April 20, 2010

Seven men arrested for wearing the number 1312

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 1:44 pm

AT5 reports that seven fans of Amsterdam’s Ajax football club have been arrested for wearing shirts that sported the number 1312 before the match against Heracles last Sunday.

Police officers apparently were insulted by numbers, as they seem to believe the outcome of 1312 is “all cops are bastards.”

Football blog footballculture.nl—presumably fearing that if the police keep up their censoring ways, fans will have to go naked at this rate—came up with a completely innocuous T-shirt (photo) sporting an apple, some kind of citrus fruit, a member of the Ananas family, and a banana (Dutch names: appel, citroen, ananas, banaan).

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April 19, 2010

Delft students improve surgery for cross-eyed

Filed under: Health,Science by Branko Collin @ 1:48 pm

Team Daisy, made up of Elsbeth Geukers and Nicole de Bakker, has won the 2010 Philips Innovation Award with a diagnostic technique that should drastically reduce the amount of operations required to treat strabismus (aka “cross-eyed”) in young children.

One of the problems that apparently plague doctors when trying to measure the angle of ‘crossed’ eyes is that young children do not sit still enough for an accurate measurement. Sprout.nl claims that this can lead to a failure rate of the operations of up to 50%.

The technique developed by the TU Delft students will simply measure from different angles simultaneously.

Earlier this year Geukers and De Bakker proved not only to be successful inventors but also promising businesswomen, when they won first prize (1500 euro) in the Writing a Business Plan course at their university.

(Photo by Flickr user net_efekt, some rights reserved)

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April 18, 2010

The other ‘Anne Frank’ houses

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:08 pm

The Anne Frank House is called Het Achterhuis in Dutch, the apartment in the back, simply because that is what it was. The andereachterhuizen.nl website has collected 30 stories of other hiding places of Jewish refugees in World War II.

For instance, the story of Johan Sanders, who was separated from his parents and sisters. When he once met his sisters on the street, naturally he smiled. The other kids, not knowing the real deal, yelled that “ha ha, Johan van den Berk is in love with Lenie Vissermans.”

“That had a real impact on me.”

The people in these stories were hiding at one of 42 addresses. They received warmth or beatings. They were in the city or the countryside, alone or with others. They were in hiding or were not. They had to pay a lot, or nothing at all. They were treated like equals or as slaves. They were betrayed or not.

(The site is entirely in Dutch. Via Trendbeheer)

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April 17, 2010

Man stages distress to win damsel back

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 1:01 pm

A 18-year-old man from The Hague staged a robbery two weeks ago in order to impress his ex-girlfriend with his heroic intervention and win her back that way.

A friend in a white ski mask pulled a knife on the 17-year-old girl on the Grote Markt and demanded her purse, only to see his ‘robbery’ thwarted by the ex-boyfriend who ‘happened’ to be on the scene. After studying security camera footage (the girl reported the attempted robbery to the police), the police concluded the ‘robber’ and the ex-boyfriend were in cahoots.

Both conspirators were arrested.

According to De Volkskrant, the ploy did not have the desired effect.

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April 16, 2010

Using thin people’s poop to lose weight

Filed under: Health,Science by Orangemaster @ 5:09 pm
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According to a study carried out by doctor and reseacher Anne Vrieze at the Academic Medical Center (AMC) in Amsterdam, fat people have a different gut flora than thin people and you can use thin people’s poop, insert it into fat people and help them lose weight. It already works with rats, now it’s being rested on humans.

The idea is not new and dates back to 1955, where in one trial of ‘poop transplant’, a woman was cured from an intestinal disease by having her son’s healthy poop injected into her own intestines.

Vrieze explains that gut flora is as unique as fingerprints, and science still does not know why. Fat people shold have the chance to have more efficient bacteria in their intestines, which would help them poop out the bad stuff easier, which is what happens with thin people.

Vrieze was also surprised that so many men (they didn’t test women) were willing to have a tube shoved down their noses down to their intestines with poop to see if this could increase their chances of losing weight. Never mind the fact that so many things are just not tested on women for reasons that include getting sued because a woman might be pregnant, this time, the reason was that “we don’t know what influence hormone levels could have on gut flora.”

If the effects are temporary, getting a month poop transplant does not sound like much of a solution. The idea Vrieze has is to develop a capsule that could be taken, which would contain the ‘thinning’ bacteria. She responsibly adds that this would not replace proper dieting and exercise.

