Dancing is communication, creativity and musicality combined, and very sociable. You can enjoy good music together and actually add you own interpretation of what is played. When live music is played, you can even interact with the musicians. This makes a great experience and immersion in the music that, in my oppinion, is not possible when sitting in a chair and listening.

I also enjoy classical music a lot. I took part in a choir performing three operas in the theater of Biel (La Sonnambula by Bellini, Amadis by Lully and Il Trovatore by Verdi).

And I love to figure out the way the different music styles are connected to each other. Hearing how a specific style (e.g. Swing) is based on a former variant (Charleston, Ragtime) and figure out the transformation from one style to the next is fun. And the whole tapestry of how the styles are intervowen, part and recombine (Electroswing) is fascinating.

I just read in a paper that games and sports are the civilized form of war: “What is more, while wars do not conserve the number of participants, sports do.” I actually don’t look at games as being a war substitute (and the paper deals with soccer anyway). But as the number of participants is conserved, you can actually look forward to another round of the same game, and have a sip of whisky while doing so.

I started playing with Lego Technics at the age of eight or so, and I still marvel at nicely engineered devices. I took this to the next level and studied physics, where I can now play around with the advanced version of Lego Technics, made of aluminium and fancy variants of glass.

Part of my job is also programming, which I also started when I was ten. I programmed a multiuser-access system for the Mac on the basis of HyperCard, but it was based on security through obscurity, which is no security at all. But it was and is still fun. Check out Project Euler for some nice programming quests.

I did do some naive writing when I was younger, but more or less since I started dancing I don’t anymore. Interesting concidence.

Nowadays, I mainly write scientific texts, and I use almost exclusively LaTeX for this task. I am quite a lot into “writing theory”, or “presentation theory”, by which I mean that I do care about how and through what means something is presented. No surprise that I have a few books at home about this topic, amongst others “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” by Edward Tufte, or “Schriftwechsel”, a big heavy book filled with different types. Albertina is my favorite, in case you’re interested. I do also care about signage systems. All of these things do play a role when writing.