August 31, 2009
Guus Oosterbaan, a Dutch designer living in Denmark, is looking for somebody to take these boxes into production for him.
The boxes can be used to store all kinds of things, and when stacked can be combined into huge toy robots. On his blog, Oosterbaan says that his “kids find it very amusing to build robots that are much taller than them and then knock them over while shouting superhero stuff.”
(Link: Bright.nl. Photos: Guus Oosterbaan.)
Tags: boxes, children, furniture, robots, storage, superheroes, toys
August 30, 2009
Over at the Google Earth forums, a user called Thomas de Bruin has assembled a complete alphabet made of shapes spotted in the Dutch landscape by the Google aerial cameras.
He has created capitals, small letters, and all kinds of miscellaneous characters, such as the ten digits and the euro character. You will also find a KMZ file there, so that (if you have a copy of Google Earth installed) you can look up what part of the Netherlands you are looking at.
(Link: Google Earth Blog.)
Tags: Google, Google Earth, sattelites
August 29, 2009
Statistics Netherlands reported last Tuesday that the average age of motorcycle riders has gone up from 39 to 45 in the last ten years.
In 2000 the group that dominated motorcycle ownership were the thirty-somethings, now it is the 40-49 group that owns the most ‘bikes’. Total ownership of motorcycles has risen by 50% in the noughties, as has the share of vintage motorcycles. Interestingly, the older the rider, the bigger the chance they are driving a vintage motorcycle.
We don’t have any great wide opens here to cross, but people sure love to ride their bikes on the willow-lined roads atop river dikes.
(Via Sargasso. Photo by Jim Crossley, some rights reserved.)
Tags: age, dikes, motorcycles, riding, statistics
The verdict is in. Laura Dekker, the girl that wants to set a world record by becoming the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe in a sail boat all by herself, will be put under supervision for two months while a psychologist will try and determine whether this 13-year old is fit for that feat.
Dekker’s parents will retain custody, but will have to ask permission from supervisor Bureau Jeugdzorg (the executive branch, so to speak, of the child protection industry) for major decisions pertaining her, a Utrecht court ruled today. The judge stated emphatically that Dick Dekker was not a bad father for supporting his daughter’s ambitions, reports Volkskrant (Dutch). Amsterdam psychologist S. Moonen will now try and find out whether Laura is mentally fit for such a huge undertaking, and whether it is possible for her to be schooled from a distance.
Laura was not present during the reading of the verdict. She tried to avoid the media, and instead gave an exclusive TV interview to Jeugdjournaal (children’s news show of NOS, Dutch). In it she said she was not afraid of the psychological examination, because she would not have gone if she wasn’t ready. She also denied reports that claimed she would be alone for two years in a row, explaining she would go to shore regularly, and she would be surrounded by other sailors taking the same routes because of storm seasons and so on. (Not that fellow ‘yachties’ always stick to the unspoken code of writing poems about flowers and being nice to puppies.)
(Photo by Wikimedia user Jonathunder, some rights reserved)
Tags: courts, Laura Dekker, parenting, records, sailing
August 28, 2009
Next year, the sales tax on cleaning will be lowered, Treasury Minister Kees de Jager announced to parliament yesterday, according to Z24 (Dutch).
Nearly all services have a 19% VAT (Value Added Tax), but cleaning personnel will now join the ranks of hairdressers, painters and bicycle repair people at 6%. The measure is taken in the hope that more people will hire legal cleaning personnel (i.e. cleaning personnel that pay taxes over their income). In 2004, the government started a program that heavily subsidized legal cleaning personnel, so that their services came within the reach of ordinary households. The program (Dutch) was cancelled last year, because it did not have much of an effect.
(Photo of Banksy’s Cleaner by Dan Brady, some rights reserved)
August 27, 2009
If you can trade in your old car or your old computer for a new one, why not your old bras? Thanks to Dutch lingerie brand Triumph, you can get 5 euro back to put towards the purchase of a new bra.
“It’s a tasteless stunt,” says Kledingbank Limburg (‘clothing bank’ for the poor in the southern part of the country), reminding us that underwear is the only thing you throw out and buy new. Underwear OK, but bras?
The more open-minded clothing bank in Haarlem thinks it’s a good idea because a new bra is very expensive and the used ones are sought after.
If you google around, you’ll see that tons of people do it and that it’s pretty common. Or they get creative and stuff them with plants.
(Link: fashionunited.nl, via bright.nl, photo: ecollo.com)
August 26, 2009
I once had a Dutch roommate back in Québec in the 1990s who asked me why our tap water looked so afwul. I explained that it’s slightly cloudy because it’s full of chlorine, but tastes fine. Many people pour water into a jug fitted with a carbon filter and keep it in the fridge. Problem solved.
“Isn’t there chlorine in the water in the Netherlands?” “Oh, no” she said, “we have very clean water”. For years I thought the Dutch were water geniuses and that Quebeckers were water dummies.
It turns out Dutch water has a dirty little secret: it’s chock full of the bacteria that causes legionnaire’s disease. Professor Annelies van Bronswijk, Professor of Health Technology at Eindhoven University of Technology estimates that 800 people die of legionnaires’ disease every year, more than the dozens quoted in official statistics. “Since severe pneumonia is what most people with legionnaires’ disease die from, you can put two and two together and get a proper estimate of the problem.”
These days, Western countries chlorinate with monochloramine, a compound of chlorine, which doesn’t leave a taste.
Tags: chlorination, chlorine, Eindhoven University of Technology, legionnaire's disease, water
August 25, 2009
While Britain is anxiously waiting for 17-year-old Mike Perham to sail into Portmouth on 29 August after having sailed around the world, 13-year-old Laura Dekker has had to lawyer up in order to fight for the opportunity to attempt the same feat for the Netherlands.
An English article about Perham ironically starts with “while most teenagers may have been losing sleep over their exam results during the past few days”, while the Dutch courts have called upon Child Services, claiming Dekker’s parents are keeping their child from school because her learning while on the sailboat is ‘nonsense’. If Child Services thinks that the parents are not doing right by Laura, there is talk of removing her from their custody.
To avoid this situation, Laura who has dual citizenship with New Zealand, is ready to emigrate – that’s how much Laura and her parents believe in this sailing journey.
Her lawyer tries to tell the courts about this exceptional teenager. “Laura is not just some girl. She was born on a sailboat and lived the first four years of her life on one at sea. She has all the necessary skills and qualities for this journey.”
He makes another good point as well. If we compare Laura to a 13-year-old gymnast, no one goes and checks to see if the gymnast goes to school or is brought up properly — they get support from an Olympic committee or a sports association.
So, are the Dutch Children’s Services not seeing the big picture or are they seeing it very clearly? Why are boys like Mike Perham and record holder Zac Sunderland of the US praised and encouraged, but Laura discouraged? Is she really too young or is a girl less capable? Stay tuned!
My personal, uneducated take is that the entire family could just skip town to New Zealand for a year. Then New Zealand can claim the world record for solo sailing around the world.
(Links: timesonline.co.uk, depers.nl, Photo of an entirely unrelated boat by the US Navy.)
August 24, 2009
Premsela and Waag Society are organising the Unlimited Design Contest from August 13 to October 12 in the categories form, food and fashion. The idea seems to be that the design must be reproducible in one of three Fablabs (Amsterdam, The Hague and Utrecht), places where you can use things like laser cutters and 3D printers for free.
Workshops to inspire you will be given by Marije Vogelzang (food), Frank Tjepkema (form) and Zelda Beauchampet (fashion), with the price of entry covering the materials you will be using.
One of the rules is that when you release your design for the contest, you must release it under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.
See also: Looking for open source furniture.
(Link: Bright. Still of Joris van Tubergen creating a lamp by Unlimited Design Contest.)
Tags: contests, Fashion, Food & Drink, forms, HAR 2009
August 23, 2009
UWV, the Dutch organisation responsible for unemployment benefits, is going to train 200 unemployed and inexperienced young people to become junior job counsellors, Z24 reports (Dutch).
The first batch of 100 university or polytechnic schooled young people will start training right away, so that they can get started on their new job on October 1. The economic crisis is particularly brutal on this segment of the population who often deal with this by staying in school longer (Dutch) in the hopes of waiting out the crisis. Youths can get a student loan for up to 7 years.
Tags: crisis, economic crisis, unemployment, UWV, work, young, youths
