August 22, 2009
Dutch department store chain HEMA has added an audience award to its famous design contest. Now you too can vote for the product you would most like to see in HEMA stores. The winners of the jury award are already known (shown here), respectively Marloes van Geel with a raincoat made of recycled brochures and Saskia Kappers with a lid made from party balloons.
You can vote until August 31.
(Link: Bright. Source photos: HEMA.)
Tags: Hema
August 21, 2009
Dutch airline KLM is planning to use the leftovers of 50,000 airplane meals to produce electricity. The idea is to convert waste (refuse and food) into oil and then burn in a gas turbine at a new power station on Schiphol Airport grounds. A feasability study is currently being done and a decision will be made at the end of September.
With an investment of less than EUR 10 mln, the power station could process 20 tonnes of waste a day, which is enough to handle the leftover food. The turbine would then be able of providing electricity for 4,000 homes.
(Link: vleesmagazine.nl)
Tags: electricity, KLM, Schiphol, waste
August 20, 2009
The KLIK! animation film festival will feature more than 250 films from 32 countries from 17 to 20 September in Amsterdam. This internationally known festival is in its third year and keeps gets bigger. One of the enthusiastic organisers Luuk van Huët talks about KLIK! like a proud father so I had to write something.
“Even though Internet has made it easier to access and view animation from around the globe, not enough offbeat animated fare graces the big screens in our creative capital Amsterdam and the rest of the country. We started the KLIK! Amsterdam Animation Festival to change that.”
KLIK! also has a satellite edition in the city of Mopti in Mali, West Africa, where Dutchman Willem Snapper lives. He started the Mopti Foundation to help the locals build gardens and irrigation systems and also screens films in his own backyward every week, attracting 300 visitors at a time, as there is no cinema to be found for hundreds of kilometers.
This year KLIK! has compiled a special program for the Mopti Foundation, to be judged by a jury of local dignitaries, and the winner will receive the KLIK! Mopti Award. KLIK! will also give out awards for the best design in animation and the best political animated film and the awards for the best films in the Open and Student Competition.
And if Luuk were watching over my shoulder, he’d remind me again to finally go and see the ‘South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut Sing-and-Swear-A-Long!’ on Friday 18 September.
(Link: klikamsterdam.nl)
August 19, 2009
Biologist Maarten Loonen from Groningen figured that it might take a while before the Google Streetview cars and bikes venture deep within the Arctic circle.
His solution was to whip out the old camera and make his own “street view” of Ny-Ålesund, Spitsbergen. The round the clock daylight currently available there undoubtedly helped make the job easier. The result is a collection of 3,000 photos, according to Bright (Dutch), and a number of videos. Biologist Loonen took a picture every 10 metres inside the village and every 30 metres outside it.
Spitsbergen, meaning Craggy Island Mountains, has a Dutch name despite being Norwegian territory because it was ‘discovered’ by Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz. He was looking for the Northern passage to the East and died trying.
(Source photos: arcticstation.nl.)
Tags: biologists, craft, maps, Spitsbergen, Streetview
August 18, 2009
The Rijksmuseum (State Museum) recently secured a long-term loan of some 80 photos from Surinam and Curaçao, two former Dutch colonies. The photo shown here is apparently the oldest known photo from Surinam, a daguerreotype, portraying a mixed race married couple that was taken in 1846 in Paramaribo, seven years after the advent of photography.
The lot is called ‘De West’ and can be admired as of 19 August. It also includes work from reputed photographers such as Augusta Curiel (1873-1937) and Willem Diepraam (1944).
(Link: wereldjournalisten.nl, Photo: rijksmuseum.nl)
Tags: Curaçao, Rijksmuseum, Suriname
August 17, 2009
‘Gecekondu’ is a type of housing in Turkey that literally means “built in one day,” and that exploits a legal Turkish loophole that says that if you built a house in one night, the authorities cannot tear it down. Estimates say that up to half of the buildings in Istanbul are ‘Gecekondular’ (plural).
It is also the name of a one-room hotel in Amsterdam that DUS architects came up with. The building is entirely made of big square shopping bags and sits atop a pontoon. Visitors can draw the bridge at night to keep unwelcome visitors away. Staying a night is ‘free,’ that is to say, you are expected to perform chores in payment.
Parool calls it surprisingly cool (Dutch).
(Photo: DUS Architects, which has an extensive web page about this project.)
August 16, 2009
The E-Kart or Electric Kart is an experiment to see “whether we can somehow conceive our own home-built electric vehicle—we bought an old go kart frame and converted it to a zero emission kart, using parts from an electric scooter,” according to its makers, Anthony Liekens and Walter Schreppers.
