The Legacy of Dag Hammarskjöld

63 Years ago on September 18^th, 1961, UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash near Ndola in Zambia. The plane crash happened in suspicious circumstances. The TV documentary “Cold Case Hammarskjöld” sheds some light on these circumstances, but the truth remains hidden in secret circles and may never be revealed. Whatever happened, Dag Hammarskjöld is a person worth remembering because of his unwavering integrity and his willingness to do the right thing. There is no doubt about his good intentions. He surely wanted to bring peace and justice to the people of central Africa.

His legacy also includes his writings. His book Vägmärken or Markings reveals a vulnerable soul, willing to bring sacrifices for the greater good of mankind. He was a man of great spirituality.

His death was predicting the misery central Africa would go through in the years after and up until this day. May his remembrance be a stimulus for bringing peace to this part of the world.

Beatus vir qui sperat in eo – Blessed is the man who puts his hope in Him.

I also refer to my blog: Truth and Justice are not found through Alliances

The Green Leaves of Summer

Every year, I go through two periods of melancholy, one in June after the high feasts of spring, Easter and Pentecost, and one at this end of summertime. In Dutch we use the word ‘weemoed’, which is somewhat less sad than melancholy, and closer to the German ‘Sehnsucht’, the most romantic of all words. Etymologically you could try to translate weemoed as woefulness, but woe is a bit too sad in English. This limited sadness if of course related to our yearly duty to leave Lazy Tasty land and return to the land of cold, darkness and work, the land of reality.

We had a particularly wet summer season this year with the advantage that we could enjoy the green leaves of summer for so long. The link brings you to the song sung by the brothers Four, slightly different from the original soundtrack of the film The Alamo (1960), directed by John Wayne.

In the Ardennes, we could relive the school excursions we did at the age of ten. We did the walk along the river Hoegne as well as the walk on top of the Gileppe dam. It is a way to reconnect with the past, a way to reconnect with ourselves.

Picture: courtesy of Bernard Gastmans 2024

Seek for Advice

Life has always been complicated. Sooner or later in their lives, all people ran into situations where they needed some kind of advice. In the old days, you could get this advice from shamans, priests, counsellors, teachers, witches or just from good friends, which was probably the best. The ancient Greeks, if they were wealthy enough, could travel to the oracle of Delphi to get some advice on what to do next.

In our society, seeking for advice looks easy but may not be that easy. A first impediment for seeking advice is our obsession with autonomy and self-reliance. Everybody is very busy appearing autonomous. Asking for advice requires a certain humility. You may need to recognise someone else for his/her specific competence. Even worse, you may discover you got it all wrong to start with. Any kind of advice, whether free or paid, may require a certain gratitude from you. Gratitude is sometimes difficult to convey.

A second impediment for seeking advice maybe the fact that we feel bombarded by advice already. In the good old days, we needed to ask for scarce information; nowadays information is abundant and thrown at us at megabytes per second. As a result, we develop a defensive attitude towards advice. We remain just as helpless as before as we now need to filter out the rare useful information from the information ocean. Therefore, we still need personal advice, more than ever.

Let us think this week on what topics we may need advice. You can't honour your fellow human being more than by asking advice. Saint Paul's advice would be “to put on the new man” or as we say in Dutch “Enrobe yourself with the new man (person)”. (‘Bekleedt u met de nieuwe mens’). Be a brand-new person. Good advice may lead us to a good life and to reinforced friendship.

I refer to my blog Dare to Expect.

Picture: Delphi, Greece, picture taken in 1991 ©Wim Lahaye

When I am Weak, then I am Strong

It is one of Saint Paul's strongest statements. And again a paradox jewel, so typical of Christianity. There is a deep truth in this statement, and the reverse is also true. When I'm strong, then I'm weak. When everything is easy, arrogance is never far away, and with arrogance comes the fall. But there is also the potential of failure. In your deepest misery, in the face of reviling, persecution, fear, despair and failure, your strongest self also emerges. Or as Paul writes to the Corinthians: "My power is made perfect in weakness." Those very worst moments that you experience are precisely moments of new insight, growth and change that lead you to happiness. A sea change, into something rich and strange.

Image: St. Paul bitten by a viper, fresco in Canterbury Cathedral. This is a free license, as in the definition of Free Cultural Works. 

International Women in Engineering Day

Every year on June 23, the world celebrates International Women in Engineering Day. I noticed on an old picture there was only one girl in my 30-student thermodynamics class of 1986. The reason I write this blog however, is that people tell me the M/F ratios have not changed that much since, whereas we were all convinced, back in 1986, that things would change soon.

