Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius was bijna de volgende premier van Nederland geworden, maar toch weet bijna niemand hoe je haar naam schrijft. In NRC en de andere Nederlandse kwaliteitskranten wordt ze namelijk consequent Yesilgöz genoemd – met een s in plaats van een ş.Read the article - posted 2024-01-03
Image link - posted 2024-02-10
Na bijna twee maanden „radiostilte” komt informateur Ronald Plasterk als het goed is morgen met zijn eindverslag over deze eerste informatieronde over het samenstellen van een nieuw kabinet. Verslaggevers blijven de informateur en de voormannen/vrouwen van PVV, VVD, NSC en BBB vragen hoe het gaat en waarover gesproken wordt, maar hun microfoons registreerden alleen nikszeggendheden.
Een paar weken geleden begon de radiostilte wat barstjes te vertonen met sneren op Twitter, op een congres of in een lek naar een krant. Maar dinsdag barstte de bom: NSC beëindigde eenzijdig deze ronde van de informatie. De overige drie bleven verder praten en Omtzigt uitnodigen om mee te doen.
Er valt veel te zeggen over de manier waarop dit klapte...
Read the article - posted 2024-02-11
Back in the 1990s, for a good number of years, I would go to see the "sneak preview" every week. One show a week would be dedicated to showing a movie that hadn't been released yet. And which movie would be a surprise. This meant I ended up seeing all big ticket movies, as well as a good number of additional smaller movies. And with rare exceptions, I would be happy to sit through them.
These days, I very often find myself getting bored with a movie that I'm watching. Now obviously a lot has changed in the intermediate almost 30 years. Have movies gotten worse? I'd say they have. But not so much that this explains me happily watching pretty much any movie in the 1990s vs getting bored by about half of them in the 2020s. Do we have a shorter attention span and more distractions today than we had 30 years ago? Again, yes. But I don't think that's the full explanation.
I think the reason it's so hard to focus on any movie or TV show/episode is that we have so much more choice today...
Read the article - posted 2024-02-19
Good typography is such a hassle. Then again, ugly-looking text is no good, either. Today I’m going to look at quotation marks and apostrophes.
Back in the 1960s when ASCII was invented as a way for computers to encode text, we only had room for 94 printable characters. With 62 taken up by A-Z, a-z and 0-9, this didn’t leave much room for a full complement of typographic characters. And actually, 94 is pretty generous by typewriter standards. Early typewriters didn’t even have 1 or 0—you just used lower case L and O for those. Also, computer printers and computer monitors weren’t exactly high resolution back then, rendering the finer details of typography moot.
So we ended up with the "typewriter style" character " for both opening and closing double quotation marks, and also used as the double prime (to indicate lengths in feet or durations/arcs in minutes). The ' got even more overloaded as the single opening and closing quotation marks, the (single) prime and, more importantly, the apostrophe. These days we have different Unicode characters for most of these, increased font size for clarity:
" can be “ ” or ″
' can be ‘ ’ or ′ or ’ again
Yes, although we have a Unicode character U+0027 APOSTROPHE (i.e., the ASCII character '), somewhere deep in the supplementary notes it's mentioned that you should use U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK as a punctuation apostrophe. Ok, so now we know.
Things are much more complex for quotation marks, because different languages/regions use different quotation marks. Even in English there is no consensus, with Americans typically preferring double “quotation marks” and Brits preferring single ‘quotation marks’, which each using the other type under special circumstances, such as for a quote within a quote.
Various European countries/languages use either the «double» or ‹single› guillemets, with the French further complementing things by having a narrow non-breaking space « like this ».
And then there's almost any combination of high/low, mirrored and/or 180° rotated combination of comma-like quotation marks. According to Wikipedia:
”Finnish”, „German“, „Polish”
In Dutch, the ‘British English’ style with single high quotes and the opening quote a "6" and the closing quote a "9" is now most commonly used, although in the Netherlands, the „Polish” style with opening double low commas and closing double high commas was traditionally used before computers were in common use. In Dutch speaking Belgium, the French « guillemets » were/are common.
The rather obvious reason for the move in Dutch from the „traditional” quotation marks to the ‘new’ ones is that it actually became very easy to use the new ones during the 1990s, as using the traditional ones is still a problem under Windows. However, Microsoft Word has a ‘smart quotes’ feature that turns 'this' into ‘this’ and "this" into “this”. And that's your only choice.
On the Mac, it became possible—but not easy—to type the traditional Dutch quotation marks around 1990. However, Apple also implements the smart quotes feature (almost) system-wide. And unlike Windows, you get to choose your preferred quoting style:
“abc”, „abc“, „abc”, ”abc”, « abc », «abc», »abc«, “abc”
(The single quote replacements can be set separately.)
Even if you choose "abc" and 'abc', your apostrophes will still be turned into ’s. You can access this feature in System Preferences under Keyboard → Text and also in the preferences of applications like Pages. Additionally, you can use select Edit → Substitutions from the menu in many applications to apply these smart quote substitutions to all the existing text in your document, or just the text you’ve selected.
If, like me, you write a lot of text where ' really needs to be ' and " really needs to be " (because they’re part of a program or configuration file), you really don’t want smart quotes to be on, perhaps save for the apostrophe replacement. The problem is, if smart quotes is on, there is really no way to insert ' or " into your document. But selecting some text and performing the substitutions is a good way to get the quotes you want. It’s certainly easier than memorizing how to type them.
