04-16-2024 Entry

Last full day on this trip. We woke up and took our time to plan out the day and get ready. Decided to take the train down to The Hague and walk around. Took the ferry over to the train station and found the right train quickly. We didn't have to wait long before it left. Saw some of the countryside on the way down, but it was blurred by periodic rain showers. We passed by some tulip fields. When we got to the main station in The Hague, it was lightly raining. Our visit here was punctuated by periodic rain, generally not too heavy or long-lasting. We walked through the city center and over to the royal palace, which wasn't much to look at. We also walked through the palace gardens, again nothing to write home about. Decided to have lunch, and we found a fresh bowl place where the staff talked all in English. It was fine and filling. From there, we walked over to the Peace Palace, where the International Court of Justice is located. Found out it had originally been funded by Andrew Carnegie. Then we headed through a neighborhood with a lot of foreign embassies to get to the Escher Museum, which is located in an old royal palace where the Queen Mother once lived. It was fun to see and read about some of the more famous Escher prints. He worked mostly in wood carvings (generally less detailed) and lithograph, and he employed a meticulous, time-consuming method of creating the prints. When we got out, it was steadily raining, so the 12-minute walk back to the train station was a wet one, maybe the wettest I got on this trip. But I dried out on the train ride back. A final night in Amsterdam, where we cleaned out the refrigerator for dinner.

I finished Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them. It had some interesting ideas about where and whether infinities are present in nature. The most likely places are associated with gravitational forces. He also makes the connection between information and entropy, saying that the highest information content you can have in a volume is the one with the highest entropy, i.e. a black hole. Maybe. I started The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr. He had an engaging way of writing, with some wit and appreciation of the absurdity that he captures in some of his descriptions of this industry. He mentions Michael Cullen (of King Kullen), who is credited with inventing the supermarket and popularizing the use of shopping carts. Lorr is a little fawning in his treatment of Joe Coulombe, aka Trader Joe, but the guy was a visionary genius about the evolution of the grocery business and how to market to the middle class. The section on long-haul owner/driver truckers was sobering and sad. This population is always being squeezed by an economy that demands increasingly lower shipping costs.