Beijing 2008: Race For Tibet!

I wholeheartedly support the case for Tibet:

Beijing 2008: Race For Tibet!

"Help make the Beijing 2008 Olympics a catalyst for change in China! China has a historic opportunity to show the world that it is a worthy host of the 2008 Olympics. But time is critical and the countdown to the Games has begun. The Race for Tibet harnesses the energy of the Olympics and goodwill of people worldwide to call on China to: End human rights abuses in Tibet, and Directly engage the Dalai Lama to find a negotiated solution for Tibet. Join the Race for Tibet today!"

VENI-grant congratulation

I was happily surprised by a letter I received from the rector of the University of Amsterdam. If you click the image you can read it... well, if you speak Dutch. (For the few people out there who don't, it reads as follows:

Dear Mr. Grasman,

On behalf of the Board of Goveners I would like to congratulate you with your recently awarded "VENI-innovation impuls" application. The awardment of your application again shows that research that is conducted within our university is both nationally as well as internationally acknowledged.

I wish you good luck in conducting your research.

Sincerely,

prof. mr. P.F. van der Heijden, rector)

They even announced it on the UvA website, just like the research school and the Netherlands Science Foundation did. It made me realize that I didn't get anything like it from the Psychology department... Not even a single word from the very same person that brought flowers to congratulate Eric-Jan—whom I share a room with—with his VIDI-grant... Even when I expressed my surprise that apparently only VIDI-grant applicants received flowers... Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all bitter .

VENI Award

It is official and definite: I got a VENI-grant! That means getting paid for 3 years of self chosen work at a self chosen institution. Stated otherwise: € 208,000 for my own research... . Well, it is bound by a couple of if's and but's: The 'institution of my choice' holds actually as long as it is willing to accept me (...mmm ...let me think ...I think I will stay at the UvA), and I had to write down the work that I will do on before hand (grant proposal ...yep). Oh, and it has to start within 6 month of the award date (which will be August 1, 2006)... I hope I will be able to keep working on stochastic catastrophy theory, but that's a “luxury problem” I guess. I didn't get any flowers from the Pscyhology department though... A bit strange 2 years ago all VENI awarded researchers received flowers ('een bosje bloemen') in a vase, and this time apparently only the VIDI-awarded researchers got flowers... Anyway, “flowers are for girls” as Wery put it (he also didn't get flowers).

Goodbye comic passport!

I have to renew my passport before going to New York in July. I'm sort of sorry about that for two reasons: The first is, that in order to comply with international and EU agreements, a new passport containing biometric marks and an RF-chip will be issued from August 26th this year, and the new passport that I will have to get before July 6th will be valid for 5 years. So I'll be stuck another 5 years with an outdated passport. 'Another' 5 years that is, because my current passport is already outdated: I am one of the relatively few people who 'ownes' a Dutch passport that is also a comic book about the entire written history of the Netherlands... writen in very tiny tiny but still legible fine print. Unfortunately, when I renew, I will have to hand the current one. And although I can ask it back (which I always do), they will have to make it 'clearly invalid'—which means that they wil make a big cut with scissors or drill three large holes through it. To rescue the internal images, I scaned my entire passport and save it to my blog. (I was amazed that no one appears to have put this unique passport online yet...)         

Cool Google Spreadsheet... (?)

Google already announced its acquisition of Writely, a web based word processor that enables you to edit, save, share, and real-time co-edit Word (-like) documents through a web browser from anywhere in the world (... eh... you'll need an internet connection), and we already saw Google Calendar (which together with Gmail replaced Outlook for me). Then we saw Google Pages, a great web based web page editor that even my mom can easily use, and the google-labs version of Google Notebook which allows you to annotate (segments of) web pages for public or private use (exactly what I have been waiting for...). But now, Google comes with a google-labs version of Google Spreadsheets, which is, no surprise, a web based spreadsheet program. It's really quite cool and promises a lot for the online word-processor (=Writely?) that they have in preparation. It's limited compared to OpenOffice.org's Calc program, or Microsoft's Excel, but it's better than the Excel version I have on my PDA: apart from crunching numbers and statistics with an extensive range of math-, stats-, financial-, date- and string-functions, formatting, sorting, importing and exporting from and to excel or csv, it allows me to collaborate with colleagues in real time on a single sheet, while 'talking' to each other with a messenger service as in your Gmail account. Thank god I have a Gmail account! How unfortunate that I don't use spreadsheets a lot, nor do my colleagues... :'(