There is one issue that has been tormenting my mind for quite some time, namely the following contradiction. On one hand, planet Earth offers finite resources and has a limited carrying capacity for all its inhabitants, i.e. a limited regeneration ability for resources extracted by those inhabitants. On the other…

When I grew up (1970ies), food availability still followed seasons. In spring I was looking forward to the first radishes. Then a bit later fresh strawberries became available. Cherries were ripe close to the end of school. Finally grapes arrived in autumn. …

Tom Murphy’s Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet¹ presents global energy production and consumption with all its consequences in an educational manner, with explanations, graphs and diagrams. Most importantly, however, using first principles of physics, this book conveys the order of magnitude of all quantities involved as well…

Engineering is concerned with producing technical solutions for problems following the pattern of requirements analysis, system and subsystem design followed by synthesis, verification and validation. At the heart of it, engineering is based on two principles: recursively breaking up complex technical problems into smaller pieces down to a level where…

There is something intriguing about the smell of steak on the BBQ, or bacon in the frying pan, but is the positive reaction of our olfactory system innate, or is it acquired and a matter of habit? Also, is this attractive smell related to the meat-nature of foods, or is…

According to common wisdom choosing the right moment for one’s action is considered to be essential in order to achieve something important. Being both too slow or too quick can result in missing an opportunity. To that end there are many proverbs about one or the other as listed for…

A couple of years ago Zorbing, i.e. “the sport of rolling downhill inside an orb, typically made of transparent plastic,” was quite fashionable, for children’s birthday parties and other occasions alike. Ever since I kept thinking about possible analogies between the trajectory taken by such an orb and aspects of…

Having grown up in a European musical tradition, I have always asked myself: Why and how did the Western chromatic scale settle for 12 tones per octave, and why is there an octave at all? What is the unique set of tones needed to create a melody, or express musical…

For many centuries music has been captured in the Western world using the well-established European notation system that allows expressing musical concepts in written form. Among features such as duration and pitch, this system maps the 12 unique notes of the chromatic scale onto a staff developed for 7 unique…