June 8, 2013

Planned bomb detonation interrupts trains to and from Venlo

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 9:08 pm

Tomorrow the Dutch army will detonate two World War II bombs on the site of the former army base in Blerick, just across the Meuse from Venlo.

Both bombs are English 500-pounders that were found last May at depths of 1.5 and 1.75 metres respectively. After the failure of Operation Market Garden in 1944, the Meuse became the front line for several months. Although Blerick had been liberated in December 1944, Venlo had to wait until March 1945.

The mayor of Venlo called the destruction of two bombs in his municipality “nothing special”, but he stressed that he had nothing but respect for the bomb disposal unit, Dichtbij writes.

The army base was built in 1910 on top of the old Fort Sint Michiel. Even in literature the area saw action. Twin brothers Beekman tried to help stop the Nazi invasion in 1940 from casemates in front of the base in the book Beekman en Beekman, which according to its publisher is the best selling novel ever in the Netherlands, Wikipedia writes.

(Photo of a 1000-pounder in Bunnik by the Ministry of Defense, some rights reserved)

June 7, 2013

Marijuana scratch and sniff cards for Heerlen

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 11:38 am

The city of Heerlen, Limburg plans to hand out scratch and sniff cards smelling of marijuana to residents so that they can help report illegal marijuana nurseries. It’s not a new idea. Back in 2010 we told you about cannabis scratch and sniff cards to sniff out illegal plantations.

Basically the police need help and what better help than people who think it smells funny over at the neighbour’s place.

In Heerlen’s case, embarrassement played a good part in bringing up the scratch and sniff card. A marijuana nursery was discovered in a building with a daycare centre, something you don’t read about every day and not good publicity for a city that has been fighting its drug-induced image for so many years. [Insert bad joke about children learning what pot smells like at a young age ].

I can still picture the German woman in this story saying it smells like Amsterdam.

Our info from 2010 stated that about 6,000 plantations are found out every year, 300 of which back then were uncovered in Rotterdam alone.

(Link: www.limburger.nl)

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June 6, 2013

World’s first transatlantic 100 Gbps links Maastricht to Chicago

Filed under: Dutch first,Technology by Orangemaster @ 3:10 pm

Today, during the last day of the TERENA Networking Conference 2013 (TNC2013) held in Maastricht, the ‘largest and most prestigious European research networking conference’, featured the first-ever demonstration of a transatlantic 100 gigabits-per-second (Gbps or one billion bits per second) transmission link for research and education between North America and Europe.

Demonstrations of the intercontinental 100 Gbps link included big data transfers between Maastricht and Chicago, Illinois taking a few minutes instead of several hours over the public Internet. This first transatlantic 100 Gbps link for research and education will advance high-end projects such as the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the ITER fusion reactor in France and similar international programs.

Short but powerful, as the Dutch would say.

(Link: phys.org, Photo by Jacek Szymański, some rights reserved)

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June 5, 2013

Two Russians fighting over a painting make a Dutch woman rich

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 12:20 pm

Auction house Christie’s in London has sold ‘Still Life With Fruit’ by Russian avant-garde artist Ilya Mashkov for an unexpected € 5.5 million euro, a painting owned by an unnamed Dutch woman who bought it for a few thousand guilders back in 1976. In 1913 the painting was adorning Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum as part of an exhibition that also featured Kandinsky and Mondrian.

It is a world record price for the artist, the value of which appears to have been driven up by a bidding war between two Russians. The previous owner bought the work 35 years ago from a Dutch art dealer. She was persuaded to put it up for sale by a Christie’s expert who had valued it for insurance purposes a decade ago and believed the time was right to cash in.

(Link: amsterdamherald.com, Image: Ilya Mashkov by Boris Grigoriev)

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June 4, 2013

Mobile football stadium solves problem of derelict stadiums

Filed under: Architecture,Design by Orangemaster @ 11:20 am

Marcel Klomp, a graduating student from the TU Delft, has designed a mobile stadium that seats 50,000 and can be taken apart to fit in 150 40-foot containers. It is a serious solution to the international problem of building a huge stadium like in South Africa for the World Football Cup or in Beijing for the Summer Olympics with the stadium barely being used afterwards.

His design made from aluminium and steel allows installers to put the stadium up in eight months. “If the stadium is used eight times in 30 years, it will be profitable. It will cost about 250 million euro and can last 50 years”, Klomp claims. A permanent stadium costs much more time and money to build, is usually not profitable and is done out of prestige rather than future need. It is probably time for many countries to stop building uselessly and look at a realistic alternative like the mobile stadium. In fact, one of the reasons the Dutch population is not on board with Amsterdam having put in a bid for the 2028 Summer Olympics is knowing that the entire endeavour is a big loss from the get-go.

Klomp says the interest in his design is ‘overwhelming’, and since it is a graduation project, it needs to be worked out 100%.

(Link: www.kennislink.nl, Photo by Wikimedia user Carolus Ludovicus, some rights reserved)

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June 3, 2013

Den Bosch turned old country road into nature preserve

Filed under: Bicycles,Nature by Branko Collin @ 12:47 pm

When the city of Den Bosch expanded eastward in the 1980s, it gobbled up an old stretch of Meuse dike called Heinis. Originally developers wanted to build a business park there, but protests put a stop to those plans.

Instead, the city decided to build around the area as Mark Wagenbuur writes:

For ages this country road ran through the fields, but the city expanded and new parts were built north and south of this east west road in the late 1970s. Residential areas to the north and an industrial area to the south. By 1980 the old road was suddenly in the middle of the city.

When this was still a real country road there were many rural houses on it. […] Many of the more contemporary houses were destroyed but all the monumental farm houses remained. There were so many of those that the road still has the atmosphere of a country road.

Motor traffic on the old road is now restricted, with bridges spanning gaps in the old dike to let bicycles across.

From a conservationist’s perspective, the area is important for its ‘wheels’ (I don’t think there is an English word for the phenomenon), small but sometimes deep ponds made by kolks breaking through dikes, what IVN/Vogel- en Natuurwacht ‘s-Hertogenbosch e.o. calls “mementos of the sometimes unsuccessful battle against water.”

Here is a Google maps link. Although I cannot show you many photos of the area, the link above to Mark Wagenbuur’s article also leads to a video of a bike ride through the area.

(Photo of a ‘wheel’ in Heinis by Geert Smulders who released it into the public domain)

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June 2, 2013

First amputee football match between Belgium and Netherlands ends in fight

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 10:24 pm

Yesterday the town of Westerlo in the Belgian province of Antwerp was the stage of the first-ever football match between the representative disabled teams of the Netherlands and the host country.

Both teams fielded one-legged players on crutches (except the goalkeepers who were missing an arm). What should have been a party ended in a fight. At a 3-3 score the crutches of two players hit each other. After the players got into an argument, testosterone-laden onlookers stormed the field under the watchful eye of Belgian national television.

Not all competitors were phased by what happened. One Marnix Huys of the Belgian team said, sat smiling in the grass: “I felt we were doing well. A couple of beginner’s mistakes, but all in all we had reason to be happy. It was a pleasant match with a few incidents that should not have happened, but other than that things went well. In the end we got stronger and stronger both physically and technically.”

(Photo by Kevin Prichard, some rights reserved)

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June 1, 2013

Policeman caught on telly driving dangerously, gets fined by colleague

Filed under: Automobiles,General by Orangemaster @ 12:34 pm

“The police in this country are underpaid and often have a serious attitude problem,” I heard recently. After having to call 112 (the Dutch 911) for the firefighters to deal with a short circuit in my house a while back, the cops reluctantly wrote up a report, treating me like a puppy that had wet the carpet.

The police do have an image problem, at least at 24oranges. They’ve arrested people based on their skin colour, they tried to fine a woman while she was having a miscarriage and fight the reopening of a cafe because it played gangsta rap.

A Dutch reality show that arrests people causing problems on the road stopped a motorcyclist for driving too fast, tailgating and weaving who turned to be cop in civilian clothing. He made excuses about being busy and “we are all just people.” It cost him 220 euro, giving the police some excellent national publicity.

I have developed a particular fondness for motorcycle cops. A few years ago, a friend told me he’d lost a female friend of his, a wife and mother, to an off duty motorcycle cop who drove through a red light in Amsterdam and ran her over while she was crossing the street. He got off with some community service or something like that.

Watch the embarrassement in Dutch:

(Link: www.waarmaarraar.nl)

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May 31, 2013

Charging your phone at the train station in Rotterdam

Filed under: Dutch first,Technology by Orangemaster @ 7:00 pm

The folks at Dutch Rail (NS) are currently testing a post called the ‘ChagR’ (pic with complicated instructions) that would allow two commuters at a time to charge up their mobile phones for free while they wait for the train. Some 110,000 people take the train every day from Rotterdam Central Station, so if this were to be implemented, more posts would be a must.

Although Dutch Rail has said to be thrilled about the idea, commuter response has been apathetic, with only 40 people having used the post, which works for micro USB, iPhone and even ordinary batteries. The instructions are apparently long-winded and more testing is needed, but the idea is not bad.

I would rather charge my phone in the train and ideally plug in my laptop there as well. I picture easy smartphone theft as well and two people at a time is way too little charging power.

(Link: blog.phonehouse.nl, Photo of train by Flickr user UggBoy hearts UggGirl, some rights reserved)

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May 29, 2013

Trash bags in Amsterdam get their own Facebook page

Filed under: General,Online by Orangemaster @ 10:19 am

Following the trend of protesting or trying to shed light on issues by setting up a Facebook page, a resident of Amsterdam’s De Pijp district who lives on the Van der Helstplein (Van der Helst square) has had enough of the heaps of trash accumulating there and has set up a Facebook page called Van der Helst-belt.

The square is full of restaurants and cafes, which would explain the preponderance of trash, but not why it isn’t picked up often enough or on time. The other problem is that people tend to put out their trash every day, which goes against the rules of that area.

Trash is a complicated business in Dutch cities. In Nijmegen for example, unless it has changed recently, residents pay extra money to use city-approved trash bags, which you buy at the regular store, so basically you pay for what you throw out. In places like Amsterdam, you pay a flat fee per year depending on the make-up of your household. In my co-blogger ultraposh neighbourhood it’s a Wednesday-Saturday affair, while in my lesser yet decent part of town, I can go across the street anytime and put it in one of the three underground bins.

(Link: www.rtvnh.nl)

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