October 8, 2012

Governments mislead citizens into sending digital information to wrong address

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 12:01 pm

The Dutch national government has put a lot of work into its digital identification system, as DigID is pretty much obligatory for most people these days. For instance, most people cannot file tax returns without one.

However, the government would not be the government if it had not found ways to mess up its own system. The latest howler is reported by WebWereld which writes that a lot of municipalities refer citizens to an ad agency called Digi-D (note the hyphen).

The ad agency existed before the government came up with the name DigiD. The agency claims it has already received sensitive data from 10,000 mistaken citizens, and it has tried to get the government to mend its ways, so far to no avail. Being an ad agency they have now started a campaign to do what the government should have done in the first place, namely point citizens to the right address. The slogan: ‘be careful with your DigiD!’

WebWereld lists several official government documents that refer citizens to the wrong organisation.

Apparently local governments have a checklist that tells them to pay attention to the correct spelling of the name DigiD, among other things.

(Photo by Mystic Mabel, some rights reserved)

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October 7, 2012

A hot tub that you can take sailing

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 1:48 pm

This is the HotTug, a boat that doubles as a (you guessed it) hot tub.

The boat is built from wood and fibreglass. A wood stove heats the water inside, and an electric engine propels the boat for about 2.5 hours (but there is also an 8 hour version). The entire contraption functions as a regular boat regardless of whether you fill the tub with water.

A version with stove or engine costs about 15,000 euro, but a version stripped of these accessories can be had for as little as 9,000 euro. Werf IJlst in Friesland rents out these babies for 300 euro per half a day.

The HotTug was designed and built by Supergoed from Rotterdam, the design studio behind the ‘bicycle tunnel as racetrack‘.

(Link: AmsterdamNews.net. Photo: hottug.nl)

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October 6, 2012

Artist Tinkebell reports snails stolen by activist reporter

Filed under: Animals,Architecture by Branko Collin @ 3:57 pm

Controversial artist Tinkebell has announced she will report a theft with the police after a TV Rijnmond reporter took two snails from an exhibit with him. TV Rijnmond handed over the snails to Dierenbescherming (‘Animal Protection’, an association with 200,000 members and 31 local chapters) for further study.

Tinkebell is currently exhibiting some 1,000 live snails with beads glued to them as part of a larger exhibition at the Villa Zebra children’s museum called Ah, wat lief! (‘So sweet’). The exhibition is supposed to explore and challenge how children look at animals—which ones do they find cute, and which ones do they find horrid.

Earlier Tinkebell exhibits centered around exposing the hypocrisy of animal lovers by doing the exact same thing they do to animals, but within a completely different context. In one instance she made a leather purse, with the leather from her own cat. She also let hamsters run around a showroom while they were imprisoned in tiny plastic balls she had purchased at a pet store, something for which she was prosecuted but ultimately acquited.

In an article on left-wing blog Joop.nl Tinkebell explains how she got the idea of adorning snails with beads in the first place:

I have been painting all the snails I find in my own garden for years. [One day I spotted my neighbour salting his garden to kill snails and] I began to wonder where the snails came from, where they were going and how old they would get. In order to answer my own questions as well as try to change my neighbour’s mind, I started to paint numbers on the snails in my garden. There were many of them…

A year later and much to my surprise I saw that the snails were still moving through my garden, numbers and all. Wow! So then I numbered the unmarked copies in a different colour.

Another year passed and now three generations of painted snails were moving among my plants, and the year after I started with a new ‘tactic’, that of ‘beautifying’. I added glitter, flowers and little paintings. Each year my snails looked different, and that is how I kept track of different generations.

(Photo by Helen Cook, some rights reserved)

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October 5, 2012

Parkour in Rotterdam, Jackie Chan style

Filed under: Architecture,Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 4:19 pm

Despite a whole bunch of bad jokes about the Netherlands’ second city, Rotterdam, it is often praised in the foreign press or in Wallpaper magazine, mainly for its modern architecture.

In this video, the city’s best know poet and jazz fan Jules Deelder sarcastically says, “I swear to you, Rotterdam can’t be filmed. It has no past and not a single stair-step gable,” echoing the opinion of many who think Amsterdam is top dog and Rotterdam must be treated like a less posh younger sibling who tries to mask their bombarded past by going modern.

The Willemswerf is the name of the office building martial arts star Jackie Chan slides down in his 1998 film ‘Who am I’, which has some excellent shots of parkour-like action in Rotterdam. Apparently, when asked back in 1999, Chan put it on his list of 10 favourite stunts, which can be read in his book ‘I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action’. Oh, and he performed that stunt himself by the way like he did so many others.