You could ask why this matters. This is a justified question. Why does it matter that one gender is underrepresented in a particular subject or faculty? Couldn’t we just live with that? The classical answer from the point of view of industry/ society, is that some potential is underused: the underrepresented gender may contribute more than it actually does. This ignores the fact that there may be an overrepresented gender, the men. Perhaps the overrepresented gender is contributing inefficiently to the bottom line, assuming that each gender has specific inherent qualities the other gender may have to a lesser extent? There is however another reason why imbalance is bad. An unbalanced ratio may make studying at a particular faculty less attractive for the students themselves either because of too many of your own gender or because of too many of the opposite gender. Gender imbalances may lead to boring study places and boring work places.

As for the causes, I have been reading a lot of articles about this. Most articles spend too much attention on why girls / women don’t study engineering, but they don’t spend sufficient  attention on the boys/ men motivation, as if that doesn’t matter much. Moreover, the articles focus too much on career impediments, like glass ceilings and salary differences. These career impediments equally exist in other professions, so why should there be a bigger problem in engineering? The choice for a scientific or engineering profession is made at secondary school, long before these career differences are actually experienced.

Most articles agree on a few things. There are hidden forces in education which drive boys / girls in divergent directions, and this is not so much related to school orientation, but rather family role related. It is interesting to note that this divergence is worse in industrialised countries. In poorly industrialised countries, men and women are equally forced to look for a job with sufficient revenue, whereas industrialised countries offer the luxury to women to accept somewhat less paid, but stable part-time or 9-5 jobs. As a result, paradoxically, industrialised countries seem to have more imbalance in the M/F engineering participation ratio.

Another finding is the role of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the degree to which you are confident you will be able to solve a difficult task. For technical challenges, girls/women seem to have a lower self-efficacy than men, but the question is whether this low self-efficacy is sufficient ground not to start the studies. Men with low self-efficacy exist as well and are kindly asked to study engineering anyway and suffer the consequences of their lack of self-confidence. “Bite on your teeth!” we say in Dutch. I'm joking a little but our society is tough on men as well.

I’m in favour of general STEM actions to encourage young people in general for science. However, I’m not in favour of girls-only actions, as these may have an adverse effect.

I refer to my blogs: ‘The Engineer’s Social Role’ and to ‘European Young Engineers’.

Afbeelding van Dee via Pixabay

The Balkan Countries Belong to Europe

When I was a pupil at primary school, I got fascinated by the dichotomy of Europe created by the Iron Curtain. As a child, I found it incredibly sad that Eastern Europe could not be visited easily and that Eastern Europe citizens could not visit us very easily. (I found out later the former Yugoslavia was an exception to this rule.) Around the end of my university studies, a dream came true. The Iron Curtain opened and West Europeans could unite with East Europeans.

Only five years later in December 1994, the European Young Engineers were born and I remember well how Hungarian young engineers visited us soon after in Belgium. Last year I was very proud to see as a founding member that our latest successors had succeeded in organising a European conference in Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia.

The eastern Balkan countries are perhaps the last countries to join the European Union, although we can't know this for sure. Historically the Balkan countries played a very important role in the Roman Empire, be it that their distance to Rome was far less than their distance to Brussels. This makes it hard for Balkan country Europeans to come to Brussels and it may lead at times to local frustrations about the decisions taken in faraway Brussels. This frustration is certainly coming, but we should remain positive and welcome this unexpected human progress. Hope never dies.

Meanwhile, we were happy to receive last week two delegations of academic staff of four Balkan countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Serbia) on a seminar about space economy in our beautiful town of Leuven.

I also refer to my blog Erasmus travels through Europe.

Afbeelding van Dimitris Vetsikas via Pixabay

The Increasing Likelihood of Flying Teapots

When Bertrand Russell formulated his famous flying teapot analogy, he deliberately chose a very British object, one that nevertheless would have looked very awkward if it were ever observed to be revolving in an orbit around the sun, the Earth, or around any celestial body.

The flying teapot analogy was often referred to by atheist thinkers as a rightful argument against religious dogmatism. I myself being a religious person, I nevertheless fully concur with Russell’s viewpoint. The flying teapot analogy is not only well found and funny, it rightfully lays the burden of proof to the one making an unfalsifiable statement. Saint Thomas was right to question his friends’ statements, which remain unfalsifiable to us. I however disagree with some atheist thinkers that religious adherence requires rational proof of the related beliefs. I agree with atheist thinkers that religions should not disdain non-believers.

Climate change deniers believe climate activists believe in flying teapots, but climate change is falsifiable science, it is not a belief. The existence of climate change deniers can't be denied though.

With the shifting thin grey line between the feasible and the unfeasible, it looks like Russell’s analogy becomes more likely in time. We can already send teapots in an orbit around the Earth, and our telescopes could then see them flying. Sending over a few dozens could be done at reasonable cost, say $500 to $1000 per teapot. A teapot constellation would make a nice student project and I’m sure the funding question will come up soon. The Kessler syndrome, ending in clouds of pieces of porcelain in space, could be the end to this very British dream.

I refer to my blogs “Belief Creates the Actual Fact” and to “What Satellites Can Do For You”.

Picture Patricia Deneffe ©2024