August 15, 2015

Wepod, a self-driving car with ambitions

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 10:33 pm

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The province of Gelderland will try to achieve a world first in May 2016 when it hopes to run a shuttle service on public roads using self-driven vehicles.

The vehicles are called Wepods and should drive guests of the University of Wageningen from the nearby rail station of Ede-Wageningen to the university and back. Currently however the vehicle laws of the Netherlands don’t allow self-driven cars on the road. The province hopes to convince the relevant ministries during a demonstration in October. The first Wepod, produced by Ligier in France, was delivered in June.

Rotterdam was the first city in the Netherlands allowing self-driven vehicles on its territory. The Rivium shuttle bus however does not mix with other traffic and has its own road — it operates a bit like a train without the rails.

(Link: Smart Driving; photo: Wepod.nl)

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August 2, 2015

Dutch city buses enjoy second life in Cuba

Filed under: Automobiles,History by Branko Collin @ 10:39 pm

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This is what the buses from my childhood look like and yet I’ve never even been to Cuba.

It appears Cuba buys up old buses from all over the world and doesn’t bother to change the signs denoting the line number and destination. This one says: “Geen dienst”, i.e. no service. RTVNH spotted the old line 14 bus to Uitgeest (a town north of Amsterdam). Checking the Flickr group Dutch Buses in Cuba is like looking at a small history of Dutch public transport.

Yellow is just the livery of this company, it doesn’t denote any specific type of service. The curtain with the sassy fringe seems to be a recent addition though.

See also: NZH timetables using European comics.

(Photo by Paul Arps, some rights reserved)

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July 20, 2015

Shock blog tries to stop Ukraine from joining EU

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 10:46 pm

vote-counting-rnwA new law allows Dutch citizens to call for a non-binding referendum in the Netherlands, the Dutch Pirate Party writes.

Shock blog Geen Stijl is trying to become the first organisation to scale the considerable thresholds the Dutch state imposes on such a referendum by getting the country to veto Ukraine’s entry to the European Union. The blog has four weeks to collect 10,000 signatures from people who support the collection of further signatures. If it succeeds, it has another six weeks to collect 300,000 signatures. Currently, signatures can only be collected in writing.

Once those two hurdles have been passed, the Yes and No campaigns may receive up to two million euro in subsidies for their campaigns. Geen Stijl claims it is unwise to let a country that is currently at war join the European Union.

The Pirate Party stresses that it doesn’t have an opinion either for or against the issue of Ukraine joining the EU, but applauds the addition of the referendum to the “rickety and unsatisfactory democratic toolkit we have now”.

The party for rich pensioners, 50Plus, was hoping to sabotage a new pension law from entering effect through a referendum last January, but the law that makes referendums legal only came into effect on 1 July. Observers believe that even though referendums under the new law are non-binding, parliament will respect them.

In 2005 the Netherlands used a special one-off referendum to let citizens rubber stamp something the European Union claimed to be a constitution. Dutch voters from both the pro- and anti-EU camps used the opportunity to vote against the document.

(Photo by Photo RNW.org, some rights reserved)

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July 19, 2015

Holly Moors’ stamp art booklets

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 2:32 pm

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We’ve mentioned Holly Moors before as a blogger from the North, but he is also an artist.

Recently Moors has been scanning a couple of his experiments from the 1980s in which he filled old Davo booklets (aimed at postage stamp collectors) with rubber stamp prints. For the first booklet he used pre-existing stamps, for the second he carved a rubber stamp from a HEMA eraser.

This is art that doesn’t easily fit on a wall in a museum, so a gallery on a weblog is a good place to study it. After you’ve clicked a link, clicking one of the thumbnail images will open the gallery. Moors chose Davo booklets, because he felt they “invited repetitive stamping”.

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July 17, 2015

Dutch kids report Mexican drug lord to police – but it’s not him!

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 5:01 pm

el-chapo-us-state-departmentThree children reported a man to the police that they believed might be the escaped Mexican criminal Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán.

The three had spotted a man with a moustache sitting in a van on a parking lot on the Paul Kruger road in Ermelo, the Netherlands, last Tuesday. Drug lord Joaquín Guzmán, nicknamed El Chapo (Spanish for Shorty), escaped a Mexican maximum security prison earlier this month.

One of the children, 10-year-old Peter, had seen a photo of Guzmán in the newspaper and thought he recognised the trademark moustache the criminal sported at some point in his life.

After they had written down the license plate number of the van, the children biked to Peter’s house to call the police. Peter’s mother told Omroep Gelderland: “They were convinced it was him, he had the exact same moustache. They even knew he had smoked weed and that that is a drug. […] They hadn’t even realised the price on his head”

The police called back later to say they had looked into the matter, but hadn’t located El Chapo. They don’t believe it was him. Mexico has offered a reward of about 3.5 million euro for information leading to the capture of Mr. Guzmán. The US State Departement would also like a word with Mr. Guzmán and have offered a reward of up to 5 million USD for information leading to his arrest.