Even though one of his stuntmen proved it could be done from a lower level, it took Chan two weeks to get up the nerve to try it himself. The sequence begins with him fighting it out with some thugs on the top of a very tall building in Rotterdam. After battling with them around the roof, and nearly falling off once or twice, he finally took the quickest possible trip to the sidewalk below –sliding down the side of the building, which is slanted nearly 45 degrees, all the way to the ground. Twenty-one stories.”

At least Rotterdam has 21-storey buildings.

The movie also prominently figures the ‘koopgoot’ (underground shopping area), the cube houses and the Erasmus bridge. He also tries using a recumbent bike, a stunt in itself.

(Photo of Rotterdam, KPN building by Roel Wijnants, some rights reserved)

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October 4, 2012

Dutch photographer snaps couples who dress the same

Filed under: Photography by Orangemaster @ 2:59 pm

I learnt somewhere during my university years that children are seen as a generic group of humans. Then boys and girls and men and women are defined separately because they are sexually active. Eventually when women become infertile (they are the benchmark), both men and women are referred to as the elderly, going back to being a generic group of humans.

This set of photographs of mainly elderly people seems to back up my story. Dutch photographer George Maas took pictures of couples, men and women who are dressed almost alike. The last five years he managed to photograph 56 couples of all kinds.

I wonder if elderly gays and lesbians are inclined to follow suit (ha, pun).

(Link: www.jut-en-jul.nl, via www.iamexpat.nl)

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October 3, 2012

Germans attempt to smuggle over 200 live tarantulas

Filed under: Animals,Weird by Orangemaster @ 8:34 pm

Customs at Schiphol airport intercepted some Germans with over 200 live tarantulas and other creepy crawlies they brought back in their suitcases from their travels to Peru. This could have been their idea of money making souvenirs just in time for Halloween.

Not only did they ‘hide’ the arachnoids and insects in plastic containers, but also in their clothes and shoes. The whole lot is poisonous and will be examined by entomologists and whatever the name is of experts who analyse spiders.

(Link: www.rijksoverheid.nl, Photo of Ctenus exlineae (F Ctenidae) by Marshal Hedin, some rights reserved)

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October 2, 2012

Live snails used in art exhibition spark controversy

Filed under: Animals,Art by Orangemaster @ 10:30 pm

Controversial artist Tinkebelle (aka Katinka Simonse) has done it again: she’s collected some 1,000 live snails and glued colourful buttons and beads on their shells, which will be part of an exhibition opening this Thursday about animals at the VillaZebra children’s museum in Rotterdam. The usual animal groups are of course very upset. I’m surprised the museum is all cool with this and I wonder what parents are going to tell their kids.

The idea is that by turning the snail shells into artworks, the artist makes the snails special and even gives them personality. That is her explanation. Last year we had the hamsters going round and round for hours in balls that was judged OK after all by the courts, and then there’s always the famous cat hand bag she made that went viral.

From 2010, here’s a video with English subtitles about why she killed her own cat (and didn’t let the vet do it) and more.

I’m not a fan, but she really knows how to get people’s attention.

(Link: www.rnw.nl, Photo of Snails by davepatten, some rights reserved)

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September 30, 2012

Shrinking jugs by Dave Hakkens

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 9:11 pm

Artist and inventor Dave Hakkens was fascinated by the fact that porcelain shrinks when you bake it. He used that notion to create a series of jugs where each jug formed the basis of a cast for the next one.

Starting out with a 5 litre jug he ended up with 14 jugs, of which the smallest has a volume of 10 millilitres. The jugs are for sale.

See also: Two inventions—a charger in a safe, and a power strip in a book (and a bonus invention)

(Link: Bright. Photo: Dave Hakkens)

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September 29, 2012

How Iran censors a Dutch newspaper

Filed under: Photography by Branko Collin @ 11:15 am

Jan-Dirk van der Burg curated an exhibition called Censorship Daily which is on display now at the Persmuseum.

It shows the handiwork of Iran’s censors with regards to Dutch newspapers. NRC has a selection at their Inbeeld website.

Van der Burg is a photographer whom we wrote about before.

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September 28, 2012

Bill Cosby sweater designer on stage in Amsterdam

Filed under: Fashion by Orangemaster @ 6:20 pm

Last March, the world famous, colourful Bill Cosby sweaters got their own blog, which was an opportunity to remind everyone that they were all designed by Dutchman Koos van den Akker.

This week until October 7 at Theater Bellevue in Amsterdam, Van den Akker, 73, will be on stage being interviewed — all very spontaneously — by friend and acteur Marcel Musters. In a performance entitled ‘Rietje meets Koos’, Musters plays a middle aged woman who is a big Cosby fan and is excited to discover that Van den Akker designed those sweaters.

Van den Akker’s jackets, sweaters and shirts have a carefully crafted collage style, works of art that are now a source of inspiration to designers such as America’s Marc Jacobs.

(Link: www.elsevier.nl, Photo of Cosby sweater by Felix Jackson, Jr., some rights reserved)

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