Autolenghi

I created an AI cooking assistant in 2022, and developed an iOS app for it. It was based on a GPT-3 base model, which I fine-tuned by scraping the web for recipes by Yotam Ottolenghi. Shortly after the release, LLMs became available to the general public, which immediately made the app somewhat obsolete so I stopped paying Apple's developer fees and took it off the app store.



Origami Swallow

I came up with an origami design for a swallow. Instructions here.



Artificial aesthetics

OpenAI's AI system DALLE2 seems to be able to understand abstract visual languages. I explored prompts mentioning Ernst Haeckel and M.C. Escher to understand how symmetry and impossible geometry are captured by DALLE2.



Mycorrhizal transplantations

Some trees got cut off from their neighbours by a road. I worked with the Bio-Design lab at Ascus to bring these trees back in infochemical contact with their neighbours through a series of mycorrhizal transplantations.



Standaard Afwijking

I run an instagram account where I collect photos of probability distrubution in the wild that say something about humans. Please send me yours!



Ising Model

I really like the Ising model. I could not find a video of a physical version online, only simulations. So I built one out of magnets. It's not really an Ising model, as the 'spins' are continuous angles, but it shows interesting behaviour nonetheless. There are clear waves of motion visible that propagate along the chain. Are these goldstone bosons associated with an (approximate) U(1) symmetry of the ground state?


Bees

I started keeping bees at Anna's Tuin en Ruigte, a public permaculture garden in Amsterdam. When I moved to Scotland, the bees moved to my grandmother's garden.



Art and design

Before physics, I was in art school, and I've made attempts at reconciling the two. I've made an installation based on fireflies that was exhibited on a Dutch art and music festival, and a analog-to-digital music box with projections of growing leafs that were exhibited in the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin, and the Bridges 2016 conference in Finland.



Olfactory distillation

I worked in the brewery of Mediamatic. I designed and built a bespoke still to compactify their beer, and aid in olfactory research. By making the still a closed system, and putting a vacuum pump downstream from the condenser, I tried to distill at low pressures to see if I could preserve more odours. While I was able to produce marvelous moonshine by electrostatic fermentation, I could not reach low enough pressures to really notice a difference. I presented some work on this at an Odorama.



Tempeh

By growing a fungus over different legumes, you can get very funky tempeh. I've been growing some in petri dishes.



The Krullevaar 1

I designed and built a large quadcopter from aluminium, controlled by open source flight control software. It was a lot of fun, but quite dangerous, so I did not fly with it a lot.


School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe

At the summer school of Physical Computing at the School of Ma, I built and battled my remote-controlled robot.