(Link: kennislink.nl)

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April 15, 2010

One million euro to research eating bugs

Filed under: Animals,Science by Orangemaster @ 8:25 pm
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Our current governement is on its way out, and there are elections in early June. This means no major decisions can be taken, and it’s more about tying up loose ends and cleaning out desks. But hey, let’s stir things up and give one million euro for research into eating bugs. Nom!

For the next three years, the Wageningen University & Research Centre gets to research which insects are worth eating. And then, the clichés: scientists say they’re just as good for you as meat, it’s good for the environment, and also my favourites, people in Asia and Africa eat them, they’re good with chocolate (bye bye health argument) and so on.

Why not just ask the Asians and Africans for recipes and/or their research instead of throwing all that money out the window? No, wait, why not start a marketing campaign to eat bugs? Wait, we don’t eat bugs, and unless we totally run out of food, we’re not going to consider eating bugs any time soon.

I grew up near one of the only, if not the only place where you can gawk at insects and then eat some: the Montréal Insectarium. If only they did that at the farm with burgers. Or maybe fast food chains should sell bug burgers. Nom!

(Link: telegraaf.nl, Photo of Worms by Wahj, some rights reserved.)

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April 14, 2010

Dutch vodka with programmable LED label

Filed under: Gadgets by Orangemaster @ 7:45 pm

How to Program a Message on Your MEDEA Bottle from Medea Spirits on Vimeo.

I love a good troika: First, we had Guus Hiddink vodka, then Trump vodka made in The Netherlands and now, hi-tech Medea vodka from Schiedam, the birth place of genever (gin).

Medea vodka has a programmable LED label. It can be up to 225 characters, which is more than a Twitter ‘tweet’ (140 characters) or a text message (160 characters). You can turn off the text to save batteries, if so inclined and a bottle costs 30 euro. Being a regular buyer of vodka, Dutch vodka is often pricy at 30 euro a bottle, as compared to Polish and Russian vodka at 15-20 euro a bottle. But hey, this time you get a gadget with your booze.

Oh and by the way, the music in the video is Chopin’s Prelude No. 4 in E minor (Op. 28), which is the work that French composer and artist Serge Gainsbourg’s song ‘Jane B.’ is based on. You get that tidbit extra, as Serge drank more vodka and other alcohol than you drink water.

(Link: idealize.nl)

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April 13, 2010

Very Short Film Festival now also in Amsterdam

Filed under: Dutch first,Film by Orangemaster @ 11:59 am
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For the first time ever Amsterdam will be one of the cities hosting the 11th edition of the Very Short Film Festival, featuring movies of less than three minutes, without titles and credits. On 8 and 9 May, the CREA in Amsterdam will play host to all kinds of movies, chosen for their originality, boldness, sense of humour, generosity and even bad taste. The festival has always been very francophone in nature, but this year films are being shown in and from countries such as The Netherlands, Brazil, Hungary, Moldavia, Israel, Romania, Singapore, Serbia, Palestine and the United Kingdom.

In the spirit of ‘Zoek de Nederlander’ (Find the Dutch person), Alix over at drooderfiets tells me that the Public’s Award of the fifth edition went to a Dutch short by Jeroen Annokkeé called ‘Road Kill’.

Road Kill

Atom.com: Funny Videos | Short Films | Existential Crisis

(Link: Very Short)

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April 12, 2010

Bed and breakfast at former madam’s

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:37 pm

Xaviera Hollander is a former New York call-girl and madam who got world famous with her autobiography The Happy Hooker. Nowadays she runs a bed and breakfast from her villa in the posh part of Amsterdam (right around my corner, although I live in the ‘poor’ part of the posh part).

She has two rooms on offer and a chalet in the back yard, the cheapest for 100 euro, and there is a sort of half-promise of being entertained by the ‘author, Penthouse columnist, legend, performer, [and] raconteur’ Xaviera Hollander herself. If you like, you can let her husband Philip cook you dinner.

(Source image: xavierahollander.com)

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April 11, 2010

Twitter-based architecture

Filed under: Architecture by Branko Collin @ 11:31 am

Last autumn a study project had eleven architecture students from the University of Delft create a house for a person based on their tweets and on other statements the ‘client’ made on-line. The eleven virtual clients were not told about the project, so the students could only go by these on-line statements.

Each student was given an area of 500 x 500 metres in Amsterdam in which to find a suitable location for a 130 square metre house.

A book made about project Twitterhouse can be viewed here, and a video about one of the cases, fashion designer Joline Jolink, is below:

Says Jolink:

@KimTextilia Kim moet je dit zien: http://www.bright.nl/ontwerp-een-huis-op-basis-van-tweets SCARY!!

(Links: Bright, The Mobile City. Source image: Twitter.)

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