Let me use the last two paragraphs of this post to consider what kind of quotation marks make the most sense. First of all, I think double makes more sense than single as the default choice. The single ones clash with the apostrophe, which is no good. I’d say〝this〞could be a nice choice if you insist on separate opening and closing quotation marks. (I really don’t get the upside-down curly quotes.)
But why would you? ”This”
seems very workable. Or perhaps something that looks more like ″this″. Some fonts already showc the curly quotes much like that. The advantage of using just ’
and ”
is that you can easily convert '
↔︎ ’
and "
↔︎ style="background-color: #e0e0e0;">”
in both directions.
a b
Image link - posted 2024-03-08
Floortje Keijzer in de Volkskrant:
Stop de sloop van het ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid. Dit gebouw van architect Herman Hertzberger is een schoolvoorbeeld van Nederlands structuralisme, dat nog steeds prima valt te gebruiken in de stedelijke context van Den Haag.
Mee eens. Ik kom er regelmatig langs, en bij mijn vorige baan hadden we regelmatig vergaderingen in een hoekje van dit gebouw. Of we lunchten er.
Er worden al zoveel woontorens neergeplempt in Den Haag. Kunnen we niet terug naar de VINEX-aanpak en beeldbepalende gebouwen binnen de stad die best nog een tijdje meekunnen laten staan?
Read the article - posted 2024-04-08
Last week, Jaap van Till asked me if BGP would be capable of supporting the terabit class interconnectivity that he foresees we’ll need in the future, possibly due to the rise of artificial intelligence. Spoiler: yes, should be no problem at all. But a more interesting question is what terabit class connectivity at home could look like.
Read the article - posted 2024-04-09
Vandaag is het vijf maanden geleden dat we een nieuwe tweede kamer kozen. Sindsdien zijn PVV, VVD, NSC en BBB in gesprek over het vormen van een nieuwe regering. We zijn nu halverwege de derde (in)formatieronde, waarbij het erop lijkt dat de partijen het in gezamenlijke gesprekken nergens eens over kunnen worden, dus de twee informateurs schrijven zelf vanalles op en gaan dan vooral één-op-één met de verschillende partijleiders in gesprek.
Over drie weken zou deze ronde klaar moeten zijn met een akkoord op hoofdlijnen als resultaat. Zou het kunnen dat dit gaat lukken?
Read the article - posted 2024-04-22
Image link - posted 2024-05-09
Two years ago, I wrote a blog post on the longevity of optical media. Today, I found out that the Canadian government also has an interest in this topic and produced the following article: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays.
Much recommended if you're interested in the topic. However...
Read the article - posted 2024-05-09
In de Volkskrant:
Van ‘vereende krachten’ is tijdens de formatiebesprekingen geen sprake. VVD en NSC vertrouwen elkaar evenmin als zij beiden Wilders vertrouwen. Toch moet komende week duidelijk worden of de rechtste partijen een nieuwe regering gaan vormen. In ieder geval tekenen NSC en VVD door regeringsdeelname hun politieke doodvonnis, stelt Frans Leijnse.
Frans Leijnse maakt de poging tot het vormen van een "kabinet Wilders 1" met de grond gelijk. Zeer mee eens, en interessant om straks na afloop terug te lezen.
Permalink - posted 2024-05-12
Image link - posted 2024-06-05
Vanavond krijgen we eindelijk de uitslag van de verkiezingen voor het europees parlement in Nederland! Tot nu toe hebben we het moeten doen met een exitpoll en de extrapolatie van ruim honderd stembureaus door Maurice de Hond & co.
...
Ik ben reuze benieuwd of de einduitslag nog wat gaat veranderen.
Read the article - posted 2024-06-09
Gister dacht ik nog, op basis van de resultaten in het stembureau waar ik vrijwilliger was, dat links wellicht nog groter zou worden dan in de exitpoll. Dat had ik goed mis! En meer nog dan gebruikelijk riepen alle partijen zichzelf tot winnaar uit. Want er is altijd wel een eerdere uitslag om mee te vergelijken waarbij deze uitslag gunstig afsteekt. Daar gaan we dus even doorheen prikken.
Read the article - posted 2024-06-10
Image link - posted 2024-09-22
Vandaag nam de Koninklijke Luchtmacht afscheid van de F16. Het iconische jachtvliegtuig maakte een rondje over het land voor deze gelegenheid.
Ik zat dus klaar voor het raam met mijn camera, maar niks gezien of gehoord, behalve lage wolken en veel regen. Dus maar deze foto uit de jaren '90 van een vliegshow boven het Scheveningse strand.
Read the article - posted 2024-09-27
The US is currently in uncharted political waters with the presidential elections in just over a month. The candidate for the republicans in Donald Trump, for the third time in a row. I started going over some of Trump's antics since becoming president in 2016 and losing the elections in 2020, but who has time to read all of that? Joe Biden performed terribly at an early debate in june and dropped out of the race some weeks later, endorsing his vice president Kamala Harris. Harris quickly improved favorability ratings and in the polls.
...
With that limitation of understanding the US electorate in place, can I still say something reasonable about the outcomes of the election? I don't know. But let's give it a try.
Read the article - posted 2024-09-29
Image link - posted 2024-11-17