I talked to Liekens at HAR. The electric scooter was used simply because they had one available from China that wasn’t rated for use on the road in Belgium, and also because this solution was cheaper than getting the required parts separately. Originally, they wanted to buy an electric motor that would draw 4800 watts. The current scooter-based model uses 500 watts.
When I visited E-Kart Village, Anthonie was mourning a flat front tire, but in true hacker spirit, he told me that they were looking into the many and diverse applications of duck tape to overcome this problem. And sure enough, a day later I saw the kart zip across the campground again.
The E-Kart has a top speed of 23 km/h, and because it can access all its torque immediately, accelerates very fast. The E-Kart blog has lots more info, including videos and a complete, illustrated history.
Now it’s off for me to the last of the talks of HAR 2009. I hope you enjoyed reading about the camp as much as I enjoyed attending.
Update: I appear to have forgotten to include the link to the E-Kart blog, an oversight I have now corrected (see first paragraph)—B.
Tags: Add new tag, duct tape, green, HAR 2009, karting, zero emission
From 7 through 20 September, the 19 historic windmills of the Kinderdijk, on the UNESCO heritage list since 1997, will be lit up with colourful, energy-efficient LED lighting from Philips and installed by Technische Unie. The colours of the windmills will represent different symbols of Dutch history. For starters, this red, white and blue with subtle orange overtones surely represents the Dutch flag and pennant.
Even my own family visited the Kinderdijk when they came to the Netherlands because it was in their guide book as a must. It was touristy, but not busy or crowded and you’ll learn a lot about water drainage.
(Link and photo: philips.nl)
Tags: Kinderdijk, LED, Philips
August 15, 2009
I just turned away from the lock-picking talk, as the tent was absolutely packed (me being 5 minutes late). I don’t know how many people fit in these convention tents, hundreds, perhaps thousands, but that is the amount of people that after tonight may know how to break every lock you own.
Earlier today I was at the talk with possibly the smallest amount of listeners of this 4-day exercise, you might even say the attendants resembled Cantor Dust. OK, lousy statistical jokes aside, this talk was by statistician Richard Gill of the University of Leiden and dealt with the Lucia de Berk case.
I had heard of the case before. In 2001, a nurse from The Hague was accused of having murdered dozens of patients, and the strange thing was that most of her guilt was determined by statistics: she had been near the victims at the time of their deaths, and although a direct link with the accused in the form of a confession or evidence could not be established, the court found that the statistical likelihood of her being near all these victims at the time of death was so minute, she must have done it.
At the time I thought this reasoning seemed silly, but I have learned early on in life never to argue with statisticians. So imagine my surprise: here was a statician who argued that the court’s reason had indeed been extremely silly, and that an innocent woman had gone to jail.
I won’t bore you with repeating the entire lecture: author Maarten ‘t Hart summarized Gill’s position excellently in this article from NRC (Dutch). Gill’s paper on how likely the chance is that a nurse was on active duty during all deaths concludes that one in nine nurses would have gone to jail (PDF).
Tags: courts, HAR 2009, hospitals, judges, justice, Leiden, murder, nurses, statistics, The Hague
The early 20th century was the heyday of Dutch polarisation. Unions, universities, newspapers, magazines and broadcasting corporations were founded, all based on a certain religion or ideology. The three main pillars were Protestantism, Catholicism and Socialism.
One of the remnants of this great societal movement is De Paasheuvel campground (the Easter Hill), on which hacker conference Hacking at Random is held. De Paasheuvel was started in the 1920s as the first communist campground. And although the campground is now a commercial venture that tries not to put too much emphasis on its past, there are still a few clues here and there that tell the visitor of the history of the place where many a left-wing politico received part of their training.
The little castle-like house shown in the photo above is called the Voorpost, and it predates the campground by a decade and a half. It was built as a Summer place of the Rolandes Hagendoorn family in 1906, and bought by the Arbeiders Jeugd Centrale (Workers Youth Center) in 1922.
The Zonnehal (Sun Hall) was built in 1939 in the style of the Amsterdamse School, and is used during HAR as one of the conference halls.
The grounds also hold a tiny wild life garden called Heemtuin de Heimanshof, which was founded by the AJC, and maintained by them for a long time. Although former AJC members still work on the garden, Jonge Socialisten (the youth branch of the socialist and social democratic parties) and other volunteers now help with the heavy lifting.
(These and other photos should appear in higher resolution in our Flickr account after Sunday.)
Tags: castles, gardens, pilarisation, politics, Socialism
