July 22, 2014

Dutch constitution will finally include e-mail

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 8:33 pm

grondwet-grondwetfestival_nlArticle 13 of the Dutch constitution declares a secrecy of correspondence, meaning the government and others are not allowed to snoop on your mail.

However, there is an unfortunate loophole: the law specifically talks about paper mail. E-mail was never included and therefore exists in a legal limbo.

According to Internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet, the council of ministers of the Netherlands has now proposed a change in the constitution that will not actually name e-mail, but which will make the phrasing of Article 13 more generic. A change in the constitution requires two consecutive parliaments to vote for that change, the idea being that the change can be made an issue in the elections.

Not that it matters much, as the Dutch constitution, which is now 200 years old, is more of a guideline than law. Judges are not allowed to ignore laws based on their constitutionality. The constitution may be said to have a normative function, for example, it could show courts how to interpret a vague law, but a 2009 study by the national government claims that this normative function is eroding (PDF). Instead a societal function is emerging, as the constitution aims to hold up a mirror to the citizens of the kingdom and to show us what our shared values are.

See also: an English translation of Article 13.

(Photo of the constitution of 1814 by Grondwetfestival.nl, used with permission)

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July 21, 2014

Armoured vehicles of the Dutch East Indies army

Filed under: History by Branko Collin @ 11:23 am

marmon-herringto-ctls-4tac-pd

Overvalwagens.com is a website dedicated to “the research of military, commercial and improvised vehicles as used in the Netherlands East and West Indies before 1945”.

In May 1940 Nazi Germany conquered the Netherlands, but it did not gain control over Dutch India. The outbreak of WWII made acquisitions difficult however for KNIL, the army in Dutch India. Overvalwagens.com writes: “Often the Netherlands Purchasing Commission was forced to acquire vehicles (as well as other military equipment) that was by no means standard allied material. Sometimes they bought off-the-shelf prototypes or equipment rejected by the US armed forces.”

An example is the tank shown above, the Marmon-Herrington CTLS-4TA. This was produced by the only company in the US “building tanks commercially, while not being involved in the re-armament process of the US Forces”. An interesting vehicle because the gun turret could not turn all the way around. As a result they were sold and used in pairs, one gun covering the left flank, the other one the right.

(Link: Martin Wisse, Photo: British armed forces, now in the public domain)

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July 19, 2014

Dummies begging in the streets for charity

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 10:42 pm

homeless-badt-jwtBoing Boing wrote about this remarkable campaign for a charity in Amsterdam:

The Dutch homelessness charity Badt dressed mannequins as homeless people, sawed coin-slots in their foreheads, and seeded them around Amsterdam with signs soliciting donations. It’s a clever campaign, but it says something a little unpleasant, in that we are apparently more willing to give money to a doll with a slot in its forehead than an actual homeless person.

The campaign was created by JWT, the ad agency that is housed in the Hirsch & Cie building on Leidseplein in Amsterdam. According to Reclamewereld it took a week to create this campaign and the costs was less than 100 euro. Both the mannequins and the clothes came from donations.

(Illustration: crop of the video)

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July 18, 2014

Taxis posing as Tour de France team cars

Filed under: Automobiles by Orangemaster @ 8:08 pm

Amsterdam’s taxi landscape is currently featuring mock team cars with bikes on them (pic) to promote Radio 1’s coverage of the Tour, which features French music, lots of manly conversation and the occasional defamatory comment. When stepping into one of these taxis, you can listen to Radio Tour de France and almost feel what it’s like to be in the Tour de France, well kinda, if you add some suspension of disbelief.

I think it’s a nifty idea, as I like the look of the cars, but then I would probably take a taxi when the Tour wasn’t on at night and part of my brain now wonders how long the bikes will stay there and what kind of bikes they are. The Tour will be starting in Utrecht next year by the way.

As you probably already know, Radio 1 won’t have any Tour de France coverage on at all today to leave space for the world news about the Dutch airplane shot down in Ukraine, taking the lives of 298 people, of which 189 where Dutch.

(Link: www.amsterdamadblog.com)

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July 16, 2014

French tourists ignore fines and sleep in their cars

Filed under: Automobiles by Orangemaster @ 9:36 pm

Maybe French tourists are onto something: why pay a lot of money for an overpriced, cramped Amsterdam hotel room when you can sleep in your car and get a parking fine you won’t have to pay in the end? Apparently, the fines the French are being issued are not being collected anyways, so pourquoi pas.

According to De Telegraaf some 20,000 parking fines were issued to French car owners over the last two years, but few fines were actually collected by Dutch authorities. Even blogs are telling the French to ignore those pesky fines, although the tax office claims they’ll have to pay eventually. I know many French friends who have come to Amsterdam, been fined for parking in the wrong place not being able to decipher what they had to do and never paid their fines.

According to local telly station AT5 French tourists are said to sleep in their cars, which upsets the locals. Maybe the tax office should collect those fines for real because when it comes to bureaucracy the French know how to snub the system more than you, you clueless Dutch tax office you.

(Link: www.at5.nl)

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July 15, 2014

Groningen features fun art on a roundabout

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 11:34 am

Berlin artist Niklas Roy, who calls himself ‘an inventor of useless things’, was asked by the city of Groningen to design something for the Tschumi pavilion (designed by Swiss Bernard Tschumi in 1990) that sits on a roundabout.

The ‘Pneumatic Sponge Ball Accelerator’ is the name of the installation, which combines a gumball machine with foam-like balls, a lottery machine and a particle accelerator powered by a vacuum cleaner.

Niklas says his work was inspired by CERN laboratory’s work with particle accelerators, which he says you can’t see at all. “This is a particle accelerator for ordinary people,” he explains. Considering Tschumi is from the French speaking part of Switzerland, I wonder if Niklas made that connection on purpose.

(Links: thecreatorsproject.vice.com, www.tschumipaviljoen.org)

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July 14, 2014

Funny reflections on everyday life by Anne Stalinski

Filed under: Comics by Branko Collin @ 2:42 pm

daily-stalinski

The name Daily Stalinksi promises daily updates of Anne Stalinski’s comics (as does the subtitle), but I think it would be better to read this as “reflections on the daily life of …” because the updates currently only appear every three or four days.

Anne Stalinski won the Comik Web Award for young, web-based talent earlier this year. Stalinski’s humour is a little cliché at times (A, in a dramatic voice: “Why haven’t I been invited?” B: “Did you want to go?” A: “No, of course not!”), but always good for a smile, which is all you can ask from a free web comic.

Shown here: “My good friend Pirmin has a tattoo. I asked him why. ‘Oh Anne… It happened on my 16th birthday…’ I expected a more elaborate explanation. It never came.”

Anne and her equally creative sister Eva hail from Haren in Groningen, a town famous for its botanical garden and its riots, and publish a fanzine together called Zuster.

(Illustration: Daily Stalinski, link: Holly Moors)

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July 13, 2014

Rich are getting poorer in the Netherlands

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:56 pm

swimming-pool-meraj-chhayaAn OESO study has discovered that the Netherlands bucks the trend of the rich getting richer at the expense of those paying for the crisis.

Good news, then? Not really. Z24 points out that the Dutch poor are also getting poorer. The group of people that live below the poverty line has increased from 6.7% in 2007 to 7.8% in 2011. In this study ‘rich’ is defined as belonging to the top 10% in disposable income and poor as the bottom 10%.

The financial news site points out that the poor have lost less income than the rich, which is an interesting mathematical factoid, but otherwise devoid of meaning in my opinion. If the poor lose 1.5% of their income it means they go without food for another five days in a year, while for the rich it means they have to wait five days longer before they can purchase their next luxury car. Not quite the same difference.

A group of people that has done relatively well for themselves during the crisis is the elderly whose income has stayed the same. The group of 18 to 25-year-olds has seen their income drop since 2007 by well over 2%, although those differences are minimal compared to those of the same age groups in other countries such as New Zealand and Israel where the elderly are getting rich at the cost of everybody else.

(Photo by Meraj Chhaya, some rights reserved)

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July 11, 2014

Data storage speeds up by a factor of 1000

Filed under: Science,Technology by Orangemaster @ 11:23 am
Binary code

Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology and the FOM Foundation have recently presented a new technology that potentially allows data to be stored 1,000 times faster with ‘spin current’ using ultra-short laser pulses.

Data is conventionally stored using magnetization, making bits 1 or 0, but the limits of this technology have been reached, and researcher Sjors Schellekens of the Technical University of Eindhoven says that it’s time for new data storage technology.

The ‘spin current’ is able to cause a change in magnetization, which is 1,000 faster than what is possible with today’s technology. The new method has also been hailed as step towards future optical computer chips, which Eindhoven University of Technology is now working on thanks to a Dutch grant of close to 20 million euro.

In 2009 The University of Twente was on to something in the same field with spin polarisation achieved at room temperature, which also sped up the reading of a hard disk.

(Link: phys.org)

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July 10, 2014

Rietveld graduation album now on Flickr

Filed under: Art,Photography by Branko Collin @ 4:55 pm

rietveld-2014-olivier-oosterbaanAs promised last week I have posted my photos of the Rietveld graduation exhibition to our Flickr account, and then some.

Among them photos of the photography of erstwhile 24 Oranges’ contributor Olivier Oosterbaan who graduated from Rietveld’s part-time programme DOGtime. You can find more of his work at olivieroosterbaan.com/work/.

Other artists represented in the album, apart from the ones already shown last week, are Anne van Klooster, Aisha Fouad, Roza van der Wal, Soren Dilling, Keiko Oyamatsu and Esther Brakenhoff.

See also: Don’t DIY Days – Part 2

(Illustration: Olivier Oosterbaan)

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