January 15, 2012

Water flea making music

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 3:03 pm

A little video joke posted to Youtube yesterday by micro photographer and videographer Wim van Egmond.

We mentioned him earlier, and he seems to have moved his website to www.micropolitan.org, which BoingBoing calls a ‘virtual wunderkammer’ of the microscopic world.

If you are in the Netherlands and speak Dutch, I recommend watching the Het Klokhuis episode about Van Egmond, in which he reveals his secrets to Dutch children. One of them is to use your mother’s credit card to scrape pond scum off of poles.

(Hat tip to Waa. Video: Youtube / Wim van Egmond.)

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January 9, 2012

Court forces paedophile to move to Christian Internet provider

Filed under: Religion by Branko Collin @ 8:26 am

Last November the Zutphen court told a man to relocate to a Protestant Internet access provider (verdict, Dutch) as part of his punishment. The man had acquired a collection of more than 50,000 images and videos containing child pornography.

The public prosecutor had asked to give the man a suspended prison sentence of twelve months, to force the man to switch to Dutch Reformed provider Kliksafe, which provides censored Internet access, 240 hours of community service, and a treatment for ‘cannabis addiction’, whatever that is supposed to mean. The defense went largely along with this.

The court saw as a mitigating circumstance that the man had reported himself, and that it then took the Public Prosecution Service two years to act.

The non-profit foundation that owns Kliksafe writes about itself:

The basis of the foundation is God’s word, as is recorded in the Belgic Confession in Articles 2 through 7. It affirms completely and unconditionally the Three Forms of Unity as they were determined in the National Synod, held in Dordrecht in the years 1618 and 1619. It therefore declares the absolute power of God’s Word over all of life’s areas, including the use of media.

The filter criteria of Kliksafe are amongst others:

  • Sites that proselytize for non-Christian faiths
  • Sites that contain depictions of God
  • Sites that promote the desecration of Sabbath
  • Sites that promote unbiblical forms of cohabitation.

None of the parties in the court case seem to have seen anything untoward in sentencing a sex offender to start using the services of a provider allied to a religious denomination, even though the Abrahamic religions have a really dismal track record when it comes to healthy sexuality. The three judges seem to have seriously dropped the ball there.

(Link: Bright.nl.)

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January 8, 2012

BeBook e-reader company bankrupt

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 10:31 am

Another Dutch e-manufacturer of e-book readers has kicked the bucket.

Endless Ideas, the company behind the BeBook, was granted bankruptcy last week, Bright reports. According to the tech mag, the Utrecht based company was still working on an e-reader with coloured e-paper, but the technology took longer to develop than hoped.

Endless Ideas was not the first Dutch maker of e-readers, nor even the first to file for bankruptcy. Eightteen months ago we reported the demise of Irex from Eindhoven.

See also:

(Photo: inUse Consulting / Pelle Sten, some rights reserved)

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January 7, 2012

Welcoming the new year with a cannon

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 4:36 pm

Carbidschieten (igniting calcium carbide in a milk churn) is a popular New Year’s eve tradition in the rural areas of the Netherlands.

It seems that these days milk churns are considered too small for a decent bang, and bigger and better cannons are built. Not always with the desired effect. The following video’s were shot in Triemen in Friesland on December 31.

(Video: Youtube / Vancha112)

(Video: Youtube / Uko van der Meulen)

Both videographers have more vids of ‘carbide shooting’ on their Youtube accounts.

Kids should not try this at home.

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January 2, 2012

The man who sells church interiors

Filed under: Architecture,History,Religion by Branko Collin @ 3:39 pm

Two weeks ago Der Spiegel published an interview in English with Marc de Beyer, a man who sells pews and other items for churches that are closing their doors:

Marc de Beyer is an art historian in Utrecht, located about a half an hour by train from Amsterdam, but one could also call him a liquidator. He’s a man who shuts down churches. When a parish is dissolved, when a church is shuttered, de Beyer is there. And he has a lot to do.

Some 4,400 church buildings remain in the Netherlands. But each week, around two close their doors forever. This mainly affects the Catholics, who will be forced to offload half of their churches in the coming years.

See also:

(Photo: the Dominican church in Venlo was turned into a ‘cultural podium […] when the priests left the city in 2005‘. This statue of a blackfriar still reminds passers-by of the building’s original purpose.)

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January 1, 2012

Stock market gorilla fails for the first time in 11 years

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 3:16 pm

In 2000, gorilla Jacko picked a banana with a basket of shares attached to it, and those shares have since then outperformed the AEX (Amsterdam) index handsomely.

Z24 now reports that last year the gorilla’s random pick fared worse than the AEX for the first time. In 2011 AEX only dropped by 13%, whereas Jackos stocks decreased 45%.

Measured over 11 years the gorilla is still doing much better than the market. Jacko’s basket rose more than 30%, whereas AEX dropped by 55%.

See also: Dolphins outperform market analysts

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December 31, 2011

Crowd sourcing a bridge in Rotterdam

Filed under: Architecture by Branko Collin @ 12:53 pm

The Pop-up City writes:

The International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) and Rotterdam-based architecture firm ZUS have launched the project I Make Rotterdam, a spectacular temporary pedestrian bridge between the city’s Central and the North districts that will be financed through crowd-funding.

The bridge, which should be completed during the 5th International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam this Spring, has to help pedestrians to get from Rotterdam’s Central Station to some of the biennale’s locations. But how long this new pedestrian bridge is going to be depends completely on the amount of money that crowd wants to spend on it.

A plank will set you back 30 euro, an element (5 planks) 150 euro, and a part (9 elements?) 1500 euro. The Pop-Up City has some good advice for the organizers: “translate the website to English in order to open up the project for foreign money. Isn’t this an International Architecture Biennale?” I would like to add that listing prices to consumers without including sales tax is punishable with a fine of the third category.

See also: How to improve Rotterdam in 100 steps.

(Source illustration: I Make Rotterdam)

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December 27, 2011

Science says medical romances are unrealistic

Filed under: Literature,Science by Branko Collin @ 9:41 am

In what one sorta-kinda hopes is a tongue-in-cheek article in the week 51 issue of Dutch medical journal Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, Cornelis Langeveld has looked at medical romances and whether they “give a realistic picture of medical practice”.

“The doctor novels which were studied give an unbalanced and distorted view of medical practice. The medical information was sometimes incorrect, partly due to lack of knowledge by the author, partly due to incorrect translation from English. The reality of medical practice was not represented accurately in either of the series investigated, although the medical information in the ‘Doctor novels’ [Harlequin] series appeared to be accurate more often than that in the ‘Dr. Anne’ [Favoriet] series.”

“The medical situations were located mostly in hospital emergency departments and operating rooms. Medical specialisms were represented mainly by surgeons, emergency care doctors, orthopaedic specialists, cardiologists and gynaecologists.”

Langveld wonders if the unbalanced and distorted view is such a bad thing. “One may expect adult readers to be able to differentiate between fact and fiction. The readers of the Doctors Novels series received a number of valuable lessons apart from the medical mistakes, like the answer of the country doctor to the question what she used her maternity leave for: ‘Read,’ she replied demurely. ‘Read, read, I do nothing but read. And no romance novels or thrillers or gossip magazines either, but medical journals. They are educational.'”

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December 26, 2011

Postcodes and road maps liberated in the Netherlands

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 5:27 pm

It took a couple of lawsuits to put their prospective gatekeepers into place, but both the Dutch postal code data and the Dutch road map data have been set free.

Postcodes used to be determined by the Dutch PTT, and when the company privatized they somehow started claiming ownership. When the government started handing out postcodes for free through its kadaster (land registration office), the new company now called Post.nl sued them, and lost. The judge has determined that starting February 2012, everybody may use the postcode database for free, Gelderlander writes.

Similarly map makers Falkplan lost a lawsuit against the government where the latter published map data via freedom of information requests, Arnoud Engelfriet writes. Falkplan’s angle seems to have been to disallow competition, plain and simple.

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December 25, 2011

De Sjonnies sing M’n Fiets is Gejat

Filed under: Bicycles,General,Music by Branko Collin @ 1:03 pm

Feliz Navidad, that sounds almost but not quite like M’n Fiets is Gejat (2007, My Bike was Stolen).

My bike was stolen (3x)
That sucks
My bike was stolen (3x)
That sucks

I don’t want to walk home
I have no money to buy a new one
By now my bike is at the bottom of the canal (gracht)

De Sjonnies (The Johnnies, named after Amsterdam singer Johnny Jordaan) were a Nijmegen based band from the 1990s and 2000s who had a smallish hit in 1995 with Dans Je de Hele Nacht met Mij? (Will You Dance All Night With Me?). As I was a student in Nijmegen in those days, I heard that song rather a lot.

Let me conclude by wishing you a mijn fiets is gejat from the bottom of my gracht.

Video: Youtube/Thijs de Nijs. Link: David Hembrow.

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