stanislaus Katczinsky, or “Kat”, in All Quiet on the Western Front. Granted, I am a sucker for smooth operators. Another delicious character that comes to mind is Ostap Bender in The Twelve Chairs. I decided to read All Quiet in Dutch because Dutch…
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Soviet “Youth Phrasebook” (1965)
I recently picked up this Soviet “youth phrase book” from 1965 to help me learn some Spanish phrases for a trip to Barcelona. It contains over 1,000 phrases in 12 languages. Some are still useful. Others, perhaps less so. I didn’t manage to see any hot houses, pig-farms, or melonfields, nor did I get to…
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Charles Darwin and Variation
One thing that has struck me about Darwin’s Origin of Species is the anachronistic view of variation as the generator of evolutionary change. Whereas today we consider variation to be essentially a random byproduct of genetic mutation, Darwin considered variation to be a force in the direction of phylogenetic change. By contrast, modern evolutionary biology…
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How Newton Squared the Circle
I recently came across a good example of the Inventor’s Paradox, where the more general problem is easier to solve than a specific case. In the mid-seventeenth century, Isaac Newton published his integration of a circle segment – but rather than attempting to integrate 1−x2\sqrt{1-x^2} directly, he found a pattern in the more general integrals…
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Old News
I have been working on an interesting project for a few months now which id like to share with the world. Old News: https://oldnews.vjbe.net Old news is a repository of newspaper articles. What makes it different from existing archives is that 1) it is open source 2) it is plain text and 3) each article…