(Photo: US Department of State)

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July 12, 2015

Anti-gay loophole closed in Dutch anti-discrimination law

Filed under: Religion by Branko Collin @ 7:10 pm

A bizarre loophole that allowed religious schools to ban gay teachers was closed in the Netherlands on 1 July.

The law on equal treatment already forbade firing or refusing to hire teachers strictly because they are gay. An exception however existed for added circumstances, leading to the strange situation that a teacher could not be fired just for being gay, but could be fired for being gay and kissing somebody of their own gender.

In Dutch this exception was called the ‘enkelefeitconstructie’ (the ‘single fact construct’). The strange exception had remained in the 1994 law in order to keep Christian party CDA happy, but in 2014 almost all CDA MPs voted to remove it. According to the government, the exception has always been a dead letter, as no judge has ever allowed it to stand in a court of law.

Churches’ freedom to found religious, state-funded schools is considered part of the freedom of religion in the Netherlands and is enshrined in Article 23 of the constitution. Teachers can still be fired from religious schools for belonging to the wrong church, as three teachers from the Reformed Wartburg College found out last June after they were rebaptised by a different Protestant sect, AD writes.

See also: Church unlawfully fires woman for being transgender

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July 5, 2015

Royal Academy of Art graduation exhibit 2015

Filed under: Art,Shows by Branko Collin @ 11:54 pm

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Friday I went to the graduation show of the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, and today I visited its counterpart in The Hague.

Bachelor and Master students in 10 disciplines displayed their works.

Check a large photo review of the show on our Flickr account. Art blog Trendbeheer also went to The Hague and published their report. (Check out their reports of other Dutch art academies too.)

The Graduation Festival 2015 can be visited until Thursday.

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Roos van de Kieft, Embody.

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Liza Pace, Going Solo.

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Marlies van Stolk’s “Tacky Couture”.

Top image: Amal Habti, Building Bridges. You can cross this bridge, but only with the cooperation of ‘the other’.

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July 4, 2015

Rietveld academy graduation show 2015

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 10:08 am

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Yesterday I went to the Rietveld art academy in Amsterdam to look at the graduation exhibition and take some pictures.

You can find a full visual report on our Flickr page. At the time of writing I still need to add in the names of the artists and the titles of the works. Trendbeheer also took a peek.

You can still visit the show today and tomorrow. And if you can you should, photos rarely do justice.

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McJesus by Casper Braat. They sold fries beneath the famous golden crosses.

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Wouter Paijmans, Untitled.

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A horse with a built-in bedroom by the mysterious Anna/Hanna/Hania Sobolewska.

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Sometimes jewellery wears you. Draagmuur (‘load-bearing wall’) by Laura Klinkenberg.

Photo at the top: Jana Vukšić, Imprint.

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June 28, 2015

Van Gogh Museum 3D prints fakes indistinguishable from the original

Filed under: Art,Technology by Branko Collin @ 5:42 pm

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Would you like to own a ‘real’ Van Gogh without either risking bankruptcy or an entry in Interpol’s ‘most wanted’ list?

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam comes to the rescue. In 2013 the museum started a collaboration with Fujifilm to 3D print copies of famous Vincent van Gogh paintings that are said to be indistinguishable from the originals when viewed with the naked eye.

Every brush stroke is copied in these replicas (called Relievos) which go for about 25,000 euro each. Art historian Ko van Dun saw one last week and reports:

The copy is so good that it is indistinguishable from the original. Not nearly distinguishable, not even a little, just not at all. Yesterday I stood in front of one, an experience which left me flabbergasted. You are for all intents and purposes looking at a true Van Gogh – in my case The Harvest from 1888, one of the painter’s most famous works – with the exact same colours as the original, the exact same highlights, relief, everything.

So far [the museum has failed to] find customers, but that would seem to be a matter of time.

The possibilities of this technology boggle the mind. Van Gogh Museum hints at some of them when it alludes to its “mission to inspire and enrich as large an audience as possible”. In other words, next time you stand in front of a Van Gogh, it might not even be the original.

You can see some of the technology behind the 3D scans in this YouTube video.

(Link: Trendbeheer; illustration: extreme close-up of The Harvest via Van Gogh Museum)

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June 21, 2015

Henry the sign painter (video)

Filed under: Design,General by Branko Collin @ 11:43 pm

henry-sign-painterHenry van der Horst from Zeewolde hand letters signs for outdoor markets all over the Netherlands.

Two graphic designers met him while he was out working and partnered up with him last year. They built a website to sell his signs (his “5 Euro Super Deal” costs 39 euro) and created the video above (subtitled in English). Check also another video of Van der Horst creating a magazine cover.

(Link: Trendbeheer; photo: crop of a screenshot of the